YAZAKI: Past, present, future. We are connected.

In 1949, Toyo Tokei, a prominent manufacturer that held a virtual monopoly on the automotive meters market, was shut down by a labor strike. Unable to get the meters and gauges they needed as a result, car manufacturers sought advice from Yazaki’s founding president, Sadami Yazaki, who was serving as chairman of an association of major car manufacturers. The union had been refusing to join talks and was holding meters and gauges hostage.

Sadami proposed a plan. He suggested separating Toyo Tokei’s sales arm from its Ageo Factory, which served as its meter manufacturing arm, and making it independent. The capital needed to do this would come from five automakers. The union discussed the plan, and determined that, amid uncertain circumstances, separating the sales arm was unavoidable.

Sadami then suggested having Yazaki handle manufacturing by bringing Toyo Tokei’s technicians over from the Ageo Factory. The diehards in the union fumed that his proposal was nonsense. However, union members had received almost no pay during the long dispute, and most had grown weary. Technicians, after all, are people who want to make things, not strike.

Driven by special demand generated by the Korean War, Nihon Jidosha Keiki K.K. was launched in August of 1950 with Sadami Yazaki as its president. The new company purchased lathes, presses, and other equipment from Toyo Tokei and brought them by truck to a factory in Shibaura. The factory was a mess, with a corroded corrugated metal roof, floors covered with puddles, and holes in the ceiling large enough to see the blue sky above. However, with Sadami in the lead, employees began the task of refurbishing the factory. Even engineering staff members put down their pens and slide rules and picked up hammers and brushes.

“Let’s make the world’s best meters right here.”

Everyone felt the excitement of finally returning to work.

Nihon Jidosha Keiki completed its first meter about one month after its founding. Then, in 1959, all of Nihon Jidosha Keiki’s capital was integrated into Yazaki and the company’s name was changed to Yazaki Meter Co., Ltd. While continuing to expand its production for automakers during this period, it also entered into a technical partnership with Kienzle of Germany, an arrangement that helped it develop Japan’s first coin-operated parking meter in 1958. Early during the New Year holidays, the company delivered an order of meters to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The company’s entire technical staff carried die-cast aluminum meters to Tokyo’s Marunouchi district—its streets lacking their usual hustle and bustle during the holiday season—for installation.

The company’s technical partnership with Kienzle also included tachographs, which it began selling in 1960. It had signed the partnership after the president had had a sudden inspiration (in truth, the same was true for the parking meters as well), but the drawings it received were sketchy and incomprehensible. When employees complained that they couldn’t read them, their superiors snapped back, “Well then go and see the originals for yourself!” And when they actually did go to Germany, they found that the drawings were prepared by experienced craftsmen on individual tables. Mass production would be impossible under such circumstances. Even within the bounds of the technical partnership, there were certain things that Kienzle was reluctant to reveal. Occasionally this put the Japanese side in the awkward position of not knowing how to proceed.

Eventually Yazaki Meter completed its first tachograph. It was called the TCO-8, but was more commonly known as “Takohachi.” Unfortunately, however, sales of the new product did not go as well as hoped. It was a time when the problem of “kamikaze taxis” and “kamikaze trucks” (taxis and trucks that failed to heed traffic rules) was rampant, and motor vehicle officials were just starting to strengthen their traffic management. Although this should have presented an excellent opportunity to sell tachographs, they were rejected when drivers and their unions refused to approve them. “It feels as if we are being watched by the president at all hours.”

No matter how much the company explained the tachograph’s role in improving safety and economic efficiency and preventing fatigued driving, customers were not impressed. Nonetheless, tachographs can be used for the scientific execution of traffic management, and thus they were highly valued by progressive transport operators. The year after the TCO-8 went on the market, a major transport company installed them in 121 of its vehicles. The product’s reputation suddenly grew. Then, in October 1962, tachographs were enshrined in law, as their installation became required for chartered buses, route buses, trucks, and other vehicles.

Yazaki Meters continued to produce meters and gauges made with technologies appearing for the first time in Japan, and this was made possible precisely because Nihon Jidosha Keiki came to be.