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

Yazaki’s founder, Sadami Yazaki, built today’s Yazaki Group in a single generation. He was a man possessing remarkable foresight, intense dynamism, and unequaled aggressiveness as well as a delightful personality that never failed to charm people.

However, even he suffered failures, some of them quite major. Interestingly, however, his failures had one thing in common: a way of thinking, similar to instinct, that exceptional entrepreneurs like Sadami seem to be born with.

One of those failures was an attempt to develop a copper mine in the Izu region in 1960. One day, an old man from Izu came to visit Sadami. He told Sadami about a copper mine in the region that he had inherited and asked Sadami to buy it. The man seemed respectable, and Sadami took a liking to him, so he ordered a feasibility study. The study found no problems in terms of contested rights, and confirmed that places of exposed copper ore did indeed exist at the site. “OK,” Sadami said. “Let’s do it.” Sadami immediately purchased mining rights for Koganezaki Cape on the Izu Peninsula and hired a metallurgy expert to explore copper ore veins there. What the expert found, however, was that the veins were very thin. Even when an outcrop was found, its end was reached with just a little excavation. Mining there would produce some copper, but not nearly enough to be profitable. Still, the old man continued to take the expert around, suggesting that he “dig here” or “buy rights there.” Eventually, after some six months had passed, the old man suddenly stopped showing up at the site. And then two years passed. Sadami ultimately concluded that there was no reason to continue exploration, and he ordered the expert to withdraw.

So why did Sadami jump at this chance? He spoke of the episode in the May 1971 edition of Yazaki News.

“Why did I want a copper mine? Try to do business in electric wires and you’ll see. Everybody wants copper. There are international syndicates that make it difficult to get copper no matter how hard you try... and the market price of copper changes every day. Copper is a raw material of electric wires, so this makes doing business very hard. So I wanted to make the world sit up and notice by being one of those who mine copper in Japan. But when I realized it wouldn’t work, I immediately pulled the plug.”

Another of Sadami’s failures was an attempt to cultivate cotton in Thailand. Yazaki took its first step overseas in 1963 when it established Thai Yazaki Electric Wire. A textile company operated by a partner in this venture was being hampered by the high costs of imported cotton. A man who was loyal to his friends, Sadami decided to help by having his company cultivate cotton on its own. He hired agricultural university graduates who were experts in cotton production, and launched an independent cotton cultivation and production project in northeast Thailand. The experts lived among the local people and earnestly instructed them on everything from land improvement to cotton cultivation. But just when it seemed their efforts were paying off, differences in national character, poaching of harvests, and other factors brought the project to a disappointing end.

One senior managing director at the time who was closely associated with the people in charge of the two projects offers this insight into Sadami’s thinking.

“Both of those cases were undertakings that other companies would never attempt. He showed attention to raw materials that went beyond the common sense of typical manufacturers, and tenacity when it came to cost reduction. And often successes were born from his failures. One cannot help but admire our founding president’s unlimited adventurous spirit in taking on new business.”