Biography | 豊田佐吉 Sakichi Toyoda — He Was Born in This Village on a Lunar Date the Company Still Prints as February

People who only read the company timeline think Sakichi Toyoda was born on 14 February 1867.

That date is Keio 3, second month, fourteenth day — a lunar calendar date that Kosai City and the Japanese register convert to 19 March 1867 in the Gregorian calendar.

The village was Yamaguchi in Fuchi District, Totomi Province, then under the Yoshida domain of Mikawa.

It is now Yamaguchi, Kosai, Shizuoka, and the pin is the Sakichi Toyoda Memorial House at 113-2 Yamaguchi.

His father, Ikichi, farmed and worked as a carpenter.

His mother was Ei.

Sakichi was the eldest of four children, three boys and a girl, in a household that was neither rich nor desperate.

The family sent the children to school when many village families still did not.

He first studied at a terakoya attached to Myogen-ji in Boze, then entered Kawajiri School when the temple classroom was replaced in 1875.

He finished elementary school in December 1878 and went to work under his father.

The house you walk through is not the original birth cottage standing unchanged.

The late-Edo birth house was reconstructed on the site in 1990 and opened to the public.

The main house on the grounds is a separate building Sakichi put up in 1907, when he was forty, for his parents.

The memorial itself opened on 30 October 1988, the fifty-eighth anniversary of his death and a marker of his 120th birth year.

What shaped him here was the mix of a carpenter's bench and a farm loom.

Ikichi taught him to cut and join wood.

Ei and the other village women worked tall hand looms with a flying shuttle already in use by the late 1880s.

The Patent Monopoly Act of April 1885, and Nakamura Masanao's bestselling translation of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, are the two documents later accounts name as the spark.

The first turned invention into property.

The second told the story of men who designed spinning frames and power looms.

Stand in the reconstructed house and the later memorial is doing one honest job: it keeps the village attached to the man, instead of letting the car company swallow the origin.

His son Kiichiro was also born in this village, because Asako came home to deliver.

That is a different memory, already on the map.

This pin is the father's.

Photo: unknown photographer, public domain (PD-Japan-oldphoto), via Wikimedia Commons