Biography | 豊田佐吉 Sakichi Toyoda — The 1890 Exhibition in This Park Sent Him Home to File a Loom Patent

The Third National Industrial Exhibition opened in Ueno Park on 1 April 1890 and ran through 31 July.

More than a million people walked the grounds.

The halls covered machinery, agriculture, fisheries, animals, art, and a reference pavilion of foreign goods.

Tokyo Dento ran Japan's first streetcar inside the site.

Sakichi Toyoda came from Yamaguchi village to look at the machines.

He was twenty-three.

Later company histories treat the visit as the moment he saw how far a wooden hand loom still had to go.

The exact day he walked the park is not in the surviving record, so the date on this pin is the month the exhibition opened.

What stands here now is not the 1890 halls.

Those buildings were temporary or have been replaced.

The precinct is Ueno Park and the Tokyo National Museum, on the old Kanei-ji land where the earlier National Industrial Exhibitions of 1877 and 1881 had already set the pattern.

After the visit he did not stay a tourist.

He lodged with a hometown acquaintance in Yokohama so he could walk into the Patent Office in Tokyo.

In November 1890 the office accepted his application for an improved wooden hand loom.

On 14 May 1891 it issued Patent No. 1195, titled simply "Loom."

That is Japan's first widely cited Toyoda patent.

The machine used a wooden frame and a batten motion meant to spare the weaver some of the work of a tall hand loom.

It was not yet a power loom.

The power loom of wood and iron came in 1896.

The circular loom in 1906.

The Type G automatic loom in 1924.

Ueno is where the sequence becomes visible as a decision rather than a temperament.

He saw other people's machines in a government park, then used the 1885 patent law to put his own name on a drawing.

The park is still a park.

The drawing became a group of companies.

Photo: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive, Ueno Park around 1919, via Wikimedia Commons