Finance History | Noritake-Shinmachi, Nagoya — Twelve Million Yen Split the Loom Works from Its Car Shop

People treat Toyota as a car company that later built a museum.

The museum occupies the other half of the story.

Sakichi Toyoda's loom works stood on this Noritake-Shinmachi ground in Nagoya.

In September 1933 an automobile department opened inside Toyoda Automatic Loom Works.

Trucks went on sale in 1935 and a passenger car in 1936.

On 28 August 1937 the department was registered as a separate company, Toyota Motor Co., Ltd.

Capital was set at 12 million yen, of which 9 million yen was paid in.

Risaburo Toyoda was president and Kiichiro Toyoda vice-president.

The head office at registration was in Koromo, the silk town that later took the company's name.

The Koromo plant, now the Honsha works in Toyota City, was completed on 3 November 1938.

That is the date the firm still keeps as its founding anniversary.

Shares listed on the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka exchanges on 16 May 1949.

The Dodge Line slump of that year forced a split between manufacturing and sales and about 1,600 voluntary redundancies.

The loom-works site became the Toyota Commemorative Museum of Industry and Technology, opened on 11 June 1994.

A visitor walks through textile frames before reaching the cars.

The mechanism is a spin-off with a published capital account.

An auto shop inside a loom company became a 12-million-yen company of its own, then a Nikkei 225 name whose first public rooms are still these sheds.

Photo: Morio, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.