Finance History | Shirokiya, Nihonbashi — One Hundred Ninety Thousand Yen in a Burnt Department Store

People treat Sony as a Shinagawa campus that later listed in New York.

The company was incorporated in a rented room here.

In October 1945 Masaru Ibuka and colleagues from Nihon Sokuteiki took a third-floor room in the Shirokiya department store at Nihonbashi and put up a plaque for Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyujo.

On 7 May 1946 they incorporated Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo K.K. with capital of 190,000 yen and a little over twenty people.

Tamon Maeda, Ibuka's father-in-law, was the first president.

The official history records that night work continued after the store locked its doors, and the staff were sometimes shut inside.

The firm moved to a leaky warehouse in Shinagawa in 1947.

It took the name Sony Corporation in 1958.

Shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1970, the first Japanese company to do so.

Shirokiya's Nihonbashi store closed in 1999. COREDO Nihonbashi opened on the same plot in 2004.

The mechanism is a stock company formed in someone else's shop.

A 190,000-yen telecommunications workshop became a Nikkei 225 name whose first rooms no longer stand, only the address.

The present arcade is public.

Photo: Ogawa Kazumasa, public domain, Shirokiya in 1911, via Wikimedia Commons. The department store in the plate is the building whose third floor the firm later rented.