Industry History | Panasonic — The Rented House at Ohiraki-cho
· 1918-3
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Industry History | Panasonic — The Rented House at Ohiraki-cho
kevin
People treat Panasonic as a Kadoma campus that arrived already named National, then Panasonic.
The first workshop was here, in Ohiraki-cho, then in Osaka's Nishinoda district and now in Fukushima-ku.
On 7 March 1918 Konosuke Matsushita, twenty-three, moved from a smaller room into a two-story rented house and opened Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works. The staff was three people: Matsushita, his wife Mumeno, twenty-two, and her brother Toshio Iue, fifteen, later the founder of Sanyo.
They dropped the ground-floor floorboards, put in two hand presses, and started on attachment plugs and a two-way socket. The bet was that household wiring fixtures could be made better and sold cheaper than the parts the Osaka Electric Light Company had trained him to install.
By the end of 1918 the shop employed about twenty people. A single wholesaler arrangement broke when prices were cut. Direct dealing with other wholesalers put the books back in order.
In 1922 the firm built its first purpose-made office and factory on a larger Ohiraki lot, still in the same neighborhood. The bicycle lamp that later carried the National name came in 1923. The head office left for Kadoma in 1933. Incorporation as Matsushita Electric Industrial came on 15 December 1935.
The rented house is gone. What stands for a visitor is a stone in Ohiraki Park at 1-18 Ohiraki, Fukushima-ku, unveiled on 27 November 2004, Matsushita's 110th birthday. The face reads 松下幸之助創業の地. Side plaques map the 1918 house, the 1922 factory, and the later lamp plant.
The pin is the public monument at the documented founding neighborhood, not a private interior.
Photo: neighborhood context for Fukushima-ku, Osaka, via Wikimedia Commons. The 1918 house itself does not survive as a visitable workshop.
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