Technology History | Fujifilm — The Ashigara Plant Behind Fuji-film-mae Station
· 1934-1
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Technology History | Fujifilm — The Ashigara Plant Behind Fuji-film-mae Station
kevin
People treat Fujifilm as a Tokyo Midtown holding company that was always in healthcare and electronics.
The first product was photographic film made beside a Kanagawa river.
On 20 January 1934 Dainippon Celluloid spun off its photographic-film division and established Fuji Photo Film Company with capital of 3 million yen in 1934 money. The brief was a government plan: stop buying film base from Kodak and Agfa and make it in Japan.
The Ashigara factory in what is now Minamiashigara City had been finished in 1933. Soft water from the Sakawa River, fed by Mount Fuji and the Tanzawa range, and the low humidity of Ashigarakami were the site reasons the engineers recorded.
Operations began in February 1934. The line ran from film base through finished sheet and motion-picture stock, the first integrated photographic-film plant in the country.
Domestic film had been sold before. Asahi Photo Industry and Rokuoh-sha had offered Japanese-branded rolls. In those earlier cases the base itself was still imported. Ashigara was built to close that gap.
The early years were not clean. Volume production stumbled, and the company carried a recorded deficit of 360,000 yen in 1936 money before medical X-ray film found a domestic market.
The public pin a visitor can actually stand on is Fuji-film-mae Station on the Izuhakone Daiyuzan Line, at 35.3177 north, 139.1089 east. The factory remains an active works behind the fence. Photograph only from the public platform and the road.
The name on the station is the history lesson. A celluloid firm was told to make film. It put the plant where the water was right. Ninety years later the same ground still feeds a listed Nikkei company.
Photo: station building at Fuji-film-mae, via Wikimedia Commons.
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