Hitachi pays to look after a Hawaiian tree it uses as a mascot
Since 1975, a giant rain tree in Moanalua Gardens on Oahu has starred in Hitachi's television commercials, accompanied by a jingle asking what tree this might be. Three other trees filled the role briefly before this one was chosen in 1984, and its upkeep reportedly costs around 50 million yen a year.
The company began far from Hawaii, inside a copper mine in Ibaraki Prefecture. In 1910 the engineer Namihei Odaira set up an electrical machinery workshop for Fusanosuke Kuhara's mining business, and its first product was a 4-kilowatt induction motor. Most Japanese industry then ran on steam, but Odaira built water-powered stations and electrified nearly everything in the plant. He also coined the name, joining the characters for sun and rise, and designed the monogram that appeared on its products until 1991.
War left factories wrecked, and the occupation authorities removed Odaira from the firm. He returned in 1951, only to die that October aged 77. Recovery was rapid: Hitachi built its first power shovel in 1949 and, in 1960, created MARS-1, the world's first electronic seat reservation system for trains, for Japanese National Railways. It supplied rolling stock for the first Shinkansen in 1964, and its low-power CMOS chips of the late 1970s helped Japanese makers dominate semiconductors. Every one of its 12 chief executives has had an engineering background.
Its laboratories produced a famous physics demonstration in 1989. Firing electrons one at a time through a double slit, researchers watched random dots slowly build into bands of light and dark, the interference pattern familiar from experiments with light. In 2001 the company built the server side of Suica, the contactless fare card introduced at 424 stations around Tokyo.
Size eventually became a burden. A loss of 787.3 billion yen after the 2008 financial crisis was then the largest in Japanese corporate history, prompting Hitachi to sell weak units, including its hard disk business, and move into digital systems and renewable energy. It was profitable again by March 2011, and in fiscal 2023 about 61 percent of its 9.7 trillion yen revenue came from abroad.
Source: Hitachi
