The Policeman Who Put Down His Sword and Built Japan's Machine Tool Giant

Okuma Corporation began in a small Nagoya workshop in January 1898, when a former police sergeant from Saga Prefecture named Okuma Eiichi started building machines for cutting noodles. Born Koyanagi Eiichi in 1870, the fifth son of his family, he was adopted into the Okuma household, joined the police in Kyushu and carried a sword for a living. His father-in-law's noodle machines drew him into mechanics. He received a patent for his own noodle machine in 1896, left the police, and opened the Okuma Noodle Machine Company with about 300 yen raised by selling inherited equipment. In its first year it sold twenty machines. The rollers of a noodle cutter have to mesh to within a few hundredths of a millimetre, and the lathes available in Japan at the time could not hold that precision. So Okuma began building his own. When the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 collapsed demand for noodle machines and raised demand for metal-cutting tools, the shop turned to machine tools and never looked back. It received patent No. 25,829 for an automatic gear-cutting lathe in 1914, became Okuma Iron Works in 1916, and launched the OS lathe in 1918. In 1930 it built the engine and transmission for the Atsuta, Nagoya's "Chukyo Detroit" car, alongside Nippon Sharyo, Okamoto Bicycle Works and Toyoda's Loom Works. The car cost 9,200 yen to build and sold for 6,500, and it died by 1937 — the same year Okuma became Japan's largest machine tool producer by value. The Second World War pulled the company into the war economy. By 1945 it employed around ten thousand people, and in 1942 Okuma Eiichi founded Asahi Heiki, the weapons maker that later became Asahi Sunac. Twenty-one major B-29 raids devastated Nagoya between December 1944 and July 1945. After the surrender, Okuma survived by building wool-spinning machinery. Its founder died in February 1950, at seventy-nine. In 1958 Okuma launched the LS high-speed lathe, which sold about 30,000 units in some forty countries. In 1963 it made the decision that defined it: instead of buying controls from a supplier such as Fanuc, it built its own numerical control, the OSP, with absolute position feedback so the machine always knew where it was after a power cut. That "single source" philosophy led to the OSP 2000 in 1972, the move to Oguchi in 1980, and the LB15 CNC lathe of 1982, which sold more than 15,000 units in ten years and became a fixture of American job shops. Success brought backlash. In 1982 Houdaille Industries, owner of Burgmaster, petitioned the Reagan administration to deny tax credits on Japanese machine tools, alleging a MITI-organised cartel. Reagan declined in 1983, Burgmaster closed in 1985, and Okuma opened a plant in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1987. At home, after years of losses and layoffs, the company's enterprise union moved against top management in 1988, ending the founding family's ninety-year run at the top. Okuma Iron Works became Okuma Corporation in 1991. After the 1987 Toshiba–Kongsberg scandal, high-end machine tools came to be treated as strategic goods, and Okuma's controls now include a relocation detection unit that raises an alarm if a machine is moved. Today, Okuma pairs hand scraping by skilled craftsmen with its Dream Site smart factories, which can run unattended for seventy-two hours — while a restored, century-old noodle machine still turns in the company's gallery. Subscribe to Machine Chronicle for more stories of the machines, the companies, and the engineers that built the industrial world. 📖 Chapters: 0:00 The Noodle Machine in the Gallery 0:21 The Policeman and the Noodle Cutter 4:33 Twenty Machines and a Bad Lathe 8:19 The Car That Cost Too Much 11:07 Iron for the War Machine 14:50 The Machine That Knew Where It Was 18:47 One Brain, One Body 22:11 Detroit Pushes Back 25:52 The Workers' Verdict 28:38 The Machine That Must Not Travel 31:31 Hands and Robots 35:21 The Gallery Sources: Okuma Corporation. "Okuma 120th Anniversary." okuma.co.jp. 2018. https://www.okuma.co.jp/english/120ye... Okuma America Corporation. "Our History." okuma.com. https://www.okuma.com/history The Shashi. "Okuma (TSE 6103) — Company History." Strategic Histories of Japanese Companies. https://the-shashi.com/en/tse/6103/ Wikipedia. "大隈栄一 (Okuma Eiichi)." ja.wikipedia.org. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%... Wikipedia. "真崎照郷 (Masaki Terusato)." ja.wikipedia.org. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9C%... Daily Portal Z. "麺作りから始まった工作機械の歴史." dailyportalz.jp. 2016. https://dailyportalz.jp/kiji/16072519... Toyota Motor Corporation. "Building a Chukyo Detroit — Development of the Atsuta Passenger Car." 75 Years of Toyota. https://www.toyota-global.com/company... #industrialhistory #machinetools #cnc