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Hitachi began in 1910 in Ibaraki Prefecture, where electrical engineer Namihei Odaira, working at the Kuhara mining operation, built water power stations inside a copper mine and a 4-kilowatt induction motor as his first product. The venture spun off in 1911 under a name joining the characters for sun and rise, and Odaira’s circle monogram logo lasted until 1991. All 12 of the company’s CEOs have been engineers, eight of them from the same University of Tokyo faculty. Hitachi moved its headquarters to Tokyo in 1918, finished Japan’s first mainline electric locomotive in 1924 and was making elevators and refrigerators by 1932. After World War II its factories lay in ruins and the occupation forces purged Odaira; he was cleared in 1951 and died that year at 77. Hitachi listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949 and built its first power shovel that year.

For the 1964 Shinkansen it built Series 0 cars, automatic train control and the COMTRAC traffic control computer, after launching the MARS-1 seat reservation system in 1960. Its 1978 HM6147 CMOS memory chip matched Intel’s speed using 87 percent less power, and by 1987 Hitachi led the world’s semiconductor makers. Sprawl caught up with it: a $7.8 billion loss for fiscal 2008 was the largest in Japanese manufacturing history. Under Takashi Kawamura it cut listed group companies from 22 to four, sold hard drives, TVs, power tools, Hitachi Chemical and Hitachi Metals, and bought GlobalLogic for $9.6 billion in 2021 and 80 percent of ABB’s power grid unit for $6.4 billion. By June 2024 its market value had grown eightfold since 2010.

• Since the 1970s Hitachi has used a 183-year-old monkeypod tree in Hawaii’s Moanalua Gardens in its ads, reportedly spending about 50 million yen a year to maintain it.
• In 1977 it built Fugen, the world’s first fully MOX-fueled nuclear power station, after completing its first experimental reactor in 1961.
• In 1989 Hitachi researchers used in-house electron holography microscopes to fire single electrons through a double slit and record the wave interference pattern building up dot by dot.
• Hitachi built the server-side system behind Tokyo’s Suica transit card in 2001 and released the first 1-terabyte consumer hard drive in 2007.
• In 2024 Bosch agreed to buy Hitachi’s HVAC joint venture with Johnson Controls, Bosch’s largest acquisition ever.