Sakichi Toyoda

Biography

Sakichi Toyoda was born in 1867 in Yamaguchi, a village in Tōtōmi Province that is now part of Kosai in Shizuoka Prefecture; the English and German reference works give different days for his birth. His father, Ikichi, was a carpenter and farmer and taught his son the trade. Toyoda became an inventor of looms and was later called the 'King of Japanese Inventors' and the father of the Japanese industrial revolution.

In 1924 his firm introduced the Toyoda Automatic Loom, Type G, a fully automatic high-speed loom. On 18 November 1926 he founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Ltd., the company known today as Toyota Industries. He is also credited with the 'five whys', a way of finding the cause of a problem by asking why again and again.

Toyoda died in Nagoya on 30 October 1930. In 1933 the loom company set up an automobile department led by his eldest son, Kiichiro, and in 1937 that department became a separate company, Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. The Toyota Century, introduced in 1967, takes its name from the 100th anniversary of his birth. On 15 April 1973 the Japan Patent Office named him one of the ten great Japanese inventors.