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Takasaki happened to have business in Tokyo when Ibuka called, so they agreed to meet. He had thought for some time that the company looked interes
ting. Succumbing to Ibuka's persuasiveness, he decided to give it atry.
Takasaki began preparations for the plant at once. In February 1954 he set up a temporary office in a corner of the Sendai office of Yamato Shoji, who was then a Totsuko distributor. The project got under way with a staff of only six, counting the factory manager and a secretary. Under the Miyagi Prefecture Factory Location Ordinance No.1, they could have use of a 17,000-square-meter site in Tagajo rent-free for five years and the doctor's rooms of the old Imperial Navy Arsenal. Work began on remodelling the building.
On May 1 work was completed and the first step toward establishing the plant was taken. The duties of that first working day consisted of weeding,sweeping, washing windows and unpacking. The staff, now numbering 27, was truly starting from scratch. Their next task was the purchase of 27 pairs of rubber boots. The factory was surrounded on all sides by fields, some of which were flooded rice paddies. The roads were at best footpaths between fields. At night it was pitch dark, and one false step would land them in muddy water. When the plant came into full operation in June, neighbors in those rustic parts were astonished at the brightness of its fluorescent lights.
At first the Sendai plant produced oil bearings, contact materials, and other products in addition to its main lines of metal contacts and ferrite,
which Totsuko named "ferrimba" based on the Okamura patent. One day, however, Iwama put in a request as general manager of the Semiconductor Department. "Would Sendai scale back its operations?" he requested. Ibuka had told Takasaki when he agreed to head the plant that the company was planning to produce transistors. This had struck Takasaki as a wild idea, but Ibuka had assured him it would not cost much. Now here was Iwama explaining that they had not meant to mislead him, but they had found the semiconductor project to be more expensive than they had originally thought. Could Takasaki hold back on items that had just entered production and were not yet paying their way? Takasaki was hardly surprised. Sendai scrapped its oil bearing and magnet lines and concentrated solely on ferrite and contact materials.
By June, the month that the Sendai plant started up, the transistor team that was proving such a strain on the company's finances had progressed and started to build a transistor radio prototype using both point-contact and junction-type transistors.
In October, Japan's first transistor and a germanium diode were announced to a gathering at the Tokyo Kaikan. On the day, Ibuka, Kasahara, and Ibaragi of Mita Musen consulted with each other in a corner of the banquet room.
Ibuka was asking Kasahara's advice on what term to use for the new transistor. After giving it some thought, Kasahara suggested they take the latter part of the word "kessho" (crystal), and combine it with numbers, i.e., rokusho for six-transistor, nanasho for seven-transistor, etc. But Ibaragi favored using the word "seki" (stone) as was done with clocks. Ibuka promptly agreed, and from then on transistors were numbered with the suffix "seki." Diodes were not placed in this category, however, to avoid having them fall
under some future commodity tax.
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At the end of October, the central Tokyo branch of the Mitsukoshi department store held an exhibition and sale of transistors and transistorized products. On display were germanium clocks, the first " germanium transistor-radio" prototype, hearing aids, and more. Type 2T-14 transistors were placed on sale for 4,000 yen, and type 1T23 diodes for 320 yen. There were eager buyers who snapped up these transistors at 4,000 yen each, leaving the surprised sales staff to wonder what they intended to do with their expensive purchases.
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