Takara

» see takaratoys.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Takara was invisible outside Japan at the licensing layer, which is a specific kind of death to have died. If you grew up anywhere in Europe or the Middle East and you owned a Transformer, the box said Hasbro. The toy inside it was designed in Tokyo by a company you had no reason to have heard of, and the entire arrangement was set up so you never would.

Yasuta Sato started the business in 1955 making vinyl goods and it took the name Takara in 1960. Licca-chan arrived in 1967 and became the doll Japanese girls actually had, in a market where Barbie had never sold the way Mattel wanted her to. Choro-Q pullback cars followed in 1978 and sold abroad as Penny Racers. Microman in the mid seventies and Diaclone in 1980 were lines of small transforming vehicles with drivers, and in 1984 Hasbro licensed the molds, dropped the drivers, wrote a fiction about a war between two robot factions and put a cartoon on American television.

The company was fine at this for four decades. Beyblade in 1999 was the last time it had the whole thing, a toy with a tournament format and an anime attached, selling in numbers that let Takara believe it was bigger than it was. Konami had already taken a stake in July 2000. What broke the balance sheet was not toys at all: Takara had gone into home electronics and had built an electric car, and both of them lost money for years.

Takara and Tomy announced their merger on 13 May 2005 and completed it on 1 March 2006. Tomy was the surviving company, the English name of the merged business became Tomy, and the Japanese name became Takara Tomy. The plan attached to the deal was to cut nineteen billion yen of cost over three years and let go of about 640 people, most of them from the Takara side, while the combined product range fell from around 7,800 items to 5,400.

Beyblade reached Turkey in the early 2000s and i was eighteen by then, in the internet cafe years, which is the wrong end of that particular demographic by about a decade. This grave is not one i have any personal claim on. The interesting part is structural rather than sentimental, and it is that a company can design forty years of objects that half the planet owned and still leave no trace of its name in any of the countries that owned them.

~ the dossier ~

~ whose robots ~

The Transformers arrangement is worth being precise about, because the popular telling gives Hasbro too much and Takara too little, and the fan telling reverses it. Takara designed and engineered the toys. Hasbro licensed them for the West, commissioned the story and the names, and built the marketing that turned a shelf of transforming trucks into a franchise. Neither half works without the other, and the split held for forty years, with the Japanese and American continuities drifting apart and being reconciled every few years by people whose job that is.

It also explains why Takara stayed a mid sized Japanese company instead of becoming a global one. Licensing your best work to the distributor who owns the market is safe money and a ceiling. Every year Hasbro learned more about selling toys worldwide and Takara learned more about making them, and only one of those compounds into a company that can survive a bad decade.

~ the money ran out ~

The side businesses are the reason this grave exists. Takara built a small electric car and sold home electronics, neither of which a toy company has any structural advantage in, and both were being wound down by the time of the merger. The Japan Times coverage of the deal put the two companies together as Japan's fourth largest toy maker, which is a polite way of saying that neither one was going to be first again.

The thing i keep coming back to is BowLingual, the device Takara sold in 2002 that claimed to translate what your dog was saying by sorting barks into six emotional categories. It won the 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for promoting harmony between species and Time magazine put it on a best inventions list the same year. A company confident enough to ship that is a company having fun. Four years later it did not exist.

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