Born to a Kyoto family of rice dealers in 1865, Yosaburo Yagi was a man with a passion for continually taking on fresh challenges. He was adopted by a liquor shop owner at the age of 15. But wanting to make a name for himself in Japan’s business Mecca of Osaka, he firmly resolved to relocate there at the age of 18. Presenting himself at his uncle’s rice shop, he soon moved in and started working there while learning the business from the ground up. His uncle was Seibei Fujimoto, a tradesman who had gained prominence in the Osaka business world. To avoid coddling him, Fujimoto was initially careful to treat his nephew the same as any outside apprentice. But he soon saw that Yagi’s passion for his work made him a model employee. But not long after Yagi started at the rice shop, a series of events began that took his life in a new direction. The first was the death of his father when Yagi was 21. It was followed two years later by the failure of the rice shop and the subsequent death of Fujimoto shortly thereafter. Yagi reacted to these misfortunes by making up his mind to go into business for himself. He decided on the yarn business, feeling that a new area would make a worthwhile challenge. So he set his sights on starting a business in an industry that was completely new to him. The yarn industry had already started showing signs of growth at the time. Yagi may have had a clear premonition of the path that would eventually lead him to a successful future.
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- Founder & First President Yosaburo Yagi
Yagi Shoten subsequently opened for business on October 16, 1893. It was a small cotton yarn shop with a storefront about 15 feet wide. An eagerness to take on challenges was a quality Yagi always admired throughout his career, while his business approach was described by his slogan Dependability First. He created a business ethic informed by rationality, arguing that dependability bred from caution was the way forward for the tradesmen of Osaka’s Semba area. Along with this management philosophy, the other quality Yagi valued is described by our current corporate slogan—Integrity in All Things. Yagi’s advice to approach everything with integrity is an attitude to business that is still practiced to this day over 125 years later.
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- The Yagi Shoten in around 1903 (in Minamikyutaromachi)
Upon starting in the yarn business, Yagi also displayed a tenacious insistence on ensuring product quality. The traditional Japanese cotton yarn of the time was spun by hand on a spinning wheel, making it thick and unwieldy. Yagi noticed that a company called Kanebo (later Kanebo Ltd.; today known as Kracie) produced yarn that was expertly twisted and had very high quality. But despite the product’s slender appearance and the praise it received from experts in the trade, consumers couldn't appreciate its true value. So Yagi advised the manager of Kanebo’s Hyogo branch to market the product by showcasing the praise it had received from dealers. A campaign to dispel consumers of their misapprehension of the product’s quality was started. It rapidly improved the product’s reputation, and Kanebo’s fame grew as its products came into widespread use. Yagi poured all his efforts into handling Kanebo products, and the company eventually grew to become a household name in Japan.
But Yagi’s passion for challenges remained as strong as ever, and he continued to step up his efforts. In 1895, he began exporting products overseas just as the First Sino-Japanese War came to an end. Guided by his Dependability First and Integrity in All Things slogans, he started to expand business by constantly taking on new challenges.
