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We started out in last place: The birth of KANEKO OPTICAL

2020.12.18
Sabae City is in Fukui prefecture. Although a small town with a population under 70,000, it manages to produce about 90% of all Japanese-made eyeglasses, and even today is considered one of the three major eyeglass producing regions in the world.
Sabae's eyeglass manufacturing started in the late Meiji era (early 1900's) as a cottage industry to employ farmers during the winter fallow season. 
Small scale home workshops began to proliferate as the post-war boom took hold, laying the foundation for what was to become the pillar of Sabae's economy. 
KANEKO OPTICAL was born at exactly this moment in history. 

In 1958, Shokei Kaneko started business in earnest, naming his family-run wholesale company "Kaneko Eyeglass Company" (KANEKO OPTICAL below). 
There were about 100 eyeglass wholesalers at the time in Sabae. KANEKO OPTICAL was quite a latecomer among them, with few competitive advantages and very low turnover. There were no openings to do business with the major manufacturers.
 The company was ranked around 95 or 96 out of the 100 wholesalers, stuck at the back, scrambling for table scraps. 

With a conflicted heart, a young successor returns to Sabae.

Shinya Kaneko, now our president, was born in 1958, the same year KANEKO OPTICAL was founded. After high school he headed for university in Tokyo, but only after promising his father to carry on in the family business after graduation. 
Four years passed, and after graduating that spring, he departed Tokyo as promised.  

The year was 1981. Tokyo's star was rising into an era of unprecedented prosperity. Kaneko was abandoning Tokyo, city of endless potential, to take over a family business in a sunset industry with anything but favorable winds behind it. Though conflicted, he returned to Sabae and joined KANEKO OPTICAL to begjn helping out with the family trade. 
The company's main business at the time was selling to eyeglass and watch retailers in remote areas such as Northern Kanto, Tohoku, and Hokkaido, avoiding major cities where the large distributors held sway.

Once engaged in the business, he began to feel viscerally the direct connection between company sales and fluctuating family income. He made up his mind to attack the business head on. He took advice from his parents and customers as he dug in, sometimes sleeping at roadside saunas to save money on business hotels, sometimes grabbing naps at highway rest stops, always pouring his heart into his sales work. But the more he devoted himself to the gritty world of sales, the more he came to realize that if he kept on this track, nothing would change from the era of his father's battles in last place. His impatience grew. 

Struggle after struggle to escape this situation would lead him to important reforms in the business.