1, Kanda Izumi-cho Chiyoda-ku
Toppan is the second-largest Japanese printing company, behind Dai Nippon Printing, and one of the world's largest. Its business includes commercial printing, publications, packaging, interior decor and industrial materials, clothing, precision electronic components, securities and business forms, compact discs, and computer processing. Toppan has become an information and consumer-services company with roots in high technology.
Toppan was established in 1900 by technicians from Japan's Ministry of Finance, who used a type of relief printing that was one of the leading printing technologies in Japan at the time. It initially focused on printing securities, books for publishers, and business forms.
The company was founded as Japan's modernization drive was in full stride, and the need for modern typeset printing was increasing. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894 had created a great increase in printing needs and paper demand as more newspapers were read and more documents needed. A slump in printing and papermaking followed Toppan's first year of business at the end of the war in 1901. In 1904, however, the onset of the Russo-Japanese War created an even greater demand for newspapers and magazines than had the Sino-Japanese war had. Japan defeated both China and Russia, and began a period of military and economic expansion, aided by the establishment of a modern currency system during the 1880s.
Printing also boomed during World War I. After the war, printing and publishing increased. In 1927 almost 20,000 new book titles and 40 million magazines were published. During the 1930s, as Japan came to be ruled by military dictatorship, publishers and writers were suppressed or imprisoned and books were banned. Publishing and printing suffered in such an environment. Further, during World War II paper shortages and the decline of the Japanese economy hurt the printing industry. The printing industry recovered after the war, however, and grew rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s. Encyclopedias and sets of the complete works of authors were the chief areas of growth, as was periodical printing.
Toppan quickly expanded after the war, founding Toppan Containers in 1952 as a manufacturer of specialty cardboard and other packaging materials. Several of Japan's large publishing houses launched successful weeklies in 1959, bringing more business to printers. In 1961 Toppan acquired Froebel-Kan, a company specializing in children's products. It had since developed a full line of children's books and teaching materials used at nurseries and kindergartens throughout Japan. It had produced and translated picture books, exporting books that have been translated in 50 languages and translated foreign stories into Japanese. Also in 1961, Toppan established Toppan Shoji, a general trading company, by taking over Tokai Paper Industries, a manufacturer and marketer of stock and bond certificates, established in 1947. Toppan Shoji soon handled trade in construction materials, electrical appliances, home furnishings, and office products. It also produces precision electronics, and character-brand products. By the 1980s it manufactured waste-water processing systems that used micro-organisms to break down fats and oils in industrial and restaurant waste.
In 1962 Toppan became the first Japanese printer to open a Hong Kong plant, staffing it with cheaper labor, and equipping the plant with European presses. It initially worked exclusively in offset printing, especially color work. It established an apprenticeship program in Hong Kong to send Chinese technicians to Japan for training. This plant, together with that of rival Dai Nippon, opened in 1963, enabled the Hong Kong printing industry to grow. By the 1980s it was competing with Japan's printing business.
During the 1960s Toppan gradually added planning and design to its commercial printing business, and moved into the production of electronic circuits through advanced printing processes. At the same time, U.S. publishers were beginning to buy from Japanese printers because they charged less than U.S. printers, even with shipping costs. By the mid-1960s, Toppan's business was growing at about 6% a year. The following year Toppan established Toppan Moore, a joint venture with the Moore Corporation Limited, of Canada, the world's largest business-forms manufacturer. By the 1980s Toppan Moore had become the largest Japanese business-forms manufacturer.
Rotary offset printing, particularly in color, advanced in the 1970s. Soon afterward, U.S. publishers provided more four-color work for Japanese printers, including Toppan, an industry leader in color printing. In 1979 Toppan became the first Japanese printer to build a U.S. production plant, a separation plant in Mountainside, New Jersey. Toppan continued growing, steadily expanding into nonprinting areas such as packaging. In 1978 Toppan unveiled an easy-to-uncap heat seal for packaging, and in 1980 a paper container that kept food fresh for six months. In 1980 the company developed a jet printer, beginning a push into computer technology. In 1983 Toppan developed Scan Note, a computerized process for setting up pages of music for publishing. The next year the company unveiled an electrochromatic display screen, utilizing reflected light. It was hoped that the screens would replace liquid crystal displays. It also jointly developed an electronic imaging color filter. In the same year, Toppan Moore developed a smart card with two integrated circuits. Smart cards are integrated circuits, embedded in plastic, that store information electronically.
In 1985 Toppan jointly formed Videotex Network Japan, a videotext firm. It also developed a paper-thin 1.5 volt manganese-zinc battery. In 1986 the company developed a portable smart-card system, and aseptic packaging equipment for filling pre-sterilized bags. In 1986 profits were US$113 million on sales of US$4.67 billion.
In 1987 Toppan moved into the quickly growing compact-disc market, forming Denshi Media Services, a compact-and optical-disc services company, with the Netherlands-based Philips. It also increased production of liquid-crystal-display filters to over 100,000 a month to keep up with demand. In 1988 Toppan bought the printed-circuit division of the U.S.-based Herco Technology. It also put on the market a non-contact smart card using a central processor, and a desktop publishing system that allowed a composer to write and edit music. Recognizing that electronic publishing was an area of growing importance, Toppan jointly developed a compact disc that held an entire encyclopedia. In 1988 profits were US$120 million, on sales of US$4.49 billion.
In 1980, a Japanese-language word processor finally came into use, its development slowed by the large number of characters in the language. This was the first major development in creating electronic publishing in Japan. As the 1980s progressed, computers and word-processing programs proliferated, and toward the end of the decade even small businesses could afford a laser printer. It was a logical step for Toppan--and competitors like Dai Nippon--to move into information processing. This view was shared by the Paper and Printing Committee of the Industrial Structural Council, an advisory organ of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. In 1988 the Paper and Printing Committee released a report predicting a dwindling need for conventional printing, and urging a change in the industry's direction. It recommended that the printing industry use its knowledge of information processing to contribute to an information-oriented society. The shipment value of printed matter in Japan had reached ¥6.2 trillion in 1986, and the committee predicted it would continue to grow at an annual rate of 6.5%, reaching ¥15 trillion by 2000. The committee said printing firms should push to expand high-tech printing techniques and information processing.
Toppan responded to the trend toward an information-oriented society in a variety of ways in the late 1980s. Toppan Moore moved into general information services, developing software and hardware to operate and manage clerical work. It launched Toppan Moore Learning with U.S.-based Applied Learning International to develop and market educational software. Subsidiary Toppan Moore Systems developed computer software and peripheral hardware and offered marketing and training services. Data Card Japan, a joint venture with U.S.-based Data Card Corporation, offered a wide range of card-related products and services.
In 1985 Toppan bought Kyodo Kako, a manufacturer of furniture materials, interior decorating products, and electrical appliances. The company used printing technology to create decorative surfaces on wood materials.
Printing companies in Japan generally had waited for customer orders before printing. During the 1980s competition increased and Toppan moved into other services. It promoted its after-printing distribution service and information-related services such as direct-mail lists.
In the late 1980s, partial deregulation of the Japanese financial industry led to a greater variety of financial products, all of which needed to be printed. The deregulation also allowed financial institutions to advertise, creating still more business for Toppan. Deregulation increased credit-card competition in Japan, a boon for Toppan since revenue from printing credit cards was the most profitable part of the company's securities division. Several private Japanese railways began accepting paid cards with a magnetic band on the back that recorded how much they were worth. Toppan printed the millions of cards used every year through a joint venture with TDK Corporation. In the 1980s, lottery-ticket sales soared in Japan, and Toppan did most of the printing. In the late 1980s Toppan became the first private company to print Japanese postage stamps.
Toppan and its main rival, Dai Nippon, became leading producers of smart cards. In 1988 the company developed advances in integrated-circuit cards that offered better signal reliability than competing cards. The cards were often used as part of access-control systems, and, because of their durability, could be used at factories and construction sites, where other cards could often not be used. In 1989 Toppan developed a method for printing color photographs directly on plastic identification cards. Formerly, color photographs had to be pasted on or laminated into the cards. The company hoped to print credit cards, driver's licenses, and other identification cards with this new technology.
Toppan's research with glass films resulted in a new type of packaging, brought out in 1988. The glass, deposited in a vacuum onto a sheet of special film, acted as an ultrathin, flexible, transparent barrier, and was designed for microwavable food. In 1988 Toppan established Toppan West in San Diego, California, which company bought Industrial Circuits, a U.S. manufacturer of printed circuit boards, later that year.
In early 1989 Toppan's electronic precision components division established a design subsidiary, the Toppan Technical Design Center. It expanded its shadow-mask manufacturing plant in Shiga to make masks for high-definition television and video displays. The high-definition market was expected to be a high-growth area in the 1990s. Later that year Toppan broke ground for a new industrial materials plant in Satte, Japan. The plant was to concentrate on thermal-ink ribbons and other products related to the rapidly growing field of office automation.
In 1989 Toppan established an industrial materials division to develop and manufacture new materials by combining coating, vapor deposition, laminating, shaping, and processing technologies with traditional printing. It has worked with thermal transfer ribbons, high-performance film, adhesive paper, and hot stamping foil.
In 1989 Toppan and Japan Pulp and Paper jointly established Toval Japon in Spain to manufacture decorative furniture boards for Europe. Toppan saw the new company, along with Toppan's offices in Düsseldorf and London, as the foundation of Toppan's presence in the European Community after the 1992 unification. In 1989 Toppan created a U.S. subsidiary, Toppan Interamerica, and formed Marionet Corporation, a marketing consulting corporation, with three other companies. Marionet processed point-of-sale information and sent the results to customers through on-line computer networks.
Toppan's planning division produces events such as expositions, anticipating the demand for related products: posters, entrance tickets, image technology, and pamphlets. The company launched the Toppan Media School in 1989 to train employees in design, production, and marketing for conventions and promotional events, and to devise new technologies. Perhaps the clearest examples of how Toppan and printing are changing occurred during the Toppan-produced Osaka Expo '90. Toppan connected high-definition television monitors showing live images of the event together with a new digital transmission technology, converted the television images into print using Toppan-developed software, and used the images to create a full-color bulletin distributed to expo visitors the same day.
In 1990 the company established Toppan Printronics U.S.A., a joint venture with Texas Instruments, of which Toppan owned 85%, investing US$5.7 million. The subsidiary was to make semiconductor photomasks for the United States and Europe. Toppan also expanded its Asaka securities printing plant, which it claimed was the largest in the world, to keep up with the steadily increasing demand.
By 1990 the company had nine printing plants in Tokyo, five in Osaka, and seven elsewhere in Japan. It had 53 sales offices in Japan and 21 overseas offices. To keep ideas flowing between offices, Toppan's commercial printing division launched the Toppan Idea Center to concentrate on planning and marketing. During the 1980s the commercial division had developed a computerized typesetting system and an image database, information from which could be transmitted between Toppan offices over telephone lines. The system helped Toppan lower costs and shorten delivery times. Toppan assigned work stations tied into this database to some of its customers, who could then use the database for design layouts, transmitting them directly to a Toppan plant for platemaking.
Toppan co-developed with Sony an optical reader that directly translated text into a computer, speeding the creation of an information database. Because of the labor shortage in Japan, Toppan's expanding commercial division had trouble hiring enough employees in the late 1980s, but focused on streamlining and automation as ways to compensate.
To promote its printing, Toppan had been involved with art exhibits, for which it often prints exhibition catalogues, and international book fairs, where it promotes its high-quality art books and magazine printing. Japanese magazine printing is complicated, however, because many magazines use several kinds of paper and printing techniques in a single issue.
The publications division suffered during the late 1980s as the boom in new magazines that started in the early 1980s came to an end. Readership diversified, causing a greater variety of publications in smaller lots and decreasing profits. To compensate, Toppan began offering editorial services, sending employees to clients to do electronic editing of copy returned to customers, thus decreasing turnaround time. On the positive side, Toppan, which had gotten into compact disc printing relatively early, got more orders as the discs increased in popularity.
Toppan established Toppan Forest in 1990, a high-tech showroom with a computer system supplying information on interior decor materials. It stores up to 40,000 color images and displays them in three-dimensional space on a computer terminal. Toppan continues to develop in the high-technology areas of information service.
Principal Subsidiaries: Toppan Printing Co. (H.K.), Ltd. (Hong Kong); Toppan Printing Co. (Singapore), Pte., Ltd.; P.T. Toppan Printing Indonesia; P.T. Toppan Indah Offset Printing (Indonesia); Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. (China); Toppan Printing Co. (Australia), Pty., Ltd.; Toppan Printing Co. (America), Inc. (U.S.A.); Graphics Arts Center (U.S.A.); Graphic Arts Center/West (U.S.A.); Toppan Interamerica Inc. (U.S.A.); Toppan Printronics (U.S.A.), Inc.; Toppan Printing Co. (U.K.), Ltd.; Toppan Printing GmbH (Germany); Toval Japon S.A. (Spain); Toyo Ink Manufacturing Co. Ltd.; Tokyo Shosek Co. Ltd.; Froebel-Kan Co. Ltd.; Toppan-Shoji Co. Ltd.; Toppan Containers Co. Ltd.; Kyodo Kako Co. Ltd.; Total Media Development Institute Co., Ltd.; Tamapoli Co., Ltd.; Hino Offset Printing Co., Ltd.; Tokyo Magnetic Printing Co., Ltd.; Toppan Co., Ltd.; Toppan Direct Mail Center Co., Ltd.; Toppan Travel Service Corp.; Toppan Sales Co., Ltd.; Toppan Graphics Inc. (U.S.A.); Toppan West Inc. (U.S.A.).
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