Namihei Odaira

Namihei Odaira was a Japanese electrical engineer and industrialist, born January 15, 1874 in Ienaka in Tochigi Prefecture and died October 5, 1951 in Tokyo, who founded the company that became Hitachi. After graduating from the electrical engineering program at Tokyo Imperial University in 1900 and working for several power companies, he joined the Kuhara Mining Company in 1906 as chief of its engineering section, where he and his colleagues began manufacturing a five-horsepower electric motor, the product that launched Hitachi as a business in 1910. Odaira served as the company's managing director from 1910 to 1929 and then as its president until 1947, when he was removed from the position by the American occupation authorities after the Second World War, though he was briefly reinstated as chairman emeritus in 1951 shortly before his death. Under his direction, Hitachi grew from an in-house engineering shop inside a mining company into an independent corporation in 1920 and eventually into one of Japan's largest industrial concerns.