Pianos on the Assembly Line

The world's biggest piano maker is not Steinway, Winter or Wurlitzer, but a relatively unknown Japanese company named Nippon Gakki that won its for tune during World War II by making airplane propellers. Nippon Gakki is one of Japan's most successfully diversi fied corporations, with 1963 sales of $99 million. It now makes motorcycles, bathtubs, glass-fiber skis, transistorized electric organs. But the company's most notable achievement is the recent success of its second oldest product line: pianos. Last week Nippon Gakki announced that it will build a modern $4,100,000 plant that will produce more than 8,000 pianos a month--almost three times what Steinway makes a year.

Nippon Gakki got its name (literally, Japan Musical Instruments) from Founder Torakusu Yamaha, a medical equipment engineer who began making reed organs as a hobby in 1897, two years later branched into pianos. The company was near bankruptcy by 1926, but gradually found that aircraft parts could be made by using some of the same manufacturing techniques that were used for organs. After the war, the firm turned back to less martial music. Taking over the presidency from his ailing father in 1950, Genichi Kawakami, now 51, decided to replace the ancient handcrafter's art of piano making with automation.

First, he spent $4,100,000 on a new wood drying facility, and his sawmill overnight became one of the most up-to-date of its kind. By using assembly-line techniques and various hurry-up tricks that would have shocked old-style instrumentmakers, Kawakami lowered the time needed to produce a piano from two years to three months. He does not feel that this produces the world's best piano, but with a shrewd eye for publicity he can point to the fact that his pianos are already used by Composer (Guys & Dolls) Frank Loesser, Fred Astaire, Guy Lombardo, and some of Conrad Hilton's hotels.

Kawakami is confident that he can sell all the pianos he can make. He is zeroing in on the growing Japanese market, where he already has 70% of the business, and expanding his U.S. sales force, which last year sold only 2,600 pianos (out of a U.S. total of 215,000). Because his production is automated, Kawakami can price his pianos at better than competitive levels: a Yamaha grand, for instance, sells for less than $2,000 in the U.S., as much as 50% lower than comparable U.S. makes. What now disturbs Kawakami is not competition but the present state of human patience. "I wonder," he muses, "if in a decade there will be enough people in the world patient enough to learn to play the piano."

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