User:Donlammers/Sandbox/IBM Japan

IBM Japan Ltd. (日本アイ・ビー・エム株式会社) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), with headquarters in the IBM Hakozaki Facility located in Nihonbashi-Hakozaki-cho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo, Japan. It was formed in 1937 as the Japan Wattoson Statistics Accounting Machinery Co., Ltd. (日本ワットソン統計会計機械株式会社).

History
By 1923, Nippon Toki (now Noritake) was looking to streamline its paperwork using machines to handle large orders coming in from the United States, and was impressed by the Hollerith tabulating machines manufactured by the Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR). Unfortunatley, during negotiations just afer CTR had been renamed to IBM, O. E. Braitmayer (an IBM vice president) refused to ship the tabulator, saying that they had thought the machine was for the Morimura-Brothers to use in the United States, but that they were a rental company and could not ship to Nagoya where there would be nobody to service it. Mizushina Kou (水品浩), offered to be trained for servicing the tabulators, and spent about 3 months in training at the IBM Endicott plant in New York.

On May 21, 1925, Morimura-Brothers entered into a sole agency agreement with IBM to import the Hollerith machines into Japan. The first Hollerith tabulator in Japan was installed at Nippon Toki in September 1925, making Noritake IBM customer #1 in Japan.

In June 1937, in response to successful sales of the IBM 450 Tabulator in the United States, and then in Japan, IBM established the Japan Wattoson Statistics Accounting Machinery Co., Ltd. (日本ワットソン統計会計機械株式会社), a fully owned subsidiary, in Yokohama, Japan, with the following principals:
 * Guy de la Chevalerie, Representative Director and Chief Technical Adviser
 * Shibusawa Tomoo, President
 * E.W.Flaser
 * H.A.Chapman, Auditor
 * Mizushina Kou, Business Operations Manager

The U.S. occupation forces released the asset freeze on Japan Wattoson in August 1949, and returned the land and buildings in Yokohama in 1950. Before this in June 1949, the first stockholders meeting in 8 years, held in in the Marunouchi Building, had changed the company name to to Japan International Business Machine Ltd. (日本インターナショナル・ビシネス・マシーンス株式会社), and elected the following to the board of directors:
 * C. M. Decker, Representative Director
 * Mizushina Kuo, Managing Director
 * T. K.Mallen, Director
 * Migita Masao, Auditor

In 1958 the company opened the first computer center in Japan, at their headquarters in Kōjimachi, with an IBM 650 computer that used vacuum tubes in its central processor. In 1959, the name of the company was shortened to IBM Japan Ltd. (日本アイ・ビー・エム株式会社).

For the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, IBM provided the first real-time data collection system for an Olympic games. The IBM data center was set up on the first floor of the press building in the Meiji Olympic Park, and facilitated the "collection and arrangement of the results of sports coming from the venues, the listing of competitors issued by the Sport Section of the Organizing Committee and the respective International Sports Federations.