level 8

1910 The pioneering spirit of founder Kotaro UchidaKotaro Uchida was born in 1871, the second son of renowned jujutsu master Tatsuzo Munetaka Uchida of Takuhan (now the city of Taku in Saga prefecture). This was a time when the samurai class was rapidly disappearing under the Meiji Restoration. Having experienced grinding poverty that threatened the very survival of his family, the young Uchida was determined to make something of himself as a pioneer in the new world.
In 1893, Japan was working feverishly to achieve industrial modernization and national prosperity while building up her military capacity. At 22 years of age, Uchida journeyed alone to Tokyo, where he passed the Ministry of Communications civil service examination and was assigned to the Yokohama Post Office. He was transferred to the Taipei Post Office in 1900, shortly after the end of the Sino-Japanese war, to work as a surveyor for the Taiwan Land Bureau, a job that saw him travelling the length and breadth of Taiwan. Shortly after he arrived back in Japan the Russo-Japanese war broke out. Uchida volunteered to serve in the railways field army and was dispatched to the new frontier of Manchuria. When the war ended abruptly, the newly formed field army was converted into the Southern Manchurian Railway Company. Kotaro Uchida became an employee of the Southern Manchurian Railway Company in 1907, at 36 years of age.
He departed just two years later, determined to play his part in resurrecting the Uchida family. In 1910 he founded Suitaigo (predecessor of Uchida Yoko) as a supplier of surveying engineering and drawing tools and equipment to service the expansion demand of his former employers in Manchuria.











