I had been selling imitation pearls, crystal necklaces and brooches at my little shop in Kyoto since I was demobilized and sent home from the war in 1946. The number of items I stocked and my sales had increased so much that I couldn't manage the business alone any longer. My first solution was to have my war buddies and old friends help out.

I couldn't afford to hire full-time sales people and had difficulty attracting talented employees though there were few jobs just after the war. No one would listen to my inflated dreams saying, "I don't want the rest of my life to end up selling jewelry," still, I was persistent and eventually persuaded a few of them to join in my enthusiasm.

"At the first morning gathering of 1950, I announced this great strategy. But my 'audience', consisting of only nine employees, stood there with their mouths hanging open."

One by one I convinced young men to come aboard. Two standouts who joined me at the firm were Mr Ikuo Kawaguchi and Mr Iichi Nakamura. Both were graduates of Hachiman School of Commerce in Shiga Prefecture. In ensuing years they would make a great contribution to the development of Wacoal and become vice-presidents.

Mr Kawaguchi had worked in Mitsubishi Heavy Industry's Kyoto Apparatus Factory. By nature he liked business and often came to my store. When I was short-handed during the very busy end-of-the-year period, I asked him to call in sick to his job and go to Nagoya to service some of my accounts for me. He enjoyed the excursion so much that he decided to quit his company to assist me permanently. His fiancée naturally could not understand his seemingly adolescent decision, and doubted that forsaking Misubishi's guaranteed lifetime employment for such a small, unknown concern was a wise thing to do.

Mr Nakamura had been called to military service when he was a student and went to the Soviet front. As there were very few jobs after the war he became a substitute teacher at his old alma mater, Hachiman School of Commerce.

He had been a brilliant student, graduating from Hachiman at the top of his class, then going on to Yokohama Commercial School and Tokyo Commercial College (the present day Hitotsubashi University). I pleaded with him, saying I was in dire need of someone with his management and accounting skills. After hours of persuasion he finally saw the light.

Yet it was a very trying decision for him. He had also been approached by a burgeoning rubber distributorship with twenty employees, and the president of the company had also attended Hachiman. At that time he was absorbed in physiognomy, and his teacher advised him to join my company, which he finally did in March of 1949.

Allow me to relate the story of how I happened upon the name "Wako Shoji". My father, Kumejiro, had lost his business, Kanouya Shouten and he said, "That is after my birthplace." It reminded me of "comrades in arms who promised harmony with Yang Tse-Kiang" and so I took the name without hesitation.

On October 6, 1949, a department store exposition was held in Kyoto where Wako Shoji exhibited brapads, brassieres and so on. It was then I felt Western underwear could become our main business. Also our display looked respectable with eight employees.

"Finally, I told him, 'You are thirty-three years older than me. I want you to be the president of our new company.' The last concession changed his mind."

But it was also the day of my father's funeral. In the summer of the previous year my father had begged me to let him go out on business once again. I had given in and sent him off to Kyushu. He came home greatly weaked with a desperate fever due to heat and fatigue. I bitterly regretted having let him go. He never recovered. My only consolation was his dying words, in which he said he was happy to die as the result of doing what he loved, being a traveling merchant.

The only thing I could think to do in the name of my deceased father was to pursue his dream of a flourishing enterprise. On the first day of the following month I incorporated my business, with paid-in capital set at one million yen. We had at last gone from being a little stand on a side street to a bona fide corporation. The only thing I lacked was capital, so I raised funds by selling off all the antiques my father had collected.

To celebrate the founding of our new company I invited all employees and their families to a party at Takao in Kyoto. We sat by a beautiful flowing stream and enjoyed sukiyaki together. From that day on, I went from being called "boss", to "president".