Fujitsu: Fuji, Siemens, and a Telephone Switch

A Spin-off in 1935

On the twentieth of June, nineteen thirty-five, a company was carved out of the communications division of a Japanese electrical firm and sent off to make telephone switching equipment. Its job was to help build the nervous system of modern Japan, the network of switches and exchanges that let one person's voice reach another across a wire. That spin-off would become Fujitsu, today one of the oldest information technology companies on the planet, second in age only to a certain firm in New York with three blue letters. But in nineteen thirty-five it was just a telephone equipment maker with a long Japanese name and a borrowed bloodline.

The parent it split from was Fuji Electric, and Fuji Electric was itself a hybrid creature, founded in nineteen twenty-three as a joint venture between a Japanese industrial group, the Furukawa concern, and a German engineering colossus you have absolutely heard of: Siemens. So before Fujitsu made a single computer, before it made a single scanner, its grandparents were a Japanese mining-and-electrical dynasty and one of Germany's greatest engineering houses. That German thread is not a footnote. It is literally written into the company's name.

The Hidden Acronym

Here is the trick, and if you listened to the first episode in this series, you are going to grin, because it is the same trick all over again. The name Fujitsu is a secret acronym, built from three pieces. Fu, for Fuji. Ji, for Siemens, which in Japanese is pronounced something like Jiimensu. And tsu, for tsushinki, the Japanese word for telecommunications equipment. Fuji, Siemens, telecommunications. Fu, ji, tsu. Fujitsu.

[happy] So we now have two companies in this story whose names are compressed family trees. PFU, hiding Panasonic, Fujitsu, and the town of Unoke. And Fujitsu itself, hiding Fuji, Siemens, and a telephone switch. And remember, the F in the middle of PFU is Fujitsu. Which means that buried inside the name of your little scanner is Fujitsu, and buried inside the name Fujitsu is Siemens of Germany. It is a corporate set of nesting dolls. Pop open the scanner's name and you find a computer company. Pop open the computer company's name and you find a nineteenth-century German engineer. The small print on a manual really does go all the way down.

Mr. Computer

After the Second World War, the telephone equipment company helped rebuild Japan's shattered communications network, and the government leaned on it as an official maker of telephone and telegraph gear. The company grew fast. And inside it, a restless group of young engineers wanted to do something new. They wanted to build a computing machine.

Their leader was an engineer named Toshio Ikeda, a man so central to the story that Japanese computing history simply calls him Mister Computer. In nineteen fifty-four, his team produced the FACOM one hundred, one of Japan's first computers, built, fittingly, out of the very telephone switching relays the company already knew how to make. A computer assembled from telephone parts. When it was unveiled, among the people standing beside it was Hideki Yukawa, the physicist who had won Japan its first Nobel Prize. The torch was being passed, in that photograph, from the age of the telephone to the age of the computer, in a company that had started by making switches.

FACOM, that name on the early machines, became the computer brand, and it is the same FACOM hiding in the F of PFU. The company kept building, moving from those relay machines to fully transistorized computers by the end of the nineteen fifties, and in nineteen sixty-seven it finally renamed itself Fujitsu, taking on the acronym as its whole identity. It went on to become a mainframe titan, a maker of chips, a builder of the systems that ran banks and governments, one of the true heavyweights of global computing.

The Fastest Machine on Earth

Fujitsu's appetite for raw computing power led it to the very top of the mountain, twice. In twenty eleven, a Fujitsu machine called the K computer was ranked the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Then in twenty twenty, Fujitsu did it again with a successor named Fugaku, which took the number one spot on the global list of the fastest supercomputers and held it. Fugaku was built, in part, on the same kind of processor architecture that powers your phone, scaled up into a machine that fills a building and models everything from climate to disease to the folding of proteins.

And now the thread from the previous episodes snaps tight, because of where Fugaku lives and who helped build it. Fugaku was developed in partnership with Riken. The same Riken. The national Institute of Physical and Chemical Research that, back in nineteen thirty-six, spun off a little sensitized paper company that grew up to become Ricoh. That very same lab, decades later, partnered with Fujitsu to build the fastest computer on Earth. So the silent grandparent stands behind both ends of this story. Riken seeded Ricoh at the start, and Riken co-built Fujitsu's supercomputer at the height. One quiet institution, threaded invisibly through two giants that most people would never guess were related at all.

Letting Go

For all that power, the last chapter of Fujitsu's story in this saga is about letting go. A company can be a giant and still decide what it no longer wants to carry. In two thousand and one, Fujitsu handed its image scanner business to PFU, the company that became the invisible scanner king. In twenty eighteen, it sold the majority of its personal computer business to Lenovo, walking away from making laptops. And across twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-five, it sold its remaining stake in PFU to Ricoh, releasing the scanner crown entirely.

[calm] So the arc is this. A telephone switch maker, born from a Japanese dynasty and a German engineer, became one of the oldest and mightiest computing companies in the world, climbed twice to the literal summit of supercomputing alongside a national physics lab, and then, with the calm of something very large and very old, began handing its hardware businesses to others so it could become a company of software and services. It gave its scanners to PFU. It gave its remaining piece of PFU to Ricoh. The paper company now owns the scanners that the computer company invented, and the computer company has moved on.

Three companies. Two secret acronyms. One silent laboratory standing behind them all. And it began, for us, with three flat letters in the small print of a four hundred kronor scanner. In the final episode, we leave the boardrooms entirely and go to the places: a futuristic skyline built on the bones of a shipyard, a snowbound town that hides inside a single letter, the silent grandparent itself, and a few rabbit holes with no through-line at all, because sometimes the tangent is the whole point.