“Our company is 100 years old, but our corporate philosophy of ‘Sincerity, Positivity, Harmony’ can be traced back some 400 years as a precept of a samurai family,” Ohba & Co. President Shigeru Tsujimoto said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.
Ohba, a consulting and engineering company in Tokyo with branches from Tohoku to Okinawa, specializes in urban development and civil engineering. It was founded in 1922 by Munenori Ohba, who was born in 1897 as a son and heir of a retainer of the Kanazawa Domain, which straddled today’s Ishikawa and Toyama prefectures. After working as a civil engineer for the Ministry of Railways, now the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, he established one of the first private surveying firms in Japan with the aim of creating a new business model for private infrastructure and urban development firms at a time when such projects were primarily the domain of the public sector.