By taking manuscripts from customers and by revising them with "beautiful characters" and "beautiful character sets", we provide information that people can rely on. With this mission as the backdrop, our company is soon to celebrate 100 years since foundation.
Even if technology changes, such as from the typewriter era to phototyping and DTP, and to when designers conducted manual print operations, our commitment to the job of "Putting our hearts into every character" remains unchanged and is thus our biggest asset.
“Heart of Letters”: This is the essence of Kato Bunmeisha, which aims to facilitate communication between authors and readers in beautiful ways. From the days when traditional typography ended up to today, we strive for continuous improvement in our design and in our business. And here we are, moving from now into the future. As various forms of information, including letters, are increasingly becoming digitized, we focus on beautiful page design as the source of the "Heart of Letters", which is increasingly becoming our company's most important asset.
In the 99 years up to this year’s celebration, our company has enjoyed many milestones and technical innovations throughout the eras. During wartime, our company moved its mother molds and movable type characters to another area, and then it resumed business as soon as possible after the end of the war. During the long era of traditional typography that lasted for long time after the war, technicians handled each movable type character one-by-one, which involved a lot of manual repetition and entailing many chances for distraction, all until the final perfect version was made. We have experienced a number of major turning points in printing history, such as the appearance of offset printing and the transition to digitization.
In all of those moments, something was flowing around the company. This was the spiritual foundation that our company was “an entity involved in printing and printing culture, aiming for first-rate dignity, first-class credit, and first-class products”. The highest ideal that one must have to be involved in the printing industry is “commitment”.
When we look at the next 100 years and the 100 years after that, what is outside the line of sight is not within the bounds of our company. Our innovations occur so as to always meet the demands of customers, partner companies, society, and consumers.
Knowing about the latest in digital workflows and expanding the areas of activity in the cross-media world is also our "advanced nature", but simply following new technologies and businesses does not provide a platform for "innovation" or "challenge". To add enhanced value to our "traditions", which include human resources, technology, culture, buildings, equipment, and workflows, we need to improve on any areas that do not fit the times, while keeping values constant. It is our duty to walk in tandem with the history of the printing industry, and we believe that it is very important to consider the "mission" and the "challenge" and to relay those concepts to future generations.
In the future as well, we believe that the world of information communication will continuously come to many big turning points. Amid this backdrop, we want to continue to be the company of choice for a long time into the future, while overcoming any problems through the power of our employees. We cannot say it enough: This is the work of Kato Bunmeisha. To that end, we will listen to the demands of customers, partners, the industry, and society, and we will continue to work on “value creation” as something that only our company can achieve.
