12 ms·

Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

307 points by pwim 11y ago

surge 11y ago
This man expresses such a passion for chalk...chalk of all things, and it's inspiring. I could see someone reading this and becoming an artisan chalk maker as a result(I kid, but its probably true). Even I kind of want to run a chalk business after reading it.
x0x0 11y ago
reading that made me think of the Byrd's song To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
- deciplex 11y ago
  That's not the original source though, FYI.
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    It probably is the source of those particular words in Modern English in that particular arrangement. Something very close appears in Wycliffe's Bible and starts like this: Alle thingis han tyme, and alle thingis vndur sunne passen bi her spaces. See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_%28Wycliffe%29/Ecclesiastes https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_%28Wycliffe%29/Ecclesia....
  - hudibras 11y ago
    To go one level deeper: It's actually an old Pete Seeger folk song. So the Byrds were covering a Pete Seeger song, who used lyrics by Ecclesiastes.
- TheBranca18 11y ago
  Love the quotation, and also didn't realize it came from a Bible verse originally.
- JorgeGT 11y ago
  Ecclesiastes 3 King James Version (KJV) 3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    Ecclesiastes! A good book, and I think a lot of people in our field could relate to it a little: "Then I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will rule over all my labor in which I toiled and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity."
    - yawaramin 11y ago
      This is so appropriate for Hagoromo's story.
qnaal 11y ago
OPEN SOURCE THE MAGIC CHALK RECIPE AND MACHINE PLANS
- fsloth 11y ago
  I don't think there is any concise secret formula that one could just copy to paper and readapt. The article gives the impression there was a specific highly custom production system where the materials were selected for the machines and the machines were fit for the materials. And the machines were apparently jury rigged adaptations which probably lack detailed blueprints. Sounds a bit hard to formalize, after the fact, without quite a laborious effort.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    I'd bet that, if he made some Youtube videos explaining the recipe, and the way it changes based on the local situation (and manufacturing equipment), as well as some videos giving a tour of the manufacturing equipment, some enterprising Makers would find a way to whip up a "Make your own Chalk" machine. While it wouldn't be perfect, such a machine could be standardized or improved, and quality could be iterated on by people who care about it until they could make their own chalk that was better than what they can easily buy. Heck, just the recipe might be sufficient for people to do that.
- hibala 11y ago
  But the Hagoromo brand's followers / value / awareness can't be open sourced it got to be earned.
fsloth 11y ago
The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality." High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.
- pmr_ 11y ago
  I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN: > The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction systems. While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good in a very localized and easy to measure sense (cheap), but lacks an understanding of other economical signals.
  - daurnimator 11y ago
    If you instruct a machine to optimize for the cheapest price; it will do that. The failure is in the instructions given, not the introduction of machines.
    - pmr_ 11y ago
      That much should be clear, my (unfortunately) implicit question is: how can we instruct a machine to optimize for the very intangible things everybody seems to love so much about this chalk? What about the more subtle economic things (like signals of economic climate and value of quality).
      - polymatter 11y ago
        optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.
        fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
memming 11y ago
It's amazing that they had just one set of machines to make all their chalk. I hope the South Korean version would be successful.
kriro 11y ago
This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities/individuals. I also think that it's somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in "brainy" jobs it's pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I'm pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can't change their mind. Maybe they were just "too big" and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.
- creshal 11y ago
  > It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh).
  - toyg 11y ago
    There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases. And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much. There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.
fnordfnordfnord 11y ago
I hope he shares his recipe.
a5seo 11y ago
About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.
- throw7 11y ago
  Yes, this is what I wanted to say. Quantify what makes them great. After reading the article and the comments, I still have no understanding of why or what makes them so great.
  - bsder 11y ago
    Thicker sticks. Coating on the outside of the chalk. Different formulation to make it smoother and less dusty. Basically, the chalk seems to be optimized for writing Kanji strokes which need to vary in thickness and weight. And, yes, he did miss the boat in the US. I have never heard of this stuff before they went under (not completely true: my Japanese teacher complained about the quality of American chalk all the time--I should have twigged in). I would have bought crates of this stuff when I was teaching. Hopefully the Korean company he sold the machines to won't be quite so insular.
putchdes 11y ago
When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk. When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.
- rthomas6 11y ago
  It's Japan though. Faxes in Japan aren't antiquated like in the USA.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    The entire technology is antiquated. It doesn't matter how much shiny you wrap around it.
    - rthomas6 11y ago
      What I meant was that fax machines are still in widespread use by all demographics in Japan, so getting a lot of faxes doesn't indicate much about the age or aversion to progress of the senders.
- kjs3 11y ago
  You should perhaps learn something about cultures other than your own... https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+fax+machine+culture https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+fax+machine+culture tl;dr: Fax machines are still fundamental to Japanese business communications.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Same in Germany: A lot of official things can only be done through fax or paper mail even today. And you know what? I’m totally fine with that.
- panjaro 11y ago
  And some people just don't have appreciation for business which value quality, culture, ethics and respect for employees. They are busy with their own arrogance.
kvcc01 11y ago
I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here's a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like "So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think." I am now a fan of Hagoromo. It was rather refreshing at a time when I can't stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.
- etep 11y ago
  Not awkward, the sentence you call out. Beautiful, rather, and whether it is an artifact of translation or not, no matter. You didn't mean awkward in a pejorative sense; this is just an affirmation.
  - kvcc01 11y ago
    Of course! What makes this letter effective and relatable are all those little things that wouldn't have passed the ordinary editorial, legal, or PR filters, if it were written by a typical corporate CEO. If I was teaching at business school, I'd have my students read this as a model of effective stakeholder communications. I think Mr. Watanabe is a shokunin (you know, in the Jiro Ono sense) of the chalk business.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Yes. There's none of this maximize-shareholder-value, church-of-the-mba religion that pervades Western business culture right now. He wanted to serve people sustainably. He did it for decades, and when that became untenable, he responsibly searched for a way to minimize the waste and harm caused by him exiting the business. I especially love that he treats his machines almost as people, people intrinsically valuable to him. Whereas here, we often treat our people as machines, machines that are eternally disposable.
mathattack 11y ago
Two passages stood out. At first, we considered selling the whole company, enabling the Hagoromo brand to survive and helping overall chalk sales. But we could not find the right deal for the company. I'm sad that I have been forced to close down my company. But I am pleased I have been able to contribute to education by providing high-quality chalk over the last 50 years. Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. Very touching note.
- GuiA 11y ago
  > Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. How is it "not enough"? He ran a successful business that brought joy and utility to millions for 50 years. Sure, it ends on a sad note - but such is life. That is success if I ever saw it.
astaroth360 11y ago
Chalk makes me feel weird when I use it. Tactically it just rubs me the wrong way and gives me the same chills I get from fingernails on a chalkboard. Just thinking about it bothers me :\ However, it is nice to read about people who have a passion for what they do, and this man seems to have passion in spades.
- paxtonab 11y ago
  This chalk actually has a special coating that prevents that from happening. This post from a while ago explains why "Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202
shepardrtc 11y ago
From the article it looks like the buyer in South Korea will learn how to continue on with the chalk. I suspect we will see it on the market again.
pvaldes 11y ago
I'm sorry for this man having so many health problems. But I can understand otherwise how to make chalk in the pacific japanese coast burning tons and tons of japanese oyster shells could be less profitable and much more dangerous since 2011. I wish him well.

307 points by pwim 11y ago

surge 11y ago

This man expresses such a passion for chalk...chalk of all things, and it's inspiring. I could see someone reading this and becoming an artisan chalk maker as a result(I kid, but its probably true). Even I kind of want to run a chalk business after reading it.

x0x0 11y ago

reading that made me think of the Byrd's song To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

deciplex 11y ago
That's not the original source though, FYI.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  It probably is the source of those particular words in Modern English in that particular arrangement. Something very close appears in Wycliffe's Bible and starts like this: Alle thingis han tyme, and alle thingis vndur sunne passen bi her spaces. See https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_%28Wycliffe%29/Ecclesiastes https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_%28Wycliffe%29/Ecclesia....
- hudibras 11y ago
  To go one level deeper: It's actually an old Pete Seeger folk song. So the Byrds were covering a Pete Seeger song, who used lyrics by Ecclesiastes.
TheBranca18 11y ago
Love the quotation, and also didn't realize it came from a Bible verse originally.
JorgeGT 11y ago
Ecclesiastes 3 King James Version (KJV) 3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  Ecclesiastes! A good book, and I think a lot of people in our field could relate to it a little: "Then I hated all my labor in which I had toiled under the sun, because I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will rule over all my labor in which I toiled and in which I have shown myself wise under the sun. This also is vanity."
  - yawaramin 11y ago
    This is so appropriate for Hagoromo's story.

qnaal 11y ago

OPEN SOURCE THE MAGIC CHALK RECIPE AND MACHINE PLANS

fsloth 11y ago
I don't think there is any concise secret formula that one could just copy to paper and readapt. The article gives the impression there was a specific highly custom production system where the materials were selected for the machines and the machines were fit for the materials. And the machines were apparently jury rigged adaptations which probably lack detailed blueprints. Sounds a bit hard to formalize, after the fact, without quite a laborious effort.
- gknoy 11y ago
  I'd bet that, if he made some Youtube videos explaining the recipe, and the way it changes based on the local situation (and manufacturing equipment), as well as some videos giving a tour of the manufacturing equipment, some enterprising Makers would find a way to whip up a "Make your own Chalk" machine. While it wouldn't be perfect, such a machine could be standardized or improved, and quality could be iterated on by people who care about it until they could make their own chalk that was better than what they can easily buy. Heck, just the recipe might be sufficient for people to do that.
hibala 11y ago
But the Hagoromo brand's followers / value / awareness can't be open sourced it got to be earned.

fsloth 11y ago

The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality." High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.

pmr_ 11y ago
I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN: > The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction systems. While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good in a very localized and easy to measure sense (cheap), but lacks an understanding of other economical signals.
- daurnimator 11y ago
  If you instruct a machine to optimize for the cheapest price; it will do that. The failure is in the instructions given, not the introduction of machines.
  - pmr_ 11y ago
    That much should be clear, my (unfortunately) implicit question is: how can we instruct a machine to optimize for the very intangible things everybody seems to love so much about this chalk? What about the more subtle economic things (like signals of economic climate and value of quality).
    - polymatter 11y ago
      optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.
      - fnordfnordfnord 11y ago

memming 11y ago

It's amazing that they had just one set of machines to make all their chalk. I hope the South Korean version would be successful.

kriro 11y ago

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much envision somone making that chalk in a garage and selling it to universities/individuals. I also think that it's somewhat short sighted to assume procurement by the employer is needed. Especially in "brainy" jobs it's pretty common for people to be willing to spend their own money for tools they use on the job. If my school only provides chalk X I'm pretty much willing to spend some of my own money for the better chalk if I can't change their mind. Maybe they were just "too big" and targeting a commodity market instead of going for the smaller premium market.

creshal 11y ago
> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously can't work" – well, duh).
- toyg 11y ago
  There is a cultural element -- the Japanese perceive the cultural contrast between their world and "ours" more acutely than we do, in both directions (i.e. their positions go from "the West is much better than us" to "the West is so much worse than us" very quickly, it's hard to find level-headed assessments of both positions). Most of the "obviously it can't work" sentiment actually comes from there, in many cases. And then there is an economic issue: their currency has been so strong for so long, it simply wasn't worth for most medium-to-small companies to invest in tricky oversea expansion for a very long time. Things have changed a bit there, but the cultural perception has not shifted much. There is also the obvious difficulty of limited chances for local expansion: the country closest to them in cultural terms are Korea, which they historically see as inferior and poorer, and China, which they know they simply cannot match on equal terms. And then, of course, there is the recent history of train-crash expansion in the '80s. That didn't end well, and some of the lessons they learnt was not to try too hard to expand abroad.

fnordfnordfnord 11y ago

I hope he shares his recipe.

a5seo 11y ago

About 20 years ago they should have created a grading standard for chalk so they could have avoided their commoditization, or at least only compete with others at similar quality (and presumably margins). Similar to organic standards.

throw7 11y ago
Yes, this is what I wanted to say. Quantify what makes them great. After reading the article and the comments, I still have no understanding of why or what makes them so great.
- bsder 11y ago
  Thicker sticks. Coating on the outside of the chalk. Different formulation to make it smoother and less dusty. Basically, the chalk seems to be optimized for writing Kanji strokes which need to vary in thickness and weight. And, yes, he did miss the boat in the US. I have never heard of this stuff before they went under (not completely true: my Japanese teacher complained about the quality of American chalk all the time--I should have twigged in). I would have bought crates of this stuff when I was teaching. Hopefully the Korean company he sold the machines to won't be quite so insular.

putchdes 11y ago

When he said that people sent a flood of faxes, it made me totally cool with no more chalk. When your customers are still sending faxes, that pretty much sums up your dire situation.

rthomas6 11y ago
It's Japan though. Faxes in Japan aren't antiquated like in the USA.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  The entire technology is antiquated. It doesn't matter how much shiny you wrap around it.
  - rthomas6 11y ago
    What I meant was that fax machines are still in widespread use by all demographics in Japan, so getting a lot of faxes doesn't indicate much about the age or aversion to progress of the senders.
kjs3 11y ago
You should perhaps learn something about cultures other than your own... https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+fax+machine+culture https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+fax+machine+culture tl;dr: Fax machines are still fundamental to Japanese business communications.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Same in Germany: A lot of official things can only be done through fax or paper mail even today. And you know what? I’m totally fine with that.
panjaro 11y ago
And some people just don't have appreciation for business which value quality, culture, ethics and respect for employees. They are busy with their own arrogance.

kvcc01 11y ago

I read the whole letter and loved the tone of it! It jumps at you right away that: (1) Here's a guy who really cares about his business, its future, his employees. (2) He talks candidly about the reasons for closing up: his declining health, sales volumes, even including awkward sentences like "So chalk is more environmentally friendly, I think." I am now a fan of Hagoromo. It was rather refreshing at a time when I can't stand reading more than a paragraph of a typical press release of a BigCo written by lawyers or PR specialists. Unlike this essay, those are intended to obfuscate, not to inform.

etep 11y ago
Not awkward, the sentence you call out. Beautiful, rather, and whether it is an artifact of translation or not, no matter. You didn't mean awkward in a pejorative sense; this is just an affirmation.
- kvcc01 11y ago
  Of course! What makes this letter effective and relatable are all those little things that wouldn't have passed the ordinary editorial, legal, or PR filters, if it were written by a typical corporate CEO. If I was teaching at business school, I'd have my students read this as a model of effective stakeholder communications. I think Mr. Watanabe is a shokunin (you know, in the Jiro Ono sense) of the chalk business.
wpietri 11y ago
Yes. There's none of this maximize-shareholder-value, church-of-the-mba religion that pervades Western business culture right now. He wanted to serve people sustainably. He did it for decades, and when that became untenable, he responsibly searched for a way to minimize the waste and harm caused by him exiting the business. I especially love that he treats his machines almost as people, people intrinsically valuable to him. Whereas here, we often treat our people as machines, machines that are eternally disposable.

mathattack 11y ago

Two passages stood out. At first, we considered selling the whole company, enabling the Hagoromo brand to survive and helping overall chalk sales. But we could not find the right deal for the company. I'm sad that I have been forced to close down my company. But I am pleased I have been able to contribute to education by providing high-quality chalk over the last 50 years. Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. Very touching note.

GuiA 11y ago
> Commendable passion to a bigger cause, but sometimes that isn't enough. How is it "not enough"? He ran a successful business that brought joy and utility to millions for 50 years. Sure, it ends on a sad note - but such is life. That is success if I ever saw it.

astaroth360 11y ago

Chalk makes me feel weird when I use it. Tactically it just rubs me the wrong way and gives me the same chills I get from fingernails on a chalkboard. Just thinking about it bothers me :\ However, it is nice to read about people who have a passion for what they do, and this man seems to have passion in spades.

paxtonab 11y ago
This chalk actually has a special coating that prevents that from happening. This post from a while ago explains why "Mathematicians Are Hoarding a Type of Japanese Chalk" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723202

shepardrtc 11y ago

From the article it looks like the buyer in South Korea will learn how to continue on with the chalk. I suspect we will see it on the market again.

pvaldes 11y ago

I'm sorry for this man having so many health problems. But I can understand otherwise how to make chalk in the pacific japanese coast burning tons and tons of japanese oyster shells could be less profitable and much more dangerous since 2011. I wish him well.