Walk into a Japanese department store on a wet day and you will find a stand at the door. Push your umbrella in, pull it out, and it comes wrapped in a plastic bag. The stand is called Kasapon. Stores use it so wet floors do not get slippery, as the maker says, and it nearly never got made.

A craftsman after hours

Murakami Toshiyuki runs Muraharu Seisakusho, a sheet-metal shop in Sagamihara, Kanagawa. His father Haruji founded it in 1965 (Sagami Keizai Shimbun). A consulting column calls Toshiyuki a press craftsman who kept working on metal late into the night, after the day's orders were done.

The idea, one account says, came in 1991 at a hospital door on a rainy day, where an old woman could not get her umbrella into the hanging plastic bag. Another account (Weekly ASCII) tells it as watching how people pushed umbrellas into those hanging bags, without the old woman. Both agree he began building a machine.

The wall

The first model had a foot pedal that opened the bag. Niikura Scales says that pedal model struggled. A sales-training site says Murakami took his prototype to dealer after dealer and none would trade with him.

Then a bag problem: static electricity kept the mouth shut. Murakami says he picked up a shoehorn one day and saw the answer, a curved guide that holds the bag open and steers the umbrella tip in.

A prototype in a corner

A salesman at Niikura Scales, a scale dealer in Kanda, Tokyo, took the prototype back to the office. He showed no interest, and it was left in a corner of a warehouse. Then the company's president, Niikura Motonari, spotted it. A Tokyo chamber of commerce profile quotes him: "Interesting. This will sell."

He bought the idea, asked for improvements, and thought up the name Kasapon. Then he did what most makers hate. He gave the machines away to department stores and restaurants, Weekly ASCII and a sales-training site both say, so people could try one.

The rest

Niikura Scales has sold Kasapon since 1993. Today it lists Takashimaya, Mitsukoshi Isetan and other department stores among its customers. Years later, Murakami told a local newspaper that without Kasapon his firm would have gone under in the 2008 financial crisis.

See it yourself

  • The door of a department store. On a wet day, find the steel stand by the entrance and try it.
  • The bag. It has a band near the top so it does not slip off the umbrella, a detail the company patented.

Hear it on the tour

Sources

Photo credits