The rallying cry was "The Switzerland of the Orient!" When Sankyo began production in 1946, the year after the end of World War II, its goal was to make Japan world famous for music boxes. The melody it chose for its first production was the Japanese children's song, Chocho (Butterflies).

At the time, all music boxes were made by hand, but before long, Sankyo became the first company in the world to mass-produce them. Around 1990, when its business peaked, it enjoyed 90% of the world market for music boxes. Today, it is responsible for almost 50% of global production.

Yamada Akihiro from Sankyo's public relations department told me, "The music box was invented in Switzerland in the 19th century. After that, the pins that pluck the tongues were always inserted by hand. But then we developed a mechanical system that strikes from the underside. This made it possible to mass-produce music boxes and sell them cheaper. They used to be beyond the reach of the general population, but not any more."

Sankyo introduced other innovations as well. For example, the company offers a spring mechanism that keeps playing the music at the proper speed until it stops completely, and even owns the rights to edit some songs to suit the music box. Sankyo has also used its expertise as a maker of music boxes to manufacture industrial robots. And the company now sells music box melodies to mobile phone customers who use them in phones to indicate an incoming call. This latest development has created considerable interest.

About half of the world's photo processing machines are made by one company, Noritsu Koki. The machines use what the company calls the Quick Service System (QSS). The first machines were sold in 1979, and greatly reduced photofinishing time.

Azuma Yoshifumi of the company's R&D headquarters says, "In the old days, a photo shop would send your film to a large developing lab, so you couldn't see your pictures for three or four days. With the advent of QSS, you can see them in almost no time at all."