Tsutomu Kanai
Chairman
The Odaira Memorial Hitachi Education Foundation is named after Namihei Odaira, the founder of Hitachi. It was established in 1971, as the Odaira Memorial Foundation, to promote education. The foundation’s activities include working closely with communities to promote local culture, and the promotion of family education aimed at enhancing the sound development of children.
Indeed, our children are our treasure, and the creators of tomorrow’s world. As adults, it is our duty to ensure that children have every opportunity to grow up sound and strong, both in mind and body. This process starts in the home, which is, for children, the most basic, fundamental place. But the tremendous social and cultural changes taking place in today’s world are eroding the educational position of the family and undermining the sound development of our children.
The Odaira Memorial Hitachi Education Foundation established a Hitachi Family Education Center (in the city of Hitachi in Ibaraki Prefecture) and a Hitachi Family Education Research Institute (in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture) to help parents make the right decisions about family education, and to help define which direction education should take. There are classes for preschoolers and mothers, with discussions of various topics to find what is needed to ensure each child’s individual development and to build good character.
In the 21st century, the Odaira Memorial Hitachi Education Foundation will continue to expand and intensify its activities to enhance education in the years ahead.
The Hitachi Group is working to enrich people’s lives and to make the world a better place, as symbolized by our corporate motto, "Inspire the Next." The activities of the Odaira Memorial Hitachi Education Foundation are a part of these broad-based endeavors of the Hitachi Group.
Namihei Odaira
Namihei Odaira
Namihei Odaira, the founder of Hitachi and its first president, was born in 1874. In 1900, he graduated from the electrical engineering faculty of the Imperial University of Tokyo. In 1906, he entered Hitachi Kozan, a mining company, where he worked as manager of the company’s electrical machinery repair shop. In 1910, Odaira left Hitachi Kozan and founded Hitachi, Ltd. as an electrical machinery repair shop in Miyatashibauchi, in the village of Hitachi. This marked the start of his lifelong focus on building electrical machinery using original Japanese technology.
Namihei Odaira made many contributions to the educational, welfare and leisure activities of the region, including the development of Hitachi’s industrial water resources, and the founding of a number of organizations and institutions, among which were a fire-fighting service, the Hitachi Hospital, a school for apprentices, an industrial high school that became the present-day engineering faculty of Ibaraki University, and the Hitachi Golf Club (Omika Golf Course).
