And old rusted sign above a storefront-cum-house on the small street that serves as my thoroughfare to and from the train station. I pass by this sign everyday (conservative calculations would indicate I have passed it around 700 times up to now) yet until today I paid it no mind. One gets used to such ugliness in Japan, one gets numb to it, until one decides to take a picture. What struck me today was the rust, and the fact that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what masutakkusu was supposed to mean. (It’s rendered in katakana, which is usually reserved for foreign-imported words, so it was likely some bastardization of some English word, or so I thought.)
In the upper left it says “Hitachi Video”, and this provided enough with which to do an internet search. (The bottom characters spell out “Misasa Denka,” or Misasa Electronics, the name of the company for whom the sign is — was? — for.) Masutakkusu was the name of one of the original VCR models manufactured by Hitachi is the late 70’s in the VHS format, to compete with Sony’s BetaMax, which had been introduced in 1975. I’m not sure, but I believe the Masutakkusu line of VCR’s was produced until the late 80’s. I say this because according to the official site of the Tsutenkaku Tower in Osaka, one of the city’s symbols which has, almost since its construction in the early 1950’s (actually re-construction, the first tower having been burnt down in a fire in 1943), featured Hitachi neon branding on all its four sides, in 1979 was already displaying “Hitachi masutakkusu.” But sometime between 1988 and 1990, it disappeared, replaced by signs for other Hitachi products. (Various images of the tower and the neon signage that has adorned it, are available here.)
Unfortunately, the mysteries of Hitachi branding remain unsolved. Why masutakkusu, and what was it supposed to represent, I have no clue. takkusu would most likely be romanized as “tax,” so perhaps the name was a take-off on or nose-thumbing to Sony’s BetaMax. Something like “MassTax.” Hmmn, that way it conjures up something entirely different, no? But such are the vagaries of katakana transliteration that it’s entirely plausible.
(You can catch up on the long-forgotten early history of home video development by way of this nice piece.)
P.S. I didn’t intentionally boost the orange hue of the photo via software. It’s that bright in real life.
