This year is the 52nd since The Mainichi Newspapers’ head office moved from Yurakucho to the Palaceside Building at Hitotsubashi. The film “A Newspaper Cannot Be Stopped,” recording the move half a century ago, is on Nippon Express’s official YouTube channel (posted July 19, 2017). The photo above shows moving trucks (circled in red) heading for the nearly finished Palaceside Building half a century ago.
Nippon Express is digitizing and releasing logistics documentaries it once planned and produced; this is one. Under a careful plan, a large-scale transfer completed in a short time without stopping the newspaper is depicted in detail. The film was commissioned from Mainichi Film Productions.
The move was September 22–23, 1966, the Autumnal Equinox holiday when the paper was not published. The transfer came a little before the building’s official opening on October 1.
The social-affairs page of the Mainichi morning edition of the 23rd, which also appears in the film, ran a story titled “Farewell, Yurakucho: Nippon Express’s ‘largest-ever’ operation” (photo at right). According to the article and the film, it was 1,3
87 trucks, more than 7,500 worker-days, 3,000 tons of large machinery, some 23,000 small moving containers and about 14,000 cardboard boxes — “for a single-building move, truly the largest ever.” Nippon Express set up a “countermeasures HQ” six months earlier (photo at left above), kept reviewing the work, and — though some new presses were installed at the Palaceside plant — hauled many other machines from the old building (photo at left center) (Yurakucho Station platforms in the background) into the Palaceside Building (photo at left below). The production side as well as editorial was extremely hard; the article quotes a staff member thinking “how to succeed at the move without disrupting newspaper production.”
Newspaper-making then was not, as now, sending copy by wire, freely editing on a computer screen and laying
out pages. Lead type was set, and corrections were a craft of picking characters one by one with tweezers. The film shows packing that type (said to weigh tens of tons in all) into boxes in order (photo at right above) and placing it on shelves at the new building without mixing the order (photo at right below), and ends with the paper being printed at the new plant (photo at the end).
Running time 25 minutes. The black-and-white images vividly convey a newspaper in the type era and the faces of those who worked and moved. Watch on YouTube: “www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAVcm819bko ”.
