Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word: 55 Years of Akizuki Denshi, Japan’s…

14 min read6 days ago--Press enter or click to view image in full sizeThe Akihabara institution that every Japanese maker knows — run on cash, instinct, and one founder’s restless curiosityEditor’s note: This is an English translation of an interview originally published on FabScene, a Japanese web media outlet covering hardware, digital fabrication, and maker culture.

Akizuki’s annual revenue is roughly 3 billion yen (about $19 million). It employs around 160 people, of whom about 40 are full-time staff. The online store processes roughly 1,200 orders a day, while about 500 customers walk into the Akihabara storefront daily. The company’s self-operated e-commerce site draws around 200,000 visits a day.Online sales outweigh the physical store by roughly nine to one. The customer base is almost entirely corporate — individuals account for less than 5% — yet the repeat-customer rate exceeds 85%.Despite this scale, Akizuki has no interest in looking big. Tsujimoto and Hakamada describe the store as a “greengrocer of electronic parts” or a “select shop” — the Japanese retail term for a boutique whose entire value lies in the owner’s taste.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeThe Akihabara store interior around 2026The staff read datasheets, test parts themselves, and stock only what passes. When manufacturers ask Akizuki to carry a product, the answer is not automatically yes. Parts are never taken on consignment; everything is bought outright, in full, before it reaches the shelf. That is why manufacturer names barely appear on the site’s top page. Tsujimoto has always disliked exclusive arrangements or irregular contracts with any single maker. The house style is to display competing manufacturers’ parts side by side and let customers choose.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeTo fit as many products as possible into the limited floor space, shelves are fitted with internal dividers so each slot can stock multiple items.Flip that around, and the inventory is a portrait of the founder’s own taste. Whatever caught his eye, he wanted in customers’ hands as fast as possible. The semiconductors on offer shifted with the times — from application-specific ICs to power and peripheral circuits, then microcontrollers, then sensors — but one principle never moved: stock what is interesting.

Akizuki’s shelves are a map of one man’s curiosity.Flower Bulbs or Electronic Parts?Press enter or click to view image in full sizeAkio Tsujimoto, founder and current chairman of Akizuki Denshi Tsusho. (Taken in June 2026, photo courtesy of Akizuki Denshi Tsusho)Here is the part of the founding story that almost went another way, as Tsujimoto has told it to Hakamada over the years. Born in 1949, Tsujimoto started trading in the 1960s while still a student at the high school attached to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, running a mail-order business called Shinetsu Denki Shokai out of his family home in Setagaya, a residential ward of Tokyo.

He placed ads in magazines from CQ Publishing — the Japanese publisher whose ham-radio and electronics titles were required reading for hobbyists — and sold surplus and junk parts from the house on weekends. He opened his Akihabara storefront in November 1970 — by the company’s own account, on the very day the novelist Yukio Mishima died in his infamous public suicide, a date every Japanese person of that generation remembers.When he first went into business, Tsujimoto reportedly agonized over whether to sell plants — seeds and bulbs — or electronic parts. “The chairman loves plants,” Hakamada says. That side of him never went away.

About a decade ago, Tsujimoto phoned a farm in Kyushu, in southern Japan, that grew bulbs of red spider lilies — a flower associated with autumn in Japan — and bought their entire year’s production. He had heard the elderly couple running the farm say the flowers no longer sold and they were thinking of quitting, and he found that too sad to accept. Then, telling no one, he quietly listed the bulbs on Akizuki’s website at the exact hour new products go live. Hakamada learned about it mid-dinner from someone at another company. Regulars still talk about the “Akizuki bulbs” incident.What tipped the scales toward electronics was his father’s connections. The elder Tsujimoto worked in the newspaper world, and through that network came a channel for surplus electrical equipment being sold off. The son bought it up and started selling parts. In the beginning it really was just reselling junk, Hakamada says he has been told — parts laid out in the garage of the family home in Setagaya on weekends. That garage is where Akizuki begins.Open Source Before the Term ExistedPress enter or click to view image in full sizeThe manual for the “High-Output Adjustable Regulated Power Supply Kit,” written in 1993.One practice from the founding era, more than any other, made Akizuki what it is: publishing complete schematics for its kits. And the company was doing it years before anyone coined the phrase “open source.”The reasoning is pure Tsujimoto.

“If you disclose all the information, customers can fix mistakes themselves.” He has described it, half-jokingly, as a way of dodging responsibility: sell a black box and every defect is your problem, but lay the schematic and assembly drawings bare, and customers will debug your product for you. So Akizuki practiced an open-source ethos before the concept had a name. For a time, the company even burned its freely published schematic collections onto CD-ROMs and sold them for about 300 yen (around $2) to customers who wanted a copy.In the paper era, Akizuki was also a small print shop. The second floor of the store housed as many as six Risograph machines — the high-speed stencil duplicators made by Japan’s Riso Kagaku, familiar to Americans mostly through the risograph art-print revival. With no internet, a part was useless without a datasheet in the bag. Even a pack of ten capacitors selling for 100 yen — about 65 cents — came with a one-page datasheet summary, front and back, that Tsujimoto compiled, photocopied, and stuffed into bags himself. He handled that enormous workload almost entirely alone.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeHakamada witnessed this period firsthand, not secondhand. Before joining Akizuki, he was a semiconductor-industry salesman who called on the store. Tsujimoto barely sat down from morning to night. With three mobile phones hanging from his neck, he took calls with one hand, ran the duplicators, and handled negotiations standing up. Sales reps from suppliers queued five or six deep on the staircase between the first and second floors, waiting an hour or two just to talk. “I honestly wondered what on earth he was doing,” Hakamada says with a laugh.That chaos is also how the two grew close. Squeezed between customers and sales reps, Tsujimoto would escape to a nearby coffee shop to catch his breath, and Hakamada went along.

On Mondays and Thursdays, the store’s closed days, he was invited to Tsujimoto’s home for meetings; the current company president, then a university student, sometimes picked him up at the station by car. After about two years of this, Hakamada finally accepted Tsujimoto’s repeated invitation — “come work for us” — and left his job at a semiconductor trading company.The Chip That Turned a Parts Store Into a Microcontroller StorePress enter or click to view image in full sizeOn the store’s second floor, background music and announcements play through demo units of the speaker kits on sale — with narration voiced by an employee.

The build-it-ourselves philosophy is scattered throughout the store.A major turning point in Akizuki’s history was the shift from application-specific ICs to microcontrollers. Dedicated chips for clocks, radios, and the like were being discontinued one after another, and without them the company could not build kits. Tsujimoto’s answer was to program general-purpose microcontrollers to replicate what the discontinued chips did. The chip that won the starring role was Microchip Technology’s PIC — the 8-bit microcontroller family that, before Arduino, was many hobbyists’ first programmable chip worldwide.