Satake Brand Guidelines: The 1896 Hiroshima Rice-Mill Maker Behind the Pearlmaster

A rice mill in Saijo, and a war economy.

Satake is the Japanese maker of rice-milling, grain-processing and optical-sorting machinery based in Higashihiroshima, in Hiroshima Prefecture. Its story begins in 1896, when Riichi Satake built what the company and Japanese Wikipedia both describe as Japan’s first power-driven rice-milling machine. Japanese Wikipedia says he came from a farming family in Saijo, now part of Higashihiroshima, and had worked as a railway construction engineer before turning to rice milling. The agricultural writer Nishio Toshihiko, in a 2004 article for Nōgyō Kyōsai Shimbun republished by Japan’s agricultural technology promotion association JATAFF, explained that the early machine mechanised the foot-powered pounding mortars then used on farms.

The company says that in 1908 it developed a vertical grinding mill that became a driving force behind ginjo sake, the highly polished premium style, and Japanese Wikipedia credits Satake, alongside Saijo’s brewers, with a lasting part in the development of Japanese sake. The business was incorporated as a joint-stock company in December 1939.

The company’s growth in the 1930s was tied to the military. In 1930 Riichi Satake and his son Toshihiko developed a mill for germ-retaining rice; JATAFF’s article places it at the time the military began to favour germ rice, and Japanese Wikipedia, citing JATAFF and the company’s own magazine, says the Imperial Japanese Army adopted it on release for its Ujina provisions depot in Hiroshima. Its first export, in 1932, went to rice mills built by the Kwantung Army in Manchukuo, at Mukden, Harbin and Mudanjiang, and Satake mills were supplied to army provisions depots until the end of the war, the same article says. JATAFF notes that rice-milling plants were built overseas as the war expanded. In 1942, at the government’s request, Toshihiko Satake surveyed rice mills in what are now Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. He became president in 1943, two years before Japan’s defeat; in 1944 Riichi Satake received the Medal with Blue Ribbon, which the company calls the first such award in its sector.

The Pearlmaster and the G mark.

After the war Toshihiko Satake’s mills made the company’s name. The Pearlmaster of 1955, the company says, was adopted by practically every rice mill in Japan and was the first rice-milling machine exported from post-war Japan. In 1957 the Pearlmaster and the farm-scale One-pass mill received a Good Design Award — the “G mark” — from Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which the company describes as the first for its sector. It remains the brand’s clearest design credential.

The Compass rice-milling system followed; the company dates it to 1962, while JATAFF’s 2004 article gives 1955. The company says Compass was supplied to all 30 model rice mills designated by the agriculture ministry in 1963, and in 1964 Satake built Japan’s first three country elevators, government model plants for drying and storing grain. The Tempering Dryer of 1966 and the Rice Master husker of 1974, with an oscillating paddy separator, extended the range from the mill to the farm; in 1986 came a rice taste analyser, which the company calls the world’s first.

Today the company groups its work into rice, flour, food, environmental and industrial-machinery sectors, with products from grain dryers and huskers to optical sorters, wheat-milling plants and rice-cooking lines. Japanese Wikipedia lists production at its Saijo works and at group companies in Higashihiroshima and in Kitakami, Iwate. Since 1995 it has also sold food under its own name, starting with the instant Magic Rice, and its Japanese history records two new business brands, SAXES for large-scale growers in 2018 and REACH for overseas markets in 2019.

Grain storage and handling.

Grain storage and handling is a trade whose products are buildings as much as machines. Its makers sell corrugated steel bins that stand in rows on prairie farms, hopper tanks for wet grain and load-out, tall bucket elevators and the towers and catwalks that link them, and dryers that run through the weeks of harvest. Further along the chain sit seed-cleaning plants, conveyors for fertiliser and pulse crops, and, in Asia, rice mills.

That shapes how the makers present themselves. Catalogue covers and websites lean on photographs of finished sites rather than single products: a cluster of galvanised bins against a wide sky, an elevator leg rising above a farmyard, a dryer tower lit up at dusk. Galvanised steel is the shared material, so a maker’s colour usually lives in its logo, its decals and its painted parts rather than in the structures themselves.

The business is also one of brands inside groups. Many of the names a farmer sees on an auger or a bin began as family workshops and were later bought by larger companies, which often keep the old name next to a group prefix. Ownership can change several times, through private-equity funds, listed companies and machinery groups, while the product names carry on.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — when and where it began, who owns it now, where it says its products are made and which ranges it is known for — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name that became a word for a mill.

Satake went abroad early. JATAFF wrote that its mills were already at work in Southeast Asian rice plants before the war and that it entered the United States in 1960. The company lists Satake USA in Houston from 1980; English Wikipedia says it bought the Houston sorting-machine maker ESM (Electronic Sorting Machines) in 1992. In 1991 it set up Satake UK through the acquisition of the flour-milling engineers Robinson/Simon, the company says, followed by a grain-process engineering centre in Manchester in 1994, a factory in Suzhou, China, in 1998, a Brazilian company in Porto Alegre in 1999 and Satake Europe in Manchester in 2010. Its president’s message says it supplies more than 150 countries.

Its first four presidents all bore the Satake name: Riichi, Toshihiko, Robert S. Satake and Toshiko Satake, according to the company’s history. It adopted its present Japanese name, Kabushiki-gaisha Satake, in 2001, and in 2021 Kazuhisa Matsumoto became president; the company’s English site now lists Kazuyuki Kihara as chairperson. Its head office remains in Saijo, Higashihiroshima, with a second head office in Tokyo, Japanese Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Satake shows how a family name can become the everyday word for a machine: JATAFF notes that in several countries a rice-milling plant is simply called a “Satake.” Compare Alvan Blanch, another founder’s name on crop-processing machinery, and Cimbria, the Danish grain and seed processing maker. For this guide we use a deep indigo, rice white and a vermilion with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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