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

Editor'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. Context has been added for readers unfamiliar with Japan's electronics scene.

Akihabara, Tokyo's famous "Electric Town," is overflowing with foreign tourists these days, drawn by anime shops, maid cafes, and duty-free electronics megastores. But there is one storefront most of them walk past without a glance: Akizuki Denshi Tsusho. It may be one of those pockets of Japan that foreign visitors never see. Step inside and the narrow aisles are packed — not with tourists, but with Japanese customers hunting for electronic parts. It is a scene that has repeated itself here for more than 50 years.

For readers outside Japan, imagine something between Adafruit, SparkFun, and a discount surplus warehouse. If you start tinkering with electronics in Japan, Akizuki's website is the one you will open before any other. Generations of Japanese engineers, students, and hobbyists have treated it as the default source for parts, the way you might default to Digi-Key or Mouser.

But Akizuki is a strange company by any standard. Every part on its shelves is hand-picked by staff who actually test what they sell. Everything is purchased outright, in cash, up front. Microcontroller boards, sensor modules, and breakout boards are manufactured in the company's own assembly plant. Trace any of these habits back to their origin and you arrive at one person: Akio Tsujimoto, the unconventional founder whose personal philosophy still drives the company.

We spoke with Mr. Hakamada, the sales director who has worked at Tsujimoto's side for nearly 20 years.

A "Greengrocer of Electronic Parts" Run by Professional Curators

First, the numbers. 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.

The 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.

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?

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 Existed

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.

Hakamada 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 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. Akizuki's relationship with Microchip now spans 30 to 40 years, and in Japan the store is so closely identified with the chip that people say "Akizuki means PIC."

Out of this came one of Akizuki's signature moves: an original programmer. At a time when official PIC programmers cost tens of thousands of yen — hundreds of dollars — Akizuki released its own "AKI-PIC Programmer" for 4,000 to 5,000 yen, roughly $25 to $30. Cumulative sales reportedly run into the hundreds of thousands of units. The price was possible because Akizuki designed and built it in-house. Microchip eventually launched its own low-cost programmer, the PICkit, which today costs over 10,000 yen (about $65) after price hikes and currency shifts. Akizuki stuck with its own design for years but, as demand changed, began carrying the official PICkit as well — and according to Hakamada, has sold more PICkits than the official distribution channel. Microchip's marketing office in Hong Kong is aware of the numbers, he says. In sales of programmers and development tools, Akizuki remains far and away the leader in Japan — which is also a measure of just how many engineers and development sites the country has. One microcontroller pushed a specialty-parts store into becoming a microcontroller store.

That said, microcontroller boards themselves were nothing new to Akizuki. For over 30 years, the company had built original boards around microcontrollers from Hitachi — later Renesas Electronics, the Japanese chipmaker. But those were boards tailored to specific applications, never marketed as a standard platform for everyone to adopt. That is precisely where Arduino, which later conquered the world, differed.

"Let Us Build It": The Road to an In-House Assembly Plant

Akizuki watched Arduino's arrival calmly. Early Arduinos carried Atmel's 8-bit ATmega168 and similar chips — as hardware, not so different from the boards Akizuki had been building for years. What was different was the packaging: the software libraries, the ecosystem, the way it was sold. Even so, Akizuki's instinct pointed where it always points: "we want to build it ourselves."

That instinct kept turning into action. When Arduino took off, Akizuki contacted Arduino's headquarters and asked to manufacture boards under license. But Arduino was newly founded, its organization still forming, and the licensing talks never came together.

When Raspberry Pi appeared, Akizuki approached the Foundation too, asking to be allowed to produce the boards. Raspberry Pi, however, was built from day one for global distribution, with manufacturing entrusted to overseas partners. That did not fit Akizuki's policy of producing and selling strictly within Japan, Hakamada explains. Akizuki finally signed on as an official Raspberry Pi reseller after the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, once the volume of genuine boards it was moving earned recognition.

If you cannot build someone else's product, build the capacity yourself. That thinking led to the in-house assembly plant. The trigger was a change in the parts landscape: through-hole and DIP packages — the kind you can hand-solder — were disappearing as chipmakers converged on surface-mount packages. Interesting parts kept appearing, but if everything came in flat SMD packages, a hobbyist parts store couldn't touch them. So Tsujimoto chose to mount surface-mount parts onto breakout boards that anyone could hand-solder, and sell them in that accessible form.

At first Akizuki outsourced the assembly. But with a huge number of product lines and tiny lot sizes per item, unit costs would not come down. The only answer was to bring it in-house. Since its founding, Akizuki's model has been to take on inventory risk itself, buying in bulk so that even a customer ordering a single piece pays a low price. Breakout boards and modules are an extension of that: planned, stocked, assembled, and retailed entirely within the company. This vertical integration — from manufacturing to the sales counter — is a strength no other parts store in Japan has.

Here too, Tsujimoto moved first and asked questions later. He ordered a pick-and-place machine without consulting anyone. It arrived — and sat idle for six months, because he had not thought about where to put it. The first line was assembled behind the Yashio branch store, then moved to a prefab hut in front of the mail-order center, then to a plot next to the company dormitory. (Yashio and Kawaguchi are suburbs in Saitama Prefecture, just north of Tokyo.)

"It's an enormous investment, and honestly pretty high-risk," Hakamada admits. But Tsujimoto rarely dwells on the numbers; he moves on the assumption that things will work out. Cleaning up afterward and making it viable — that falls to Hakamada and the president. The founder gets the idea; the people around him give it shape. Akizuki's operations have always run in that order. Nor is there any ambition to scale the factory up. Tsujimoto is only comfortable with what he can personally keep an eye on. The company's facilities sit in Kawaguchi and Yashio for the same reason: he will only expand within easy driving distance. Agility over scale.

"Inventory Is 100% Profit Margin"

What lets Akizuki make investments of this size in cash is a lifetime of debt-free management. Purchases are almost all prepaid; machines are paid in full. Never borrowing is one of Tsujimoto's articles of faith — about the only thing the company rents is the Akihabara store building. The mail-order center in Yashio covers roughly 5,000 square meters (about 53,000 square feet) and the logistics center in Kawaguchi about 3,300 square meters (36,000 square feet), both company-owned. Profits from sales buy parts; those profits buy land; that land gets buildings. Everything cycles through reinvestment.

Tsujimoto's logic on inventory is characteristically his own. Sitting on staggering quantities of stock, he insists inventory carries a 100% profit margin: the purchasing was already paid for out of profits earned, so even unsold stock poses no risk. It is the greengrocer's gamble — you never know if what you bought will sell until you open the crate. There have been plenty of misses, but because he buys within the limits of profits already banked, no miss can wound the company.

The customer-facing policies are equally his. Even today, many Akizuki products carry per-customer quantity limits, and the store refuses reservations for production-volume orders. The old shop famously had a sign on the wall: "No hoarding." The point is to never let a popular part sell out — because a circuit cannot be built if even one part is missing, and Tsujimoto refuses to send a customer home empty-handed. Shipping follows the same logic: the company takes no profit on it. The rate is flat nationwide, with the surplus collected from the Tokyo area offsetting losses on remote deliveries.

This customers-first posture proved itself in a crisis. When Japan declared its first COVID-19 state of emergency in 2020, Tsujimoto gave the order to hold two years of inventory. "Our baseline is six months of stock. Two years meant quadrupling our orders," Hakamada recalls. With factories stopped and customers' production lines frozen, it was a heavy call. Processing those orders fell to Hakamada and the president — just the two of them, managing more than 500 suppliers in Japan and abroad. The result: from 2021 into 2022, Akizuki posted record sales while competitors scrambled through the global parts shortage. Even now, amid continuing price hikes, the company's stance is to lock in one to two years of inventory at pre-hike prices from any manufacturer willing to sell it, and keep selling at the old price until that stock runs out.

Pick Up a Soldering Iron

The company's independence, too, traces back to the founder's personality. Tsujimoto keeps to himself and never joined the informal networks of neighboring parts dealers.

"He opened in Akihabara simply because that's where customers looking for parts gather," Hakamada says. "But keeping that distance may be exactly what protected the store." Because Akizuki stayed outside the circle, it held onto its founding concept even during Japan's bubble economy of the late 1980s, when surrounding parts shops transformed one after another into trading companies.

Tsujimoto handed the presidency to his eldest son Nobuaki in 2012 and stepped back to the chairman's role. The temperament of the place, though, has not changed. Product curation is now the whole staff's job: employees read manufacturers' press releases faster than the trading companies do, request samples of anything interesting, evaluate them, and turn them into modules. "Our employees are just a bunch of parts geeks," Hakamada laughs. A single remark from a floor clerk — "isn't this interesting?" — is enough to set things in motion. Sometimes manufacturers are startled to learn afterward what Akizuki has built from their chips. Some products, like Sony's IoT board "Spresense," started as a thin sales channel and grew into staples through three, five years of persistent stocking. A microcontroller does not take root in the market unless you keep selling it for a long time — that is Akizuki's rule of thumb.

Retired or not, the chairman's fire has not cooled. Weekends, early mornings — whenever a part catches his interest, the phone or the fax machine rings at Hakamada's desk. "Found something — doesn't this look interesting?" Overseas sourcing has always been Tsujimoto's exclusive turf. Unable to read English or Chinese, he judges parts by the part number and the board itself, decides they look interesting, and buys. "I've never seen anyone like him," Hakamada says. The founder's curiosity and passion still power the company.

At the same time, Akizuki keeps an eye on the ecosystem around it. The store long ago stopped needing advertising. Yet it continues to sponsor specialty magazines and events — to keep the culture of hobby electronics itself alive.

Finally, we asked for a message to the young generation just getting started. The answer was exactly what you would expect from a parts store.

"Touch a soldering iron as much as you possibly can," Hakamada says. In an era when software can simulate almost everything, hardware is still what makes systems run. So touch it, fail at it, learn from it. Keeping the shelves stocked with approachable parts that make people think "this is interesting" — that, he says, is what every employee at Akizuki wants.

The instincts of one founder who laid out junk parts in a Setagaya garage are, more than half a century later, still choosing parts for the people who make things.

Original article (Japanese): 「オープンソース」以前から回路図を公開 — — 眠らない情熱に彩られた秋月電子通商の55年

Interview and text by Gakuto Ochi, Editor-in-Chief, FabScene

Akizuki Denshi Tsusho official website: https://akizukidenshi.com/