Sanseido

The company was founded in 1881 by Tadakazu Kamei, a member of the old Hatamoto family, as the secondhand bookshop Sanseidō Bookstore Ltd.. It entered the publishing business in 1884.

From the outset, the company focused its business on academic fields, publishing dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and for a period, maps, as well as selling educational materials. While its rival in the field of dictionary publishing at the time, Fuzanbō, focused on large, specialist-oriented dictionaries, Sanseidō concentrated on smaller but more practical dictionaries. For this purpose, the company opened its own printing plant in 1889.

On October 18, 1912, two months after the publication of Nihon Hyakka Daijiten's sixth edition, the company went bankrupt. This came as a surprise to the company's employees and general public considering the prevalence of the company's dictionaries across the country. In 1915, at the suggestion of Tadakazu's son, Torao, who was a university student at the time and had a background in economics and accounting, the publishing business and bookstore would be separated. He would later go on to join the company after graduation, later becoming president in July 1930.

In the late 1970s, the company's publishing business was in a slump, and soon the company went bankrupt before reviving again in 1881 with the printing division spinning off as SANSEIDO Printing Co., Ltd..