Haruchika Dye (春近染色工業), Fukui textile dyer, bankrupt in 2025

What happened

Why it happened

• An invisible link in the chain: a dyer has no brand and no retail presence — it lives on the orders of mills that were free to move abroad.
• The customers left with the factories: as Japan's textile mills offshored production, the fabric that stayed behind no longer needed Haruchika's vats.
• Chronic losses became the business model: ¥680M of sales in 1995 gave way to decades of decline, and no new product replaced the lost volume.

Aftermath

Haruchika Dye stopped business on 25 November 2025 and filed for self-bankruptcy with the Fukui District Court, with total liabilities of about ¥270 million. The Sakai City, Fukui Prefecture company, founded in 1967, provided textile dyeing and processing mainly for textile manufacturers, with sales of about ¥680 million in the fiscal year ending March 1995. As clients shifted production overseas, orders declined and losses became chronic, until cash flow made continuation impossible.