Bandai
Japanese toy making and video game company
Bandai Co., Ltd. is a Japanese multinational toy manufacturer and distributor headquartered in Taitō, Tokyo, including many international branches around the world. Since 2005, Bandai is the toy production division of Bandai Namco Holdings, which, in 2017, was the world's second largest toy company measured by total revenue. Between 1981 and 2001, Bandai was a manufacturer of video game consoles.
Bandai was founded by World War II veteran Naoharu Yamashina as Bandai-Ya on July 5, 1950, as the corporate spin-off of a textile wholesaler. The company began as a distributor of metallic toys and rubber swimming rings, before moving to metal cars and aircraft models. It was renamed Bandai Co., Ltd. in 1961 and achieved considerable success with its action figures based on the anime Astro Boy.
History
Origins and success with toys (1947–1968)
In 1947, Naoharu Yamashina began working for a Kanazawa-based textile wholesaler. The eldest son to a rice retailer, Yamashina had studied business in high school and was enlisted in World War II, where an impact from a grenade shrapnel blinded him in his right eye.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bandai” as japanese toy making and video game company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as japanese toy making and video game company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q507269. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2017, 1981 and 2001.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bandai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.