Hi Brian,
I hearn that Sanshin used Sunshine as a brand name because they thought Sanshin was too difficult for non-Japanese to pronounce, and it was kind of close to Sunshine in English, which had nice connotations, so why not? I don't know when they switched product labelling from Sunshine to Sanshin internally, but I have Sunshine-branded ProAm high-flange road hubs from the late 70s. Fuji started calling out the hubs as Sunshine in '75 catalogs, all the way through '84. They changed the catalog callouts to Sanshin in '85.
I just found an '81 JBM catalog, which lists Araya (rims), Kyokuto (KKT-pedals), Takagi (cranks), Tange (frame tubing/lugs/forks) and Shimano (most everything, including mid/high-end pedals and cranks). Suzue wasn't mentioned anywhere. I can't find any JEX catalogs.
So I dunno. I can tell you that in '89 and '90 I cycled past Suzue's factory twice each weekday, and it seemed like every box staged for shipment and every truck making pickups I ever saw there were labelled Shimano. When I asked SunTour co-workers why this was so, the answer was that Suzue was effectively a subsidiary of Shimano, that Suzue had almost stopped producing Suzue-branded product, and it had been that way for a long time.
And any SunTour hub product that wasn't handled in-house came from Sanshin. When important OE customers came to SunTour for product presentations, Sanshin's president Mamoru Kawai would attend to handle hub-related questions. Suzue and Sanshin were definitely seperate companies, Suzue was firmly in Shimano's orbit and Sanshin was in SunTour's.
It's not impossible that the situation was reversed, or different, in the late 70s when Dura-Ace was being created. Given the generally tightly-knit corporate world in Japan in those days, it seems unlikely---but stranger things have happened, and you have some physical evidence that strongly suggests it was so.
If I bump into somebody who can clear it up I'll ask.
Cheers,
Paul Brodek Hillsdale, NJ
On Sun, 11 Aug 2002 10:22:50 -0700, "brian blum" <bbspokes@lycos.com> wrote:
[snipped]
>I always thought that these were all the same company. When and why did Sanshin use Sunshine as a label? I have Sunshine Junko Skyroads which are identicle in everyway to first Generation Dura Ace hubs, except the stamped name, so if in fact Suzue is a separate company I think Sanshin was Shimanos partner.
Paul C. Brodek
Hillsdale, N.J. U.S.A.
E-mail: pcb@skyweb.net