Born in April 1866 in Kamisue, Komakimura, Higashikasugai-gun, Aichi Prefecture (Kamisue-cho, Komaki City), Ochiai went to Nagoya City in the early Meiji period to work for a Kazari shop. In 1905, he invented the present Kazari safety pin and was granted a patent for the utility model. With the outbreak of World War I, imports of gold solution (called mizu-kin at the time, which was all imported) used for overglaze painting on export ceramics from Nagoya, Seto, and Tono areas were cut off, and for a time, pure gold was imported from Japan to replace the quantity of gold solution. Hyonosuke, seeing the predicament of the exporting ceramics industry, decided to produce gold solution domestically. At the time, many chemists in Japan were working on prototypes and research, but they all failed and were never completed. Hyonosuke established the Ochiai Scientific Research Institute with the cooperation of German prisoners of war Max, Kuchen, and Senck Bayer, whom he had hired to teach plating technology, and in 1918 (Taisho 7), he began full-scale research on gold solution production. In 1921, he was deported as a prisoner of war, but he continued his painstaking research, and at the end of the Taisho era, he reorganized and renamed the Ochiai Scientific Research Institute as the Japan-Germany Chemical Industry Company. The first and second products were completed, but the industry, which had been accustomed to American gold solutions, did not accept them, and the company’s debts only increased. In 1924, Dechauer came to Japan to participate in the production of lusters, and for the first time, domestic gold solution and lusters began to be recognized in the industry. In 1932, he died at his home in Nagoya at the age of sixty-five. (“Fifty Years of Gold Liquid”)
