National

National (ナショナル) was the Japanese trade name of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. - the company renamed to Panasonic Corporation on 1 October 2008, with its head office in Kadoma, Osaka. The corporation itself dates to 1918, when Konosuke Matsushita (松下幸之助, 1894-1989) opened a small workshop in the Fukushima ward of Osaka under the name Matsushita Electric Housewares Manufacturing Works; the firm took its kabushiki kaisha form in 1935. The National brand first appeared in 1927 on a line of bicycle lamps and went on to become Matsushita’s principal label inside Japan. From 1955 the parallel Panasonic name (a coinage from “pan” and “sonic”, “all-sound”) ran on exports outside Japan because the National name was already a registered US trademark held by another company. A separate hi-fi sub-brand, Technics, was added from 1965. With the corporate rename on 1 October 2008 the company became Panasonic Corporation, and by March 2010 the National brand had been retired from the Japanese domestic market as well.

National was not a specialist audio name but Matsushita’s general consumer brand - it carried small appliances, lighting, recording tape, portable radios and televisions in addition to audio gear. Within the audio range the National label took the mass-market end: portable recorders in the RQ cassette and RS reel-to-reel series, integrated home stereos and accessories. Flagship reel decks and audiophile hi-fi components ran under the parallel Technics name, but Showa-era catalogues set them out under a dual designation - for example “National RS-736U Technics” at ¥75,000 or “National RS-740U Technics” at ¥96,000, with National as the publishing brand and Technics as the line inside it. Through the 1970s the Panasonic name remained largely outside the Japanese home market, leaving National to cover the entire consumer range - from the smallest Mini Type cassette portables right up to the top Technics reel-to-reel decks.

Early-1970s National cassette portables were sorted by user segment: Mini (the compact RQ-212 at ¥19,500), Study (the RQ-227 and RQ-229), Family (the entry-level RQ-224), Music (FM/AM models like the RQ-237 at ¥24,800 and the RQ-449 at ¥32,800, the latter with a built-in digital clock) and Cassette Auto (the RQ-207 and RQ-208, which started playback automatically when the lid closed) - all built on an IC-based record and playback path and a mechanical auto-stop on tape end. The Time FM generation of January 1972 added FM/AM reception to the portables along with timer recording on an external clock (タイマー録音), Memory Rewind to a tape marker and a Sleep Switch turn-off timer. Home stereo combos sat in the RS series: the RS-252 at ¥59,800, the RS-259 and RS-280 at ¥69,800 each bundled FM/AM tuner, cassette mechanism and speakers into a single unit. National’s own reel-to-reel transports ran on the Gold Mecha mechanism - Gold Mecha R in the RQ-501, Gold Mecha 7 in the RQ-706D - while the same catalogue pages listed the top Technics reel-to-reel decks (the RS-736U and RS-740U) alongside the National accessory range: in-house recording tape (cassette, reel and 8-track) and the RP-series dynamic microphones from the RP-3400 desk model at ¥2,000 up to the professional RP-330E at ¥9,500.