In the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s, Sony’s Inazawa factory made cathode ray tubes and sent them down the road to Ichinomiya, where they were used in Trinitron televisions and exported.

After Sony announced an unexpectedly large operating loss on Thursday and a new round of cost-cutting, Inazawa will soon be alone, importing liquid-crystal display panels from Korea and Taiwan and assembling them into televisions for the Japanese market.