The Sakuma dam joint venture with Guy F. Atkinson (1953)

Until a borrowed system becomes your own technology

The phrase “technical tie-up” may bring to mind an exchange of drawings and patents. What Hazama received at Sakuma, though, was a fleet of machines running from wagon drills to cable cranes, and the site organization needed to operate them. A working method assembled out of manpower, straw baskets and hand-pushed carts had to be replaced while a job worth some ¥8.5bn was already under way. That a schedule conventionally put at more than ten years came down to three owes less to the performance of the machines than to the strength of the side that made that changeover work at the first attempt.

The tie-up was not, however, Hazama’s conception. It was Takasaki Tatsunosuke, president of the client Electric Power Development Company, who travelled to the United States, compared the work at Pine Flat Dam, and arranged the $4.5m machinery import and the engineering assistance. Hazama was a bidder competing inside that framework; both the machines and the money came from outside. Whether the borrowed system became its own technology is answered by what followed — Atkinson technology brought in again at Miboro, and the type extended to Kurobe No.4 and Ikawa.