Converting Inuyama from pulp to film (1968)

Withdrawal and creation as two sides of one decision

The heart of this decision is that a structurally depressed business was not simply wound up: the use of the tangible assets — the plant and the site — was reconsidered from something close to a blank sheet, and the range of application of existing technology was redefined. The technical base of processing pulp could be transferred to film, a neighbouring but distinctly different product field, and Kawasaki Kunio’s remark that “as clothing fibre it has failed, but in film and plastics there is room to grow” can be read as showing that retreat from a failed application and redeployment into another advanced together inside a single judgement.

That Cosmoshine SRF held some 60% of the world market half a century later speaks to how far this decision could reach — but the side effect, a concentration of profit in the film segment, was not avoidable either. The abrupt fall in earnings in the year to March 2023 shows that a strength grown through technology transfer can, at some point, invert into a structural weakness of dependence on a single business. The conversion of the Inuyama mill remains continuous with the problems Toyobo faces today.