The centenary push into non-textile businesses (1982)

A renewed sense of crisis, and businesses selected out over time

The heart of this decision was not a response to financial distress but a deliberate renewal of the sense of crisis at the hundred-year mark. That the man raising the flag was Uno Osamu — from Kureha Spinning, and someone who had experienced being an outsider inside the company — is suggestive. Precisely because he was not a career insider, he could refuse to rest in the self-image of a distinguished textile house and set out a resource shift into plastics, biochemicals, separation membranes and electronics with numerical targets attached.

Expanding beyond textiles was not, however, a straight-line success story. By the late 1980s the core textile business had revived on higher value-added products, and management itself was talking about narrowing the new ventures down. Even so, the film technology descending from the Inuyama mill grew years later into a business with a high world share in protective film for liquid-crystal displays, and the separation membrane business came to hold a world-class position in water treatment. The hurried diversification of 1982 is better understood not as something decided on the spot but as the sowing of a set of businesses that would be selected out over the following decades.