The ¥100 billion petrochemical complex at Mizushima — a sum equal to a year of sales (1968)

Being long-wished-for and being right are decided separately

The figure of ¥100 billion lay outside the very test Miyazaki himself had set: that a choice “must be within your own strength.” It matched the company’s annual sales, exceeded five times its yearly capital spending, and met strong opposition inside the company. That he could push it through anyway seems to owe to two things coinciding — the memory of supply insecurity in the years when Asahi Kasei bought its monomer from Mitsubishi Chemical Industries and others, and the fact that the minimum-scale standard had risen to 300,000 tonnes, closing off the room for a plan of its own. Here the yardstick of “within your own strength” is used as a reason to step over it.

What passed, however, was the intention to enter, not the shape of the plan. The single-company 120,000-tonne concept was not approved; it was rebuilt as a rotation shared with competitors, and construction and operation of the Mizushima cracker were held by Mitsubishi Chemical Industries. April 1972, when Sanyo Ethylene started up, was the month the ethylene industry received approval for a recession cartel. From the oil shock of the following year, this plant turned into the centre of what came to be called an “oil-soaked” constitution, and the thing that had to be shed shifted from fibre to petrochemicals. That something was long wished for, and that it was right as an investment, are questions that have to be examined separately.