Ending all manufacture and sale of asbestos-containing products, in Japan and abroad (2006)

What was left after giving the material back

In practical terms, withdrawing from a material handled for 110 years was only the work of dropping the last few per cent. The main sealing materials, the friction materials and the building materials had all finished coming off asbestos by 2004. What still gives the two dates — December 2006 and March 2007 — their meaning is that the company handed back, of its own accord, the room the law had left it as an exception. Deciding not to use a right one is entitled to use does not come out of a profit-and-loss calculation.

Changing a material and changing how an organisation behaves were, however, two different things. Six months after sales of asbestos-containing products ended, falsified performance data for fire-resistant materials came to light; repair costs of $254.7M (¥30bn) were booked and the following year closed in the red. This was twenty-six years after the material’s name left the company name, and two years after it left the products. Nichias still runs a public search site for the asbestos content of its products, keeping what it once sold open to inspection by anyone. Its relationship with the material it let go did not end on the date the sales stopped.