Leaving Osaka: building the Imari yard (1972)

Giving up a river for a bay

What Namura assumed at Imari was a capacity of three and a half 80,000-gross-ton ships a year — a different order of magnitude from the 40,000 gross tons a year the Osaka head works could manage as of March 1961. This was not reinforcement of an existing site; it was an investment that reset the size of the company itself. A firm that had always advertised its conservatism was, past its sixtieth year, testing its own self-description: that at the decisive moments it commits boldly to plant.

The speed at which Imari became the mainstay, however, was not what the plan assumed. The first ship was delivered in March 1975, just after the first oil shock, and Japanese shipbuilding then entered years of falling orders and capacity disposal. That the Osaka plant’s equipment was not sold until October 1979 — five years after Imari was completed — suggests the old site could not simply be folded up. Choosing a new location is tested less by whether the land was good than by how long the company can afterwards keep concentrating its resources in one place.