Scandal-hit Kobe Steel has a 'look the other way' culture

Kobe

THE fresh university graduate, eager to make a good impression on the job at one of Kobe Steel Ltd's main plants in Japan, punched the wrong measurements into machines making steel pipes, causing a large batch to come out too short.

"I thought I was going to be fired," recalled the former employee nearly 40 years later. But Shinzo Abe, now Japan's prime minister, stayed on the job at Japan's third-largest steelmaker for three years before entering politics in 1982.

Mr Abe has called the steel industry the backbone of the nation. Kobe Steel, a 112-year-old company in south-central Japan's Hyogo prefecture, has risen from wartime devastation and natural disaster but its past is littered with examp…