Metalworking craftsman welcomes 'impossible' requests

Tokiko Oba / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

While some small and midsize Japanese companies have built up worldwide reputations on the back of innovative products, other companies rely on workers who, through years of experience, have become superbly skilled.

In Japan, workers with such finely honed skills are known as "shokunin" (artisans) and are widely respected in their fields.

Masayuki Okano, 74, who heads a company with just five employees, is world-renowned for his incomparable metalworking skills.

He frequently works on products that other manufacturers--including many major firms--have given up on because of the precision required.

Okano's latest masterwork is a hypodermic needle so thin it does not hurt when it pierces the skin.

At his company, Okano Kogyo Co., located in Sumida Ward, Tokyo, the master craftsman showed some of the needles attached to a sheet of steel so thin it looked like film.

Each needle is 0.2-millimeter thick, with a 0.06-millimeter-diameter hole running through it. One end is slightly thicker than the other, though the hole itself is invisible to the naked eye.

In the factory next door are banks of needle-making machines.

"This is the only place in the world where these needles can be made," Okano says proudly. "So we have a 100 percent share [of the market]."

The needle was produced at the request of major medical appliance maker Terumo Corp., which wanted to free diabetes patients from the pain of repeated insulin shots. The Terumo employee in charge of the project contacted Okano after having his request turned down by dozens of other manufacturers who said it would be impossible to produce a needle to those specifications.

On seeing sketches of the projected needle, Okano said he told Terumo, "Sure, I can do it."

Terumo began marketing the needles in July 2005. A spokesman for the firm said, "Mr. Okano's skills are world-renowned, and we appreciate that he understood how passionate we were about this."

One of Okano's finest engineering feats is a cell phone battery case. Creating it from a single sheet of stainless steel required the utmost skill. But the result was a case that allowed cell phone makers to use lithium-ion batteries, which are smaller and lighter than those previously use. It is generally agreed that without Okano's skill cell phones could not have become as compact as they are today.

Keisuke Honda, an official at the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry's Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, said: "It's really difficult to make such a thin case with metal pressing. The battery case and the needles show the company is driven by ideas."

Though his resume implies that Okano is a formidable man, in person he is friendly and eloquent, with our interview only interrupted by phone calls from executives of client companies and organization administrators wanting him to speak at seminars.

Okano was born, raised and still lives in Sumida Ward, a neighborhood that used to be an entertainment district similar to Kabukicho in Shinjuku, Tokyo. He says he frequented the area when he was a teenager, running errands for the people there.

"I played and played in those days. I'd get home at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., and my father would be mad at me," he recalls. "But my experiences from those days have formed the backbone of what I am today."

Soon after he started to work at his father's metal molding factory, he decided that metal pressing would be more profitable than molding, so he suggested to his father that they try this out. But he says his father rejected the idea as it could destroy the business relationships he had cultivated over the years with pressing companies.

So Okano began metal pressing by himself every day at the plant after completing the day's work for his father.

Okano says he worked until about midnight every night and, as delivery firms were unusual in those days, he would also drive the truck to deliver products to clients.

But he says the energetic life he had running errands as a child meant he did not get tired holding down two jobs.

Okano adds that ever since he started metal pressing, his policy has been to pick jobs that no one else would do--either because it would not bring in sufficient profit or because it was too difficult. He says that in many cases, the work was in fact both possible and profitable.

"Nothing is impossible," he said with a hearty laugh.