The Steel Works

Mizushima Works, Kawasaki Steel (now JFE Steel, Kurashiki Steel Works - 倉敷製鉄所)

From 1982 to 1983, I worked as an English conversation teacher in Mizushima, Okayama Prefecture on the Inland Sea in Western Japan. My employer was a small company in Osaka that supplied native-speaker English teachers to companies trying to improve their employees’ English competency. “Nippon Information and Communication” or “NIC” was run by a compact, obsequious man who started every telephone conversation with: “Thank you always for your hard work!”, his take on Itsumo osewa ni natte orimasu, an essentially untranslatable expression of appreciation for the other person’s existence in relation to oneself.

In August 1982, I traveled to Osaka, and from there an NIC representative escorted me to Kurashiki, Okayama. The company provided me with a small apartment, a 2DK (two rooms, a dining area/kitchen, bath, and toilet), maybe 400 square feet in what looked like a prefab building containing eight identical apartments (four up, four down). In front was a muddy irrigation culvert bridged by a simple concrete slab. At the time, rice paddy fields surrounded the building. When I check Google street view now, I am astonished to see that the building is still there, looking much as it did 40 years ago: not much then and not much now.

My job was to provide English conversation lessons at the Mizushima Works of the Kawasaki Steel Corporation. Kawasaki Steel, commonly known as “Kawatetsu” (a portmanteau of the kawa {川} in “Kawasaki” and tetsu {鉄} in seitetsu {製鉄}, “ironmaking”) was one of the world’s largest steel producers, and Mizushima was a truly gargantuan integrated steel works. “Integrated” means that the steel works covers the entire steelmaking process over hundreds of acres, from coke ovens and blast furnaces, to slabbing mills, hot and cold rolling mills, rod and wire mills, pipe-making factories, and more. I believe there were some 8,000 workers employed at the Mizushima Works in the early 1980s. The plant was built primarily on landfill jutting into the Inland Sea to take advantage of the sea for the delivery of huge amounts of raw materials: coking coal, iron ore, fuel, alloying metals. The sea also facilitated shipment of the plant’s finished steel products. For years, the sea had served as an outlet for toxic plant effluent, although that practice had largely stopped by the 1980s.

All of my students were men, most of whom were engineers. The classroom was in a building, constructed of concrete, steel sheet, and leaky windows, which was even grimmer and more provisional than the apartment in which I lived. It was cold in the winter, and students and the teacher huddled around kerosene stoves that stank and warmed the classroom unevenly. My students wore standard-issue gray Kawasaki Steel uniforms and steel-toed boots. The men in their 30s and 40s typically could not speak English with much facility, but some of the younger ones were reasonably fluent. I was hired primarily because I was white and had a college degree and had no idea how to teach anything. I improvised and was chagrined to realize I could not tell an adverb from a pronoun. Tabata-san, who could scarcely utter a comprehensible English sentence, schooled me in the parts of speech on more than one occasion. The older men had come up during the golden age of Japanese heavy industry, the years from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when the Japanese steel industry overtook its American competitors. A leading steelmaker like Kawasaki Steel could attract graduates from the best universities and technical colleges; some of these men were in my English conversation classes.

My employer, NIC, had arranged taxi service between my apartment and the steelworks. I disliked the taxi and the VIP treatment, especially when the driver was waiting for me, his engine running, in the evening after my last class. I observed that the fares on the taximeter added up to quite a bit of money, so I asked NIC if they would buy me a bicycle and discontinue the taxi. They accepted my proposal: two or three weeks’ worth of carfare amounted to the cost of a new bicycle. I had a local bike shop order a 12-speed Bridgestone, sized extra-large (the bike shop owner said that bikes that tall were usually for export). I loved my rugged blue “sports type” bike with drop bars.

It was about seven miles between my apartment and the main gate of the Mizushima Works. The classroom building was just beyond the gate. The road was narrow, heavily traveled and, for the most part, ugly. The area had been built up quickly, a hodgepodge of small businesses, pachinko parlors, machi kōjō (small workshops, usually sweat-labor subcontractors to big manufacturers), houses, car dealerships, interspersed with rice fields and vegetable plots. There was in Japan then and remains little today in the way of zoning. The result could be described as barely-organized chaos. As I got into the industrial zone, there was a large pig farm along the road. Even on the coldest nights, the stench rising from the pigsties was overpowering. I trained myself to pedal fast and hold my breath as I passed.

Beyond the pigsties was the Mitsubishi Motors auto plant. The plant had its own special smell, probably a combination of oils for lubrication, hydraulic equipment, and metal cutting. From inside the plant came the thud-thud-thud of the autobody stamping mills. Beyond the auto plant was the symphony of smells from the steel works: The acrid, infernally sulfurous emanations from the coke ovens, which converted Australian coal into coke, the fuel for ironmaking in the blast furnaces. There was the smoke from the blast furnaces themselves, and the warm humid odors of water used on an industrial scale to cool the steel as it was drawn out between the colossal rolling stands of the hot strip mill. There was the smell of the animal fats used as rolling lubricants in the cold strip mill where the stuff of auto bodies and a thousand other products was made and rolled in coils weighing a dozen and more tons. There was sour smell of acid from pickling line, where cold rolled steel was cleaned before galvanizing.

At one point in the eight months I spent at Kawatetsu in Mizushima, I asked to be taken on a tour of the works (here it was useful to be considered a VIP). It must have taken several hours to go through the entire process, the coke ovens, the blast furnace, and steelmaking shop (where carbon in the molten iron from the blast furnace is burned off in the basic oxygen furnace by injecting oxygen at supersonic speeds and adding alloying materials into the melt to produce various grades of steel). The molten steel was then carried to the continuous caster to produce slabs 6”~8” thick. These would later be reheated and sent through the hot strip mill to produce the stuff used to make automobile and truck chassis and other products. I will never forget the first time I saw a hot slab emerge from the reheat furnace to begin its journey down the rolling line through the descaler, where high-pressure water jets stripped oxidation off the surface of the 2,200°F slab, then on to the roughing mill to begin squeezing the metal thinner. At that point, the red steel still looked like a slab, albeit suddenly elongated. The grand finale was when the leading end of the slab entered the finishing train, five to seven closely-spaced stands of enormous rollers exerting many tons of pressure on the steel to reduce it from several inches to less than a quarter of an inch. Each time the leading edge of the steel entered a stand, there would be an enormous boom echoing through the quarter-mile long mill, the concussions spacing closer together as the strip accelerated through the stands:

Boom!…..boom!....boom!...boom!..boom!

until the newly-rolled hot strip was traveling over 30 miles an hour as it was taken up into the coiling machine.

Hot strip mill finishing train

 * * * * * *

            I returned to the US in the spring of 1983. After a much longer stint in Japan from 1985 to 1989, I went looking for a job in the New York area where I could use my growing ability to speak, read, and write Japanese. I sent out over a hundred letters (actual letters) to Japanese companies. Few replied, but one that did was Kawatetsu: The manager of educational programs at the Mizushima Works, now promoted as a senior assistant to the company’s CEO, remembered me, wrote back, and told me there might be a job for me at the company’s New York office. In the spring of 1989, I became an actual employee of the Kawasaki Steel Corporation.

            The Mizushima Works became only the first of many steelmaking facilities I would visit.

Hot rolled coil and cold rolled coils