Japan’s Never-Give-Up Approach Has Made It A Standalone Leader In Creating Unique Materials

When a major electronics company requested that textile maker Amaike create a new shielding material for their plasma TVs, neither imagined the result would be a fashion breakthrough. Amaike’s commitment to satisfying their customer, however, led them to a solution that far exceeded expectations. Japan has long been famous for customer service, but this commitment goes beyond retail shopkeepers and hospitality staff keeping their guests happy. Many of the innovations that have made Japan a global industrial leader were the result of small and medium enterprises working to meet the unique demands of their corporate customers. Building on these innovations to further meet their customers’ evolving needs, these small- and medium-sized firms have made Japan the leading or sole provider of many of the materials that make the modern world possible.

Creating from Customer Needs

“The needs of our customers are the prime driver of our R&D,” says Amaike Mototsugu, CEO of synthetic textile maker Amaike. “They come to us for materials with properties that simply don’t exist anywhere else.” This drive can lead to the invention of completely new materials. In some cases, however, even the customer doesn’t anticipate how the product will be used. This was the case with Amaike Super Organza, originally developed by Amaike at the request of a manufacturer looking for an electromagnetic shielding material for plasma TVs. Once plasma became old technology, Amaike began introducing the fabric to the fashion world. At just 5g/m2, Amaike Super Organza is the lightest fabric available today (for comparison, its yarn is five times thinner than your hair.), and it fired the imaginations of designers in France and Italy. Today it can be found in costumes for film and stage productions, including performances at the Opéra National de Paris. Amaike continues to develop new materials for customers around the world, for both fashion and industrial uses.

Changing How the World Works

“Our customers continually seek out better specifications, faster production times, and of course, lower costs. This means each product we create will be superseded in a few years as we respond to customers’ new needs.” Kondo Naotaka, CEO of graphite specialist Toyo Tanso, describes their products, which have become indispensable for high-performance applications. “We make graphite components for household appliances, for medical equipment, for automobiles, trains, aircraft. Our parts were even used in the Hayabusa 2 space probe.” Toyo Tanso was one of the first companies to be able to mass produce isotropic graphite, and it still supplies 30% of the world’s market share of this material today. Graphite’s light weight, low friction and heat resistance have made it indispensable to next-generation energy solutions, enabling Toyo Tanso’s customers worldwide to become leaders in wind, solar, thermal and nuclear technologies.

At a microscopic end of the scale, the materials that go into our electronic devices, have shaped the future like few others have.  Conventional electronics have been approaching a limit, however, as developers race to achieve greater computing ability in smaller sizes with limited power usage. One thing they have hoped for is some new material or technique that will let them bypass these limitations to create devices that are far smaller, more powerful, and much more efficient. For one group, their work on a completely different problem led to a solution: “these students at Kyoto University had developed a method for creating ceramic filters with gallium oxide, but when I saw their work, I realized that their method could be applied to making power devices with gallium oxide as a semiconductor,” explains Hitora Toshimi. “This would make electronic components not just more energy efficient as power sources, but also much smaller in volume than before.” Hitora, together with this 15-person academic research team, created the company Flosfia. Their resulting MISTDRY technology has enabled them to make diodes and transistors that only require one tenth of power source volume compared to previous ones. The company is planning to scale up to mass production this year.

Committed to Continuous Innovation

When Amaike’s customers request a new material, the team of 40 workers must set to work inventing it literally whole-cloth. “Each year we produce 50 to 100 new materials as samples for our customers,” says Amaike of the work his team does creating fabrics with unique properties no other maker can supply.

R&D is always important, but on the cutting edge of technology it is an absolute necessity. Firms developing new materials in Japan invest heavily in R&D, which can be attributed to the emphasis they place on listening to the needs of their customers. Most of them depend on B-to-B sales, and their customers, who are themselves striving to improve their own capabilities, approach them with very specific requests. This creates a virtuous cycle in which the material makers themselves innovate to meet their customers’ needs.  

For Toyo Tanso, being a trailblazer in their field often means that the equipment to develop new innovations doesn’t even exist yet. “Being so far ahead means that we will necessarily make false steps, but because we never give up, we achieve what nobody else can,” says Kondo. “We invest a large portion of the profits earned by our successful products into developing the next generation.”

These companies, though handling different materials, share one same vision: to see their creative innovations not only serve the needs of their customers, but of society as a whole. “Our goal over the next 10 to 20 years is to contribute to solving social issues,” says Hitora. Already they are working on cutting-edge solutions that reduce waste, pollution, and energy consumption, while lowering costs to within reach of everyone. To achieve this, they are looking for global partnerships: “Together with our offices around the world, we need to be much closer to all of our customers so that we can meet their exact requirements,” says Kondo.

To learn more about Toyo Tanso, click here.

To learn more about Amaike Textile Industry, click here.

To learn more about Flosfia, click here.