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Global World Leaders!
Global World Leaders! Small and Medium Size Japanese Companies
Episode 30: Masuko Sangyo Co., Ltd.
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Kawaguchi city in Saitama prefecture used to be called a cupola furnace town, where foundries stood side by side. It has now been transformed into a residential area where apartment buildings stand side by side due to its accessibility to central Tokyo area. Masuko Sangyo, which achieved worldwide prominence with its ultrafine grinding technology, is located in one corner of this city. It is said that the history of Masuko Sangyo goes back to the family line of a Kawaguchi caster, who manufactured hundreds of cannons 150 years ago under the supervision of Shuhan Takashima, a military scholar in the late Edo era. A replica of 18 lb. cannon, which was casted by Yasujiro Masuda, the founder, is exhibited at the company's entrance. Then, MASUKO MERCHANTS was established in 1922 in order to sell cast iron products. After World War II, he started manufacturing cast iron products and industrial machinery. |
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Ten years of time going to waste? "Around 1955, my father was manufacturing so-called bean curd machine which crushes soybeans with millstones, and mainly sold them to tofu shops. Then, a teacher at the Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo who saw the machine approached my father and asked if he can pulverize coal into microparticulates of 5 thousandth of millimeters (5 micrometers) for research on asphalt materials. The size far exceeded the limits of fine grinding technology at that time. It probably set fire to my father's fighting instinct as a person who loved invention. He took on this challenge, but..." Sachiya Masuda, who is now the 9th president of the company, talked about how the company started the development of its ultrafine grinding technology. "In order to pulverize things with a millstone, all you need to do is to just keep reducing the gap between the upper and lower grinding stones. However, the temperature between the surface and the inside of the grinding stones exceeds 70 degrees C when they are rotated in close contact with each other, causing the gas cavities inside to expand from the heat of friction and crack the stone. I was just a child at that time, but I remember my father staring at the thermometer in the middle of the night, turning the switches on and off and trying one thing after another." Finding the right material and baking process to make a grinding stone without gas cavities (gas cavity free grinder) was a series of trial and error. Although it took 10 years of painstaking effort to complete the ultrafine particle attritor named "Supermasscolloider" that used a gas cavity free grinder, only two units were sold. The production technology of asphalt made rapid progress in 10 years, and there was no longer a need to turn coal into microparticulates. Although it was a revolutionary technology that acquired patents in 12 countries around the world, we were only left with debt." |
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Effective utilization of unused resources "It was the time when my father was walking through a shopping street in Bunkyo-ku. There were chicken carcasses piled up in front of a chicken meat shop. When my father asked the shop owner, he said they are useless and he has no choice but to throw them away. Then, thinking that it might be possible to get bone powder if they are ground with the Supermasscolloider, he asked if he could take the chicken carcasses." In conventional grinding machines, processing raw food materials causes immediate rotting because bacteria grew within the gas cavities of the grinding stones, and it was necessary to sterilize with boiling water. However, a grinder without gas cavities does not require the boiling process and only washing the surface is necessary, so it can be used to crush food ingredients. Furthermore, when chicken carcasses are processed with the Supermasscolloider, "it produced a nice pink-colored minced meat. When it was cooked, its taste was unexpectedly delicious. Moreover, it was rich in minerals such as calcium as well as vitamins, and also had a high nutritional value," said Masuda, the company's president. It was literally a case of "something really unexpected coming out from an unusual place," and to add another momentum to it, an NHK television program introduced the company as "a very tiny worldwide enterprise which creates meat from bones." It received numerous inquires one after another from food manufactures in and out of Japan, and the Supermasscolloider began to spread around the world. This effective utilization of unused resources became the fundamental standpoint of the company. For example, when corn used for corn soup is finely pulverized with the standard manufacturing process, 10% of the corn, mostly the skin is currently discarded as pomace. A high amount of natural sweet ingredients are contained between the kernel and the skin, which was being discarded. However, when they are finely pulverized with the Supermasscolloider, nothing gets discarded, and in addition to making corn soup that is rich in food fibers (increases from the conventional 2% to 7%), the process becomes environmentally friendly. Moreover, since the soup is too thick as it is, 10% of water can be added. That is to say, the yield ratio of 90% with the conventional method can be increased to 110%. Mr. Masuda, the company's president, emphasized the advantage as, "not only just simply reducing waste, but it can contribute to the earnings of the corporation which introduced the machine." The bottom quarter of asparagus were being discarded because they have a grassy taste and tough fibers, but when these parts are finely pulverized, they become sweet and won't have to be discarded. This increases the yield ratio by 30%, and the company says that a restaurant chain was able to switch from imported asparagus to domestic products and still realize more than enough cost reduction. |
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Finer grinding of every material It is not too much to say that the company's history of development has been the endless pursuit of ultrafine grinding technology. The company continues to develop the technology to finely pulverize all materials except diamond, such as the "Cerendipitor" which enables ultrafine grinding at twice the conventional rotation speed in 1993; the "Ceren Miller" which combined jet grinding and impact grinding into a stone mill type attritor in 1999; the "Micro-Meister" which has the world's highest rotation speed of 12,000rpm in 2002; and the "Masscomizer X" which is an ultra-high pressure jet mill type hyper fine micronizer to produce nano-sized (billionth of one meter) particles in 2006. |
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In what area is such a technology actually applied? "Bioethanol can be produced by pulverization of wood chips into the nano-level. Two hundred kilograms of wood chips are required in order to produce 60 kg of bioethanol, but the finer the chips are cut, the higher the yield becomes. Furthermore, it is necessary to add sulfuric acid in the normal production process, but sulfuric acid becomes unnecessary when the chips are pulverized to a nano-level, so this is also an environmentally friendly technology. Also in medicine, the materials get digested/absorbed faster due to their finer size, and cosmetics can be expected to be more effective on the skin due to their function to penetrate the body surface and infiltrate into the cells," said Masuda, the company's president. Mr. Masuda says that he learned from his father to "never give up", and this DNA appears to have been solidly inherited to the manufacturing floor. Although 25 employees are not many by any means, he talked about his dream of turning the company into "a small-sized big enterprise" by further raising the awareness of each employee. |
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Masuko Sangyo Co., Ltd. : 1-12-24 Honcho, Kawaguchi city, Saitama prefecture, Japan 332-0012 |
(Reprinted from the "December issue of J2TOP = Global World Leaders! Small and Medium Size Japanese Companies ="
interview & article/J2TOP Editorial Department, published by Jiji Press Ltd.)
Translated under the responsibility of JST
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