The Kamijima Heat Treatment plant is located in the back streets of Tokyo’s Ota Ward, known as the city of craftsmanship, or monozukuri no machi. Like many SMEs in Japan’s manufacturing supply chain, Kamijima is a niche business built on artisanship, a tradition it carries on today. As well as the modern vacuum furnaces for metal heat treatment, Kamijima’s skilled workforce also use the older salt bath method, a practice that is gradually dying out.
The labour-intensive salt bath method means that productivity is low, but there is still a need for it when treating larger precision components, keeping the factory’s 45 employees busy. “We get orders from all around Japan despite being known for taking time and being expensive,” jokes the company’s president, Hidemi Kamijima.
The shrinking market and the difficulty of maintaining the high levels of craftsmanship–it takes decades of on-the-job training to master the skills–are the major challenges for the specialist factories in the sector. “Even the heat treatment work that does not require high-grade skills is coming to us these days as the level of craftsmanship in other factories is suffering,” says Mr Kamijima.
The company has been able to maintain its skilled workforce through a flexible approach: taking young interns, investing heavily in training for existing workers and getting non-manual senior workers through “leasing” arrangements from larger companies.
Even then, the future is uncertain for Kamijima. Business is only 80% of what it was before the economic downturn, says Mr Kamijima, and he foresees his niche business increasingly chipped away by improving machine technology. “The work that can be done by our craftsmanship only will definitely shrink,” he says. Nevertheless, he is hopeful about the company’s new business areas—conducting experiments on heat treatment for the R&D departments of large companies, and providing manufacturing solutions to the aerospace industry through a consortium established by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
