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Hokkaido boasts fertile soils and abundant natural resources. Its coal reserves in particular made it as well known in the past as Kyushu, Japan's main coal producing region. Sumitomo Coal Mining Co., Ltd., as a case in point, started out in Kyushu, built a solid base there, and subsequently expanded into Hokkaido.
The greatest volume of coal ever produced in Japan was in 1940 when annual production reached 56.32 million tonnes. After the war, coal continued to be a major industry as Japan rebuilt its economy. But with deposits becoming more difficult to mine, and with burgeoning labor costs and the yen rising in value, production inevitably started to shrink.
Sumitomo Coal Mining opened its mine in Akabira, near Asahikawa, in 1938. After providing employment opportunities as well as vast coal tonnage for more than half a century, this mine, too, closed down in 1994. The company shifted its focus to coal importing and has since diversified its operations, branching into building materials such as cement and ready-mixed concrete, condominiums and other real estate, distribution services, and other ventures. Sumitomo Coal Mining's construction materials and machinery business, based on supply routes to the coal mines that the company established in the past, still accounts for the major share of corporate sales.
Satoru Onodera, head of the Construction Materials and Machinery Department at the Hokkaido office, speaks confidently of the future:
"The business areas we're developing are soundly based on expertise we've built up over many years. We hope these new initiatives will benefit the community both economically and environmentally."
This forward-looking stance is evident in the way that the Asahikawa branch has extended its construction materials and machinery business to encompass composting toilets—Bio-toilet. "We're developing a carbonizing system, too," says Kazuhiro Hayashi, a manager at the Asahikawa branch. "The equipment can produce charcoal in about 60 hours using materials such as the logs that interfere with dam operations or branch trimmings when the municipality prunes the city's trees. The charcoal we produce can be used in all sorts of ways, in water purification and odor removal, besides being used as fuel."
With the current interest in the purifying properties of charcoal, this certainly seems a sound, forward-looking business venture well suited to Asahikawa with its lumber resources. |
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| The Asahikawa Ramen Village, where many famous ramen restaurants in Japan are represented. Tourist buses from throughout Japan visit this favorite culinary destination. |
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