Staff writer

OSAKA -- A thin steel rod is being rolled onto a large spool about 2 meters in diameter at a factory in Higashi Osaka.

This may sound like an ordinary scene at any steel wire manufacturing plant, but this particular rod has distinctive features: it's hollow, made of three fan-shaped segments curved precisely at an angle of 120 degrees.

Its distinctive design is what makes the tube like no other in the global market and has made it indispensable for telecommunications networks and its manufacturer, Namitei Co.

The three segments combined create a perfectly circular tube with sides 1.5 mm thick and a hole 3 mm in diameter.

The tube can withstand extremely high pressures and is used to protect fiber-optic cable submerged as deep as 8 km at the bottom of sea.

Capitalized at 30 million yen and staffed with 50 employees, Namitei Co. is the only supplier of steel tubes for this market.

It has produced enough to cover 90,000 km of fiber-optic cable laid at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean connecting Japan, the United States and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. For the latest business year that ended last October, the company's sales reached 2.2 billion yen.

Masatsugu Murao, the 57 year-old president of the company, says he has been "lucky" to have achieved such success. However, his company's achievements seem more likely to be the result of advanced technologies and craftsmanship.

Murao became president of Namitei in 1994 following his father's death. By that time, the company founded by his father in 1945 as a screw maker had evolved into a firm specializing in steel wires featuring sections with various shapes.

Dissatisfied with just that, however, Murao was looking for a product that would meet the emerging needs of the market.

When a wholesaler in Tokyo telephoned him and asked if his company could make fan-shaped steel sections that could be joined to create a tube, he replied that his company could make anything drawn on paper.

When he pulled the wholesaler's drawing off the fax machine, however, he was stunned at the accuracy of the production and strength the final product would need to have. He thought he would not be able to make it, but he had to live up to his big words: that his company can make anything.

"It was so difficult. We had to make metal molds many times and tried with different materials. We had to work three days and nights straight in the last few days to meet the delivery date," Murao recalls.

As it turned out, his company was being considered as a potential supplier for an international project to lay the No. 3 trans-Pacific fiber cable, which was completed in 1988.

The initial order was for 1 km. But then, subsequent orders came in for 3 km, then for 6 km, and then for 10 km.

To make a tube as long as 55 km, Murao invested 300 million yen in plant and equipment, and asked Nippon Steel Corp. to make special material for that purpose.

The technologies they developed have since been applied, without any modifications, to produce different kinds of steel tubes for cable protection.

This shows, Murao says, just how good their basic design was in the first place.

The reputation Namitei has earned for its sophisticated precision technologies has brought it orders for many other big projects, such as bullet train and maglev railways, which in return has helped the company further improve its technology. Today, it holds about 200 patents.

Murao says his fascination with skills and technologies is very much similar to his passion for collecting cameras. Among the 800 or so he has collected so far are the first Leika model and Nikon's first series.

"I'm fascinated by companies that have competed with others by their technologies," Murao says. "Nippon Kogaku K.K. (the maker of Nikon) has become the world's top camera maker by taking a different strategy from Leika."

He stresses the importance he places on restructuring his company into one that meets the needs of the day. He inherited this management style from his father.

In 1945, just after World War II, his father started to make screws because he thought that screws would be in great need for the war-devastated country to reconstruct itself. Afterward, his company began to make steel wire, barbed wire and nuts of various shapes.

Murao doesn't seem to do anything halfway.

When he performed in a noh play 15 years ago, he practiced so hard he became ill. But he still remembers the excitement and his sense of achievement after he left the stage.

"Work is the same. If you work very hard to complete something, the sense of achievement will remain. And I want to keep doing that," Murao says.