KOBE – The fresh university graduate, eager to make a good impression on the job at one of Kobe Steel Ltd.’s main plants in Japan, punched the wrong measurements into machines making steel pipes, causing a large batch to come out too short.
“I thought I was going to be fired,” recalled the former employee nearly 40 years later. But Shinzo Abe, now prime minister, stayed on the job at the nation’s third-largest steel maker for three years before entering politics in 1982.
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