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.
Abe has called the steel industry the backbone of the nation. Kobe Steel, a 112-year-old company founded in Hyogo Prefecture, has risen from wartime devastation and natural disaster, but its past is littered with examples of corporate misconduct.