Kobe Steel has ‘look the other way’ culture

A man walks past the signboard of Kobe Steel at the group's Tokyo headquarters in Tokyo, Japan October 10, 2017. REUTERS

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 Japan's prime minister, stayed on the job at Japan's third-largest steelmaker for three years before entering politics in 1982.