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“No photos!” a pouncing PR person tut-tutted. Yoko was more amused than bemused as she holstered her smartphone once more. Colleague Yoko Manabe and I were part of a Japanese media group touring the integrated steelworks of Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp at Kashima, northeast of Tokyo. We’d been mustered inside the cavernous building housing the No.1 blast furnace where the furnace house superintendent was listing the attributes of the 5,370 cubic meter giant with fatherly pride.
A diligent scribe, Yoko had taken out her phone to record the fascinating minutiae because the safety goggles, gloves, helmet, water bottle, headphone set and C02 detector we’d all been provided with were hampering efficient note-taking. Alas, photo-capable iPhones were a no-no.

Photo by Russ McCulloch

As the tour wore on, the no-pictures rule became more perplexing. To be fair, NSSMC had allowed us to capture the outside of the furnace from a bus stop for a few minutes of furious clicking. But the photo restriction seemed increasingly absurd. I’ve toured countless Japanese steel works, smelters, coil centers, fabrication shops, and end user plants, many of which have really cool set-ups and are doing amazing cutting-edge stuff. So a reluctance to let tourists wander around taking happy snaps of intellectual property is understandable and justifiable. And then there’s Kashima. The Kashima plant was inaugurated nearly five decades ago by the former Sumitomo Metal Industries (which Nippon Steel absorbed in October 2012 to form NSSMC). The works is spread over 8.9 million square meters and, like all contemporary Japanese mills almost entirely dependent on imported steelmaking raw materials, is built close to the sea. Today, age, sea-air corrosion, and iron ore dust have given Kashima the visage of contented decay. As much as The Beatles and the Mini Cooper S, Kashima is a product of the ’60s and still employs the technology...