Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present

19: The Search for Business

T H E S E A R C H F O R B U S I N E S S P A G E 187 One day in spring 1979,a young,athletically built Japanese businessman arrived in Denver. His name was Isao Kamitani and he represented Japan’s giant Sumitomo Trading conglomerate. His mission was to establish an office in Denver and look for opportunities for Sumitomo in Colorado’s economy, which was then riding on an energy boom. The emphasis was on oil, and Kamitani had learned something about that industry during a six-and-a-half-year assignment in Houston. Kamitani’s first chore was to lease an office. So many firms were coming to Denver that it took him three months to find suitable space. Sumitomo was not the first Japanese business to discover Colorado . Kamitani found trading companies like Idemitsu had preceded him and Pentax Camera’s national headquarters were in Denver. Japan Air Lines had opened a sales office here. And Kamitani had hardly c h a p t e r n i n e t e e n T H E S E A R C H F O R B U S I N E S S T H E S E A R C H F O R B U S I N E S S P A G E 188 settled in when other Japanese blue-chip traders—Mitsui, Nissho Iwai, Mitsubishi, Kanematsu, Marubeni, C. Itoh, Tomen—arrived to sell oil field casing and other steel items and buy everything from coal to beef. When the boom ended less than a decade later, most Japanese traders left. Kamitani persuaded his bosses to let him stay because he was confident Sumitomo could find a place in the Colorado marketplace . To begin with, he had made friends and customers of firms like Davis Oil, Anschutz, Amoco, and Chevron by providing quick delivery of supplies—oil well casing, tubing, and pipe—from distribution centers he built in Casper, the Williston Basin in North Dakota, and Grand Junction. But it took years of trying before he established a solid relationship with Coors. One day in Golden Kamitani saw huge Coors warehouses full of coils of sheet aluminum waiting to be inspected before they were converted into beer cans. The warehoused aluminum was tying up capital and space. “I can save you money,” he told the Coors people. “What you’re doing is recycling used beverage cans. That’s fine, but the way you’re doing it is costing you a lot of money. I propose that you convert the recycled cans into aluminum ingots and ship the ingots to Japan. There we will roll them into aluminum sheet which will be coiled and shipped back to the port of Long Beach. I can guarantee to deliver anywhere from 700 to 1,000 tons of top quality aluminum sheet a month to Golden, as specified by Coors, on three to five days notice so you won’t have the storage problem.” Coors executives laughed. They asked how he could control the quality and timing of shipments all the way from Japan. Kamitani explained Japan had perfected a system for “just in time” delivery of materials because of lack of warehouse space and to save interest on the funds tied up in inventory. Coors executives agreed to try Sumitomo’s system and were astonished it worked without a hitch. T H E S E A R C H F O R B U S I N E S S P A G E 189 Its success led naturally to introducing Coors beer to Japan. But the introduction almost was a disaster because the demand had been underestimated. Kamitani solved the problem by a spectacular but costly promotion. He chartered the Flying Tigers’ then-new Boeing 747 freighters to fly Coors beer from Stapleton International Airport to Tokyo with a refueling stop in Anchorage. In all, twenty-five planeloads of Coors beer were flown to Japanese consumers who were notified of the beer’s arrival with a heavy advertising campaign that said, “Sorry to have kept you waiting; a Jumbo Jet load of Coors beer has just arrived from Colorado. Enjoy.” Japan continues to buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Colorado products ranging from beef to coal to electronic goods, and ranks third behind Canada and Mexico as an export market. In 1986...