Last week, I had a call from Mr. Uchida, the president of the company called FUKAYA CHARCOAL CHANNELS SDN., and was given an honor to become his consultant. Though Mr. and Mrs. Uchida are 83 and 81 years old, they are still working on the front line of business together burning charcoal of mangrove in Malaysia, distributing six hundred 40-feet containers a year to home centers in Japan. FUKAYA CHARCOAL CHANNELS SDN. is the number one charcoal maker in Japan.

I’d like to introduce this couple’s life story briefly here, because their career is so unique and wonderful that you can almost make a TV drama out of it. Mr. Uchida had an education during the war to be a teacher and once actually became a teacher of a school called Okazaki Shihan. However, a business mind had occurred to him and opened a little clothing store in Okazaki. After the war, his extraordinary sense of business made him invite Ms. Kinuko Ito, a very famous model at that time who was also Miss Japan and well-known as a beautiful well-proportioned figure like a foreign woman, to his home town and held a fashion show. As a result, his clothing store gained a large growth and became the number one store from Okazaki, Nagoya to Kanagawa prefecture. After the Isewan typhoon devastated the most of his stores, he closed down the clothing stores and came to Tokyo. In Tokyo, he used his extraordinary ability again to invent “ethylene gas sterilization” with Showa Denko, which is a sterilization method that requires no heat, and launched a factory. Its success still did not satisfy his business mind at all that he launched a factory for disposable injection needles. I bet there must have been enormous needs for his Japan’s first disposable injection needles.

Since his company was getting a lot of orders from overseas including the request from Singapore to build a needle factory there, Mr. and Mrs. Uchida went to Singapore with a big ambition. However, when they tried to export to the Middle East, they were told that they would be paid with oil, and when they tried to export to France, they had exchange-rate losses with ruble. It didn’t go very well. They launched the charcoal factory in Malaysia thereafter.

They now have 100 employees, engaged in the business in which they pay the local people of Singapore in advance for their Mangrove charcoal and acquire the product after. We might think they are supposed to enjoy their retired lives with no regret since they have a very profitable blue-chip company now, but their dream is illimitable.

They have just succeeded in making a very heavy mangrove charcoal like the Bincho charcoal, by burning twice at a high temperature (1100-1200 degrees C) in the special oven. The woods of tropical rainforest like mangrove are normally not dense by their nature, so they can supply only charcoal that is so light that it can float on water. Even though I doubted in my mind the mangrove charcoal that was as good as Japan’s first-class charcoal, the charcoal they showed me actually had a high energization-rate and sank at once when it was put in water. The oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) of this water dropped to 600-200 lower than tap water with only five grams of this charcoal for one litter. I have never tested ORP with Bincho charcoal, but the lower ORP, the more electrons there are in the water. (In other words, there exist many hydrogen dots that are reduced to from hydrogen ion in the water.) This water is thought to have the power to turn oxidized body fluids with a great deal of hydrogen ion back to reduced form more than most of the vegetable juice or blueberry juice.

After kindly telling their roller-coaster lives, Mr. and Mrs. Uchida left with the beautiful eyes sparkling with their dream and romanticism that are swelling bigger with age. I have to tip my hat to their motivation.

Global warming is equal to global oxidation. I have seen news that the temperature in Kyusyu area rose to 35-40 degrees C and the clams of the area were completely destroyed. The red tide was generated when the warming produced the mass generation of particular bacteria. This is thought to be the cause of this destruction of clams. The bacteria might have monopolized the oxygen in the water.

The rise of global temperature will accelerate oxidation reaction generating bad microorganisms, and eventually damages the agriculture, cattle production and fisheries industry. Reducing seawater is surely a very difficult theme in environment technology, but it might be a good idea to reduce at least the shallows where clams are cultured by using charcoal, I thought, watching the TV news in the evening Mr. and Mrs. Uchida left.

I’m looking forward to giving answers to various environment problems considering and collaborating with Mr. Uchida in the future. I also came up with the idea to push a proposal about their life story as the NHK morning drama.
FUKAYA CHARCOAL CHANNELS

http://www.fukayacc.com/