Wow! Here comes Setsuden-mushi.! Chapter 5 Parents of Setsuden-mushi 5.2 Profile of the Father of Setsuden-mushi 5.2.2 Silky fiber
5.2.2 Silky fiber
I have introduced myself as a chemist and a person who worked with English at work, but what I cannot forget as a chemist is a fiber of Chinon named after the old castle of Château de Chillon standing at the edge of Lake Leman in Switzerland, which I have visited twice. I was luckily allowed to do research on this fiber when I was at the Takatsuki Processing Technology Laboratory of TOYOBO.
Chinon is an exclusively new synthetic fiber with a texture and characteristics closest to silk, which was created at Toyobo's Kata Research Institute. It had been still seen in stores selling textiles, clothing, woolen yarns and knitted fabrics for a long time after I retired from the company, so it must have been produced for a long time.
(I have found recently that Chinon production was finished in 2004.)
Chinon is structurally and compositionally an acrylic fiber grafted with milk protein.
It was the first in the world to successfully graft milk protein into acrylic fiber on a commercial scale, and reigned supreme (?) as a fiber with properties very close to natural silk.
Except for the period when I was attending Kyoto Institute of Technology on company orders, Chinon was the fiber that I handled as part of our laboratory's reserach for several years before and after that period. It was able to be used for both Japanese and Western clothes, but I always used natural silk as a comparative material in my tests and research, which made me naturally acquire knowledge about the properties and advantages of silk.
This was the basic reason why I visited Sichuan Province in China twice in 1994 and 1996, nearly 20 years after I became independent to give them technical guidance on silk processing there. Needless to say, the latest information and advice on silk processing given by Mr. S.O., a former colleague of mine at TOYOBO, were of great help to me during these two on-site technical guidance experiences in China.
Here, too, I recognized the importance of friends and human networks. Once you leave a company, it is often the case that you lose all ties with them, but in order to develop your life, it is necessary to cherish and make the most of your past experiences as much as possible. What you should not make mistakes here is to cherish and make the most of your experience, and not to work relying on your former company's network. It is very unpleasant to be depended on for work by someone who has left the company.
In my case, I left the company amicably due to the business restructuring that hit the textile industry in the 1970s, but I learned a great deal from Toyobo Co. Ltd. including how to work and how to deal with people inside and outside the company beside my studying chance at KIT. This has been very useful even up to now.
Even now, almost 30 years after I retired, I keep in touch with my colleagues, seniors, and juniors at TOYOBO, the company that nurtured me. I have been very grateful to Toyobo Co. Ltd.
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