Oregon Hamlet Courts an Economic Windfall From Japan
Mayor Clayton Wood keeps a watchful eye on this town’s newest and most significant resident, a Japanese engineer who prefers steak to sushi and big Chevys to little Toyotas.
For Wood, Kenji Saito is living proof that although the inhabitants of the local cemetery outnumber the 545 living residents of Millersburg, this tiny central Oregon town is far from dead. Saito’s company, Nippon Kokan K.K., has agreed to build a $60-million plant here--last year’s largest non-automotive Japanese investment in the United States.
“I’m still keeping my fingers crossed about this NKK thing and hoping nothing fouls up and it goes through,” Wood said from his City Hall office, which offers a choice view of Russ’s Day-N-Nite market across the street and Willamette Industries’ paper mill down the road, smokestacks blowing full tilt.
Willamette is one of Millersburg’s two big employers--Teledyne Wah Chang is the other--and NKK’s poly-crystalline silicon plant will make three, a seeming embarrassment of riches for a town that is only 12 years old and barely covers three square miles. But like many other depressed rural areas, this is a place hungry for jobs.
Doubtful at First
“The area around here is something like 15% unemployment,” Wood said. “It’s been our lumber industry that we’ve been so dependent on that’s laid off (workers), just closed up complete plants. I guess from the city’s standpoint, we could have done without it, but it’s good for the area. We hope this is a kind of a start.”
When the state first approached Millersburg about Nippon Kokan, it was met with a healthy dose of doubt. None of the city leaders had ever heard of the company, and they thought the state’s claims that the plant would create 300 jobs were too good to be true.
“We didn’t know whether to believe what we were hearing, so we hired a private investigator for $200 a day plus expenses, just like on TV,” Wood recalled. “And for $312, he gave us more information than we could assimilate in a week.”
What their investigator told them was that Nippon Kokan was Japan’s second-largest steel company, that it was diversifying and that its plans for a silicon crystal plant were almost everything the state had said they were. The 300 jobs would come only after all three phases of the plant were completed, but if the company did build its $60-million facility (the first phase), the city could expect 100 jobs right away and a 10-year return on the $354,000 tract of land it would give to Nippon Kokan.
“The city’s concern was, they would come in, and being as we’d heard it was 300 jobs, and now that it was down to 100 or so, maybe it was only really going to be 10,” Wood said. “Here we were giving away (concessions), and here we were going to end up with something just a good service station could handle as far as jobs. So we wanted guarantees, and of course, they didn’t want any guarantees.”
Understood Risk
Wood, however, came to understand the risk Nippon Kokan was taking, trying a new economic strategy. In the last year, Japanese economics has became important to the mayor, like the strength of the yen versus the dollar and the fluctuations of the Japanese stock market, which he now checks daily.
Wood also keeps tabs on Saito, so far the only Nippon Kokan employee living in Millersburg, a cheerful man who laughs often and loudly.
“Mr. Saito is a little lost soul around here at times,” Wood said. At other times, though, he seems happily assimilated. “He drives the biggest Chevrolet in town. We took him to the Japanese restaurant in Salem; come to find out he likes steak and hamburgers best.”
The lack of social amenities for the Japanese in Millersburg and neighboring Albany probably was the area’s biggest drawback for the company, Wood speculated, but the city’s location, its ability to get the company fast answers to its questions and the folksy forthrightness of Wood himself may have tipped the scales.
