Tradition Keeps Japanese Oilman Primed to Pump Crude

Half a century before John D. Rockefeller struck oil, Shigetaka Nakano’s ancestors were paying taxes on their crude oil to Japan’s warlords.

Nakano, 61, lives in the palatial style of his samurai forebears and carries on the family tradition of drilling for oil, the last individual Japanese to hold title to his own oil fields.

Japan imports 99.62% of its oil, and most of the minuscule amount produced locally comes from the pine-forested mountains of Niigata on the north coast of the main island of Honshu.

Sitting in Nakano’s immense rock garden amid the pines, one can hear the relentless crunch of aging pumps drawing oil from the ground.

In its heyday around the turn of the century, Niigata’s Niitsu area was studded with 900 “nodding donkeys.” It was the Texas of Japan, and Nakano’s grandfather rode high as Japan’s “Oil King.”

Today Nakano’s 100 active wells yield about 50 barrels a day; some produce more water than oil.

Besides Niigata, there is an oil field at Ennai to the northeast and a few offshore wells. But the total is only a drop in the ocean of the 3.6 million barrels Japan imports every day.

Nakano watches the market like any other oilman.

“It’s terrible how the price of oil keeps going down,” he said.

Most of the oil Nakano produces is heavy crude, suitable for machinery and power transformers.

Much of the equipment used to pump it out of the ground dates to the turn of the century when the family bought a number of what were, at the time, state-of-the-art rigs.

Everything about the operation seems to be from a different age. Pulleys creak as they haul crude from a well more than 80 years old.

“Just about all of our technology is Meiji era (which ended in 1912),” Nakano said, “but the family’s first derricks were made of cypress wood instead of the iron we use now.”

Nakano’s 12 employees used to be in good company. In the salad days before and during World War II, practically all his neighbors had 10 or 20 little wells going.

“But after the war, we started having cheaper oil from the Middle East, so people gave up because it wasn’t worth it,” Nakano said.

His family, which launched its oil business in the samurai days of 1804, bought up the active wells in the area, most of them enveloped in maple forests.

For about five months of the year, Nakano’s oil field is blanketed in six feet or more of snow.

“When something up here breaks down, we just have to dig it out,” Nakano said.

An open-air tank holds the first catchings of murky, lumpy oil, floating on top of tea-colored water also pumped from the wells.

Times have been better for the Nakano family business. Low prices last year saw the company’s revenue plummet 50%, but he declined to give figures for his sales.

While many of his neighbors have long since abandoned the oil business, Nakano, expecting a turnaround in prices in the foreseeable future, says he will continue pumping for “black gold.”

Besides, he is sitting on what he believes are several more decades worth of oil in his fields.

“We just have to stick it out,” he said.