Kotani a prominent face in Japan's robotics industry

Mayumi Kotani grew up in southern Japan, in Kyoto prefecture, where women and men carried an equal load.

In her small fishing village, about 100 meters from the sea, her mother was an active worker, being the head of a local nursery school. Her father was in the military before starting his own business.

So when she began work at the company her husband founded, Kyoto-based Yushin Precision Equipment Co. Ltd., a leading maker of take-out robots for injection molded products, she was used to being the only woman in the room. She has served as the president of the company since 2002, 12 years as vice president before then, and a total of 48 years as an executive.

Kotani is part of the 2021 Plastics Hall of Fame class, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, will be inducted in a ceremony in Tampa, Fla., on Oct. 7. Kotani is just the fourth female to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. She joins Donna Davis, Stephanie Kwolek and Maureen Steinwall.

Kotani was recently interviewed by Plastics News for the honor via a Zoom call.

"I'm extremely happy and I'm really grateful to all the people involved," she said in an interview translated by her daughter and current vice president of Yushin, Takayo Kotani.

Mayumi Kotani plans to step down from her role as representative director and president of Yushin. Takayo Kotani will take over the role effective on June 22 at the company's annual shareholders and board of directors meeting. Mayumi Kotani will then serve as an honorary chairperson for the company.

Kotani was one of just 17 students from her junior high school to move onto high school, and of those she was the sole student to pursue a college education. She graduated from Osaka International University with a degree in home economics in 1969.

"At my age, there were less people going to school because it was right after the World War [II] and many things were rapidly changing at that time," she said.

Since both of her parents had pursued higher education, she did too. It was rare for women in the 1940s to pursue higher schooling, most began to start working after just elementary school.

Yushin Precision Equipment Co. was started in 1973 by her husband, Susumu Kotani as an injection molding company for plastic products. They had been engaged for six months when he started the company. Mayumi Kotani was one of four employees when the company was started. Her husband handled the machines, and she did everything else. By 1978 the company began the use of take-out robots to operate the injection molding machines.

She handled legal affairs, taxation, recruitment and real estate purchasing.

"But the size of the company was very small, so it wasn't a huge task at first," she said. "But I'm very proud — from the beginning we established a foundation and have never made a loss in our history."

Over the next decade , she served as Yushin's executive vice president and opened sales and technical service offices all over Japan. She oversaw Yushin America Inc. when it was established in 1988.

"I don't think I'm very successful, yet," she said.

In the ancient capital city of Kyoto, which has a long history, men and women have been treated equally.

"That culture made me have no hesitation to walk among many men in the industry," she said.

Kotani stepped into the position as president when Susumu Kotani died in 2002.

Yushin often leaned on the help of other companies around them to help meet company needs, using unique molding machinery to get there.

"We didn't have the capability of doing everything, but we were surrounded by people who helped do what we could not," she said.

She learned quickly and adapted to all the changes in the industry that came to her.

"By doing business every day, new things came to me every day and that's what I enjoyed," she said.

The foundation of the company always relied on listening to the customer's needs then — especially when it came to a new item. She attributed the success of Yushin to the adaptability of its robot machinery.

"The machines themselves had the power to pull customers," she said. "That was one large factor."

The unique machines, often the first of the world, would be a big piece of how Yushin expanded. Yushin is now in 19 countries and has dozens of units and systems for plastic molding plants. The take-out robot for plastic molding machine is its gold standard.

At the time, Yushin was just one of many companies in Japan who were doing the same business — take-out robots — but now there are just four in the entire country.

"Throughout our history we expanded our sales market to the whole world," she said. "When we look at customers in each of the countries, we tried to understand where the customer is going and which request from the customer is important or not important."

The machine achieved .069 seconds of cycle time in 2002, which is now the fastest time in the world.

"Impossible, is a starting point," she said. "It often feels impossible when we face new things."

Kotani is the only female top leader in the Japanese plastics industry, said Hideo Tanaka, her nominator and fellow member of the Hall of Fame. He mentioned she still stops by the factory floor and conveys the "spirit of manufacturing" and "technological innovation that creates value" to the workers.

She's part of the Japanese Robotic Association, which has CEOs from many of the big companies in Japan like Fanuc, but she's still the sole woman in the room. When asked if her gender was an advantage, she said she doesn't feel like it gave her any specific advantage because of the way she was raised in the culture of southern Japan.

"Everybody does recognize me all the time," she said.

Her two daughters, Takayo Kotani and Miki Murata, who is an executive officer and general manager of Yushin's corporate office, both have engineering degrees and have sought higher educations abroad in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Yushin's machines are in a wide spectrum of user end markets, with 31 percent in automotive, 17 percent in electronic parts, along with appliances, medical products, containers, discs and optical instruments.

Kotani has participated in each NPE since 1988, except 2018, and of course this year, since NPE2021 was canceled because of the pandemic.

Kotani prides her company on always operating "in the black."

Yushin reported 21.8 billion yen in sales in its 2019 fiscal year.

"We've never made a loss in our history," she said.