Japan’s leading packaging manufacturer and canmaker Toyo Seikan Kaisha was forced to stop production at eight of its production sites following the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11.
As the full impact of the disaster emerged, with 9,000 deaths confirmed and more than 12,000 people unaccounted for, power shortages have forced much of the industry in the north east of the country to either shut down plants or slow their operations.
A spokesman for Toyo Seikan said that there had been no major impact to its personnel but that there had been damage to a number of factories in the Tohoku and Kanto regions.
The Toyo Seikan canmaking plant at Sendai, which makes aluminium and TULC beverage cans, as well as PET bottles, was closest to the epicentre of the earthquake and, adjacent to the port, suffered the full impact of the tsunami, but its structure was intact according to satellite images.
