In the morning we went by fast train to Nagoya to visit the Tujimachi printing plant, which prints the leading regional Chunichi newspaper. The president Mr. Nokasai and his plant manager Mr. Teshi welcomed the Study Tour group. Right in the beginning a group photo was taken behind a welcome signpost that the employees had handcrafted.
Before the factory tour we got information on the background of the print shop founded in 2003. They employ four shaft-less 700 CD press sets from TKS, which print up to 40 pages each (24 in colour) at a maximum speed of 85,000 copies per hour. The mailroom is located between two press lines in a one floor system. Four CTP lines from NEC produce photopolymer plates. A newspaper printing plate in Japan is typically a double-long plate holding two images (pages).
The press cut-off is 541 mm, slightly less than the Japanese standard, but printing the same image size. Chunichi has a circulation of 780,000 copies for the morning edition and 65,000 copies for the evening edition. The evening paper is printed on one press set only. A set contains three double wide 4-high towers, two mono units and one folder. This is Japanese standard throughout.
The plant has 58 employees, five of them in management. The average age of the employees is 28.9 years. The morning paper is printed with four people per set, the evening paper with three per set (see story about Chunichi in the WAN-IFRA Magazine Extra on “Lean Production,” March 2010).
This reduced staffing is possible because Tujimachi relies to a large extent on an automatic image-based inline closed-loop colour control system, developed in cooperation by TOYO INK and TKS. It employs a web-wide colour scanner that scans the printed result. This is then compared to the target colour derived from the CMYK information supplied by the RIP to the CTP recorders.
The web break rate is as low as 0.017%. They didn’t have any breaks in the last five months. Start-up waste is typically 800 copies for cold starts.
When the group started the plant tour they passed the CTP output section and just in time a plate was produced that showed the picture of the group taken on arrival. The photographer had sent the picture data to the editorial department and they had put it into a digital page, which they then returned to the print plant where it had been automatically output onto four plates for colour printing.
The plate was loaded into the press, and our Finnish Study Tour member had the honour of starting a Japanese press for the first time in his life by pushing the "go" button. Without manual intervention the press gained speed and printed saleable copies after a short start-up. The Study Tour participants got all their personal copies with their recently taken photo reproduced and printed fresh from the press.
