Fujikura's cable test fraud ran 33 years — and management sat on it for two months

In October 2017 Fujikura, the century-old Japanese cable maker, ran its first internal quality audit. By December it had a report warning that about ten cases of improper testing might remain in its energy and telecom carrier products; three more cases surfaced in 2018, and a second audit that July found 57. Management sat on the December warning for two months before disclosing anything in August 2018 — Asahi's headline said it plainly: "knew, but did not announce."

What the August disclosure showed was already systemic: inspectors skipping prescribed tests, writing false numbers into inspection sheets, and never reporting equipment changes at JIS-certified plants. The fraud covered power-transmission cable, industrial wire and telecom cable — 70 cases back to 1987, shipped to 66 customers across 73 product types at 10 sites. Cables supplied to the Ministry of Defense were among them, prompting a safety review of defense equipment. President Masahiko Ito apologized on camera.

The company's deeper investigation, published in April 2019 with an external law firm, roughly doubled the damage: 152 improper acts from October 1986 to March 2019, 75 product types, four plants plus eleven subsidiaries, 99 customers. The JIS mark was pulled from some products and ISO9001 certification was briefly suspended. The report's diagnosis was blunt: a QA function that could not manage test data, chronic understaffing, no rotation — and sales that had promised capabilities the plants never had, making spec-change requests unthinkable.

Closing the file took seven more years. Safety confirmations with all 99 customers were not complete until October 2025 — one customer never identified where the fraudulent cable had been installed and could only conclude it was "no problem for the time being." Fujikura's final report credited a lawyer-drafted guideline that made quality checks a routine business process, institutionalizing the detection it had failed to do for three decades.

152 falsification cases at 4 plants and 11 subsidiaries, 1986–2019, shipped to 99 customers including the defense ministry; JIS mark and ISO9001 certifications suspended

Quality assurance was functionally broken: tests were not centrally recorded, equipment inadequate, staff permanently stationed with no rotation — so fraud went undetected for three decades.

Sales won orders by overstating the plants' testing capability, so afterwards no one dared request spec changes from customers — the gap was absorbed by fake inspection records.

A 2018 internal survey found 31.8% of employees rated their own quality-compliance awareness as weak, and the report noted managers saw fraud as so routine that doubts never escalated.

Executives who learned in December 2017 that improper testing remained delayed disclosure until August 2018, managing the story instead of reporting it.

Even after disclosure, improper acts continued — the April 2019 report conceded fraud had persisted past the August announcement.

An understaffed, unautomated QA department cannot police production, and when audit findings must pass through the executives they implicate, disclosure waits until the story is ready.

Shipments of affected products stopped and safety confirmations proceeded customer by customer: 73 cleared by April 2019, 82 of 99 by July 2020, and the last confirmations completed in October 2025 — with one customer unable to locate all installed product and accepting only a provisional all-clear. Fujikura says quality checks under the law-firm guideline are now a standing process. The company kept its defense-supply qualifications after the ministry's equipment reviews found no safety failures.