When small unheard-of factories on Japan's tsunami-hit northeast coast were knocked out of action last year, few people would have predicted that it would cause the global car industry to come screeching to a halt.
However, that painful experience has quickly forced manufacturing giants to re-think their complex web of globalized production.
The crippling of thousands of workshops by the quake or flooding by the monster tsunami it caused on March 11 last year did not at first appear to be a disaster in itself.
This was Japan's hinterland, not the economic and cultural hub of Tokyo or the industrial base around Osaka. (Taipei Times)
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