As someone who was in the Aluminum business during that time, this is a lot more complicated than it might appear. There was an absolutely insane amount of fraud being committed in the industrial aluminum biz during this time, here’s an article[1], but a lot of my experience isn’t really documented online or has been lost. What made this really troublesome was that ingots aren’t really sold direct to customers, so often times you have a contractor or sub contractor buying extrusions ($xxxxx)from a megacorp like SAPA(an extruder) who in turn is buying from a metal market($M+). The extruders doesn’t want to deal with material defects from Aluminum that was supposed to be to spec, and their customers can’t really play hardball as the industry is pretty niche-extrusion presses are capital intensive and require a fair amount of sophistication to operate.

They were probably being compelled to do that because of the vast amounts of fraud committed by Chinese Aluminum producers. The purity issue was so bad my anodizing shop started recommending our customers demand mil certs from a reputable manufacturer, like Alcoa or Kaiser, and then specifically clarifying to the extruder that they intended to anodize it; being a chemical process anodizing is very dependent on the metal’s makeup and the extruder knows this.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-fraud-idUSKCN1U...

I hoped someone would have additional data to add, thanks!

Is a scandal at one company evidence for the entire industry in a country?

Is there similar information about other Japanese companies? What about the industry at large? The prevailing sentiment is that Chinese steel has similar issues.

That's a different company.