Faced with rising costs or difficult market conditions, many Japanese companies have improved their prospects by adopting environmentally friendly business strategies, with some going as far as moving into entirely new industry sectors. …New Tech Shinsei Inc., a precision equipment maker in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, has been producing wooden blocks for children’s toys since 2011, using local trees cut for forest thinning. New Tech Shinsei… used to be a subcontractor …producing precision equipment such as print circuit boards for TVs, mobile phones and notebook PCs. …At its factory, a computer-controlled cutting machine automatically carves out pieces of wood into blocks, accurate to one hundredth of a millimeter. …“Compared with plastic blocks ours are actually expensive, but the purely wooden products are very popular,” Kuwabara said.