Major machinery maker Kubota Corp. will pay up to 46 million yen in compensation to people who lost relatives to asbestos-linked diseases or who suffered from such illnesses after living near an asbestos-contaminated factory here. Kubota's move is the first time for a firm to establish its own compensation system for sufferers of asbestos-linked diseases who were not employees... Kubota, however, has not admitted a causal relationship between the factory and the illnesses, but said it decided to pay because it could not rule out the possibility the toxic substance spread from the plant and thus could not deny that nearby residents may have been affected. "We have a moral responsibility. And we also feel a social responsibility," Kubota President Daisuke Hatakake told reporters Monday.