Made In Japan

by Akio Morita

  The spirit of competition in Japan even pervades the government ministries. To outsiders it may appear that the Japanese government is one smooth-functioning organization. It is composed of many very well-trained, intelligent graduates of all the elite universities, and Japan may have the most highly trained and competent bureaucracy in the world today. Those bureaucratic experts are often jealous of their territorial j authority, and often there are battles between bureaus or sections within the ministries and between the ministries.

  Our newspaper competition and our television competition have caused severe problems. The quality of television programming has deteriorated to low levels because of the competition to air the most popular shows. In the newspaper field, cool heads have solved one problem but caused others. Because we have almost total literacy and because our country is all in one time zone, we are able to have national newspapers, and so the competition for news is very keen. The major newspapers have airplanes and helicopters, and some even have photographic darkrooms aboard so that the photographers can process their film while the plane is on the way back to Tokyo from a faraway assignment. Tokyo’s Asahi Shimbun used our filmless Mavica camera at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and transmitted the pictures from each event over a phone line from a Sony cellular telephone installed in a car the Asahi team used to visit all the major venues. Asahi beat every other paper with these instant, digitalized pictures. This was an experiment that worked much to our satisfaction. I didn’t go to the Olympics, but I enjoyed the pictures.

  The eagerness for news and the large numbers of reporters assigned to cover any event, however, cause big problems for everybody. Reporters and TV cameramen often camp overnight outside the homes of persons in the news and sometimes harass people who come and go. Sometimes the sheer numbers are staggering. At all the government ministries and major agencies, reporters who normally cover the activities and the persons in those ministries have established clubs that set the rules of coverage and conduct. This tends to stifle “enterprising” reporting, but if hundreds of reporters all zero in on one cabinet minister or one set of bureaucrats to get a story, nobody would ever get a night’s sleep.

  Despite some of its darker aspects, competition, in my opinion, is the key to the development of industry and its technology, and I think that is true in the United States as well as in Japan. Any interference with free and open competition should be minimum. In that respect, the Reagan administration’s new approach to the antitrust laws has been most welcome in bringing back a reasonable approach to the problems that is more in line with the realities of the economy. We in Japan must also contribute our effort to lift some unnecessary restrictions and limitations on the free functioning of the marketplace. Obsolete and meaningless business customs and practices must be done away with. I have always challenged conventionalism I and I will continue to do so.

  But I would like to give one word of caution to my American friends. American diplomacy was once described by George Kennan as “legalistic and moralistic.” I think it is still true today. Each country has a different historical and cultural background, just as individuals do, and to assume that one can apply American ideas and American legal doctrine everywhere in the world, as some Americans seem to think, would be wrong.

  What I am getting at is that often the competition we face for markets leads to misunderstanding. That is why I have always advocated the idea of more personal contacts among top business executives from around the world. Lawyers often advise us not to get together, fearing that the possibility of such a meeting might be used to incriminate us in an antitrust case. I do appreciate their advice, but there is nothing in antitrust law that says business executives cannot and should not get together and know each other a bit better. With appropriate safeguards provided, sponsorship by governments, and public availability of the minutes, such meetings would create the basis of better understanding and should be encouraged. An outstanding example is the ongoing series of meetings between British and Japanese electronics industry associations, now in its nineteenth year. Certainly in the meetings of the so-called Wiseman’s Group, and later the Japan-U.S. Businessmen’s Conference, and in the meetings of the U.S.-Japan Advisory Commission in 1984, important steps were made toward developing mutual understanding.

  But more effort is needed to find broader understanding. I was interested to see the outraged American reaction when the fourth year of so-called “voluntary” automobile restraints was announced in 1985. After Japanese makers for three years held down shipments of cars to the U.S., officials of the administration in Washington, including the U.S. trade representative, said that a fourth year of restraints would not be necessary, because the American industry had got its “breathing space.” It had retooled and its cars were now competitive.

  The sizes of the bonuses to American auto executives for 1984 were so big that there were editorials in the papers calling them nothing short of scandalous. But General Motors and Ford were asking for huge increases in the number of Japanese cars they could sell under their brand names in the United States. The smaller Japanese companies that had very low quotas under the old restraints were eager to see the restraints end so they could begin to ship more cars to their customers in the U.S. Wise people in MITI saw that if there were no restraints at all, everybody would begin shipping as many cars as possible, and the result could be chaos and anger in the United States if the exports became torrential. So the Japanese government decided to have another year of quota restraint, and raised the numbers by about 24 percent, a considerable increase, but knowing the competitive nature of our own people, probably lower than the number they would have shipped if they were not under any restraint at all. This increase gave bigger quotas to small companies whose cars were being sold by American companies as what are called “captive imports” (the Mitsubishi cars made for Chrysler, the Mazdas made for Ford, the Isuzus made for GM).

  The announcement caused a great commotion and outrage in Detroit and the industrial Midwest. Some U.S. newspapers ran editorials saying the Japanese should continue to abide by the old restraint quotas, even if there were no formal curbs in effect. Congressmen were screaming. They didn’t understand the Japanese competitive mentality. And then to our surprise, some American automobile makers began to complain— not because Japan was shipping too many cars, but because they were not getting enough of an increase in the number of the cars they import! The shipments under the increased restraint quotas for Japanese cars gave Chrysler a 70-percent increase in the number of Mitsubishi-built cars they could import over the previous year’s quota, and GM got a 211.8-percent increase in Suzuki cars and a 140-percent increase in Isuzu vehicles. Both these two companies and Ford increased their capacity to supply Japanese cars to their American customers. It became Japan’s turn to wonder what was going on. Why are congressmen and others complaining about Japanese competition when American automobile companies themselves are increasing their purchases and even complaining that they cannot get enough cars?

  Competing in a market we understand, such as our own, Japanese companies sometimes misbehave with their cutthroat tactics. Companies will go after an increase in share of market by cutting prices to the bone, sometimes to the point where there is no chance of anybody making a profit on the product. The winner for market share becomes the one who can afford to lose money in the market the longest. Such practices have caused misunderstanding and hard feelings in business circles in some countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, where Japanese companies have brought their competitive tactics with them in disregard of the system of their host country. But in the case of automobiles, American companies are participating in Japanese practices, and if they do not know the market and the consumers best, I don’t know who does.

  TECHNOLOGY: Survival Exercise

  I

  We Japanese are obsessed with survival. Every day, literally, the earth beneath our feet trembles. We live our daily lives on these volcanic islands with the constant
threat not only of a major earthquake, but also of typhoons, tidal waves, savage snowstorms, spring deluges. Our islands provide us with almost no raw materials except water, and less than a quarter of our land is livable or arable. Therefore, what we have is precious to us. And that is why we learned to respect nature, to conserve, to miniaturize, and to look toward technology as a means of helping us survive. We Japanese do not think of ourselves as deeply religious people, although we are; we tend to believe that God resides in everything. We are Buddhists, Confucianists, Shintoists, and Christians, but we are also very pragmatic. We often joke that most Japanese are born Shinto, live a Confucian life, get married Christian-style, and have a Buddhist funeral. We have our rites and customs and festivals steeped in centuries of religious tradition, but we are not bound by taboos and feel free to try everything and seek the best and most practical ways of doing things.

  One of the most significant value concepts that we have cherished from ancient times is a term that does not bear simple literal translation, mottainai, which can be pronounced “moat-tie-nigh.” It is a key concept, one that may help explain a great deal about Japan, the Japanese people, and our industry. It is an expression that suggests that everything m the world is a gift from the Creator, and that we should be grateful for it and never waste anything. Literally, mottainai means “irreverent,” “impious,” but more deeply it carries the connotation of a sacrilege against heaven. We Japanese feel that all things are provided as a sacred trust and actually are only loaned to us to make the best use of. To waste something is considered a kind of sin. We even use the expression mottainai to refer to the profligate waste of something simple, even water or paper. It is no wonder that we have developed this concept that goes beyond mere frugality or conservation; it is a religious concept. I know that the concept appears to a degree in the West and elsewhere in the East, but in Japan it carries special meaning. Struggling for survival under the constant threat of harsh times and natural calamity, attempting to produce goods with a minimum of raw materials, both became a way of life for the Japanese, and so the wasting of anything was considered shameful, virtually a crime.

  In the old days when Japan was completely isolated, we had to handle any calamity by means of our own resources. We had food shortages and earthquakes, and fires burned the wooden houses of our cities many times, forcing people to start rebuilding their lives from scratch. We became skilled at crisis management. Some people who were in Japan just after the war marveled at how the Japanese went about rebuilding the cities that in 1945 were reduced to huge fields of rubble by the bombings. More than one person has written that we seemed to go about it as though another natural disaster had struck, as it had on September 1, 1923, when the great Kanto earthquake jolted Tokyo ferociously, toppled its tall buildings, and set fire to hundreds of thousands of homes. The incendiary and high-explosive bombings of World War II did similar damage.

  I remember walking from our temporary factory in the Shirokiya department store to Tokyo Station every evening after work in 1946, a walk of about a mile, and no buildings were standing, nothing but a few chimneys and many steel safes of the shops and factories that once filled the area. For a mile in any direction, you could see only waste. Thousands of B-29 Superfortresses had dropped incendiaries on the major cities, going after the concentration of industry there—a planning mistake of the Japanese. Almost half of our aircraft engines were produced in one city. All of the airplanes were assembled in two cities, and 90 percent of the electron tubes in three cities.

  But in both eras, after natural and man-made disaster, the city was rebuilt with a speed that amazed even some Japanese. Accustomed to dealing with privation and natural calamity, some families after the war managed to move into the bomb shelters of their burned-out homes, while others built shacks using corrugated iron, cardboard, and wood scraps for shelter. They accepted their misfortune as something that had to be endured but no longer than was absolutely necessary, and they immediately went to work rebuilding, ingeniously fashioning cooking stoves from rubble and odd bits of shattered metal, patching together remnants of usable material from among the charred ruins. In rebuilding the city, new ways were sought and new technologies employed in an attempt to learn how better to survive the next calamity, whatever and whenever that might be.

  The Imperial Hotel, designed by the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, withstood the shock of the 1923 earthquake (in fact, it was formally opened only hours before the quake), and his techniques were studied and emulated. Advanced construction technology was the result, and that technology is being improved constantly in earthquake laboratories at Tsukuba University and elsewhere in Japan today. In these labs earthquakes are simulated and are used in tests of building foundations and construction methods. With the aid of computers, simulations are possible that were never available before and, as a result, Japanese building technology is probably the best in the world. It has to be, because it is so much a matter of survival.

  We are also great savers, and not just savers of money, although we are pretty good at that, too. When I first went to the United States I was astonished to see Americans throwing away their newspapers. I could hardly believe that after a quick glance at the headlines over breakfast they would just throw the paper aside or into the garbage. Some people saved them until the bundle got big and then carried the bundle to the trash heap. They would save the day’s TV program schedule page and throw out the rest. I was also astounded at the sheer size of the newspapers; in Japan the newspapers are much thinner. I had never seen anything like the Sunday edition of The New York Times, which sometimes weighs several pounds. After a while in America it seemed almost natural to throw papers away.

  While I was in New York, I met a Japanese who had been in the States for quite a while and he confided to me that he was embarrassed about a problem that he could not solve and with which he thought I could help him. Of course I said I would be glad to help him. “What is your problem?” I asked. But he wouldn’t tell me.

  “You must come to my room,” he said. So I went to his room and discovered the problem immediately. The tiny place was almost completely filled with newspapers—stacked up against the walls, under the bed, filling the closets. He couldn’t bring himself to throw them away and he didn’t know what to do with them. I arranged to have them hauled away, to his great relief, and I explained that mottainai was not a concept ingrained as widely in American society as in Japan.

  The literacy rate being what it is, Japanese magazines, books, and newspapers proliferate. Our use of paper extends from religious objects, art, and books to coverings for lamps and windows, to wrapping and packaging and decoration of many kinds, and all of this makes Japan the second biggest producer of paper in the world, after the United States, turning out over one hundred and ninety million tons a year. Yet Japan has the highest recycling rate in the world—in 1984 we collected 50 percent for recycling. (In the U.S. the figure is 27 percent; in France, 34 percent; in West Germany, 38 percent; in Holland, 46 percent; and in the U.K., 28 percent.) One old-fashioned but effective method we use is to have the paper dealer go through the neighborhoods periodically with a loudspeaker on his truck or cart collecting old newspapers and magazines and giving toilet paper in exchange. That might look a little odd on the streets of New York, but it would probably be a wise thing to do. We also recycle large amounts of aluminum, steel, glass, zinc, copper, lead. People in Japan very loyally separate their garbage to help make recycling work.

  Because we have always had to practice conservation for survival, we Japanese feel it makes more sense and is more economical to heat a body with a footwarming brazier or electric heater than to use all the energy it takes to heat an entire room (or house) in order to make one or two persons comfortable. Even the hot Japanese bath serves the whole family (the washing is actually done outside the bath), bringing body temperatures up in the winter to easily survive dinner in a drafty Japanese-style house before getting into warm be
dding for the night. In America huge houses are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer for the convenience of a few people, and to the older generation of Japanese like me this seems like a waste, but we are doing it in Japan now, too. Sometimes we must take our coats off in the winter because it is so hot in many offices and we must put them on in the summer because of the air-conditioning. After the second oil embargo, Japanese prime minister Masayoshi Ohira tried to get Japanese businessmen and bureaucrats to wear a kind of modified summer safari jacket to work instead of a shirt and tie and jacket, so that building temperatures would not have to be brought down too far, and he even tried it himself for a while. He even posed for the press in what he called his “energy-saving suit,” but the Japanese have too much of a sense of formality to be quite so casual and it never caught on. But office building temperatures were adjusted to save energy, and people just sweated more. At Sony we make it a point never to overheat or overcool any of our buildings, and we have a sign at our main office explaining our policy to visitors.

  Up until the first oil embargo, our economic growth seemed to many Japanese to be based on the assumption that oil resources were unlimited, that all we had to do was go out and find them, and that with these resources we could expand our industries indefinitely. We learned once again the meaning of mottainai when the oil crisis came. But we also learned how to apply the principles that underlie the expression, and today with a much-expanded economy we use less crude oil, coal, and natural gas than we did in 1973 because we have learned how to be efficient.

  The ability of Japanese to work together came to Japan’s aid at the time of the oil crises. Japan was then and is now almost 100 percent dependent on others for oil. And so this oil became precious to us and ways to conserve it were foremost in our minds. All Japanese industry was charged with the responsibility of conserving, or of devising ways to use less energy in our factories, and was challenged to make products that would use less energy. Actually this was right down our alley. Ibuka had been a fanatic about low power consumption; it is one of the main things that led him to want to use the transistor.