Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  PART FIVE

  14. THE GAIJIN TEACHERS

  THE JAPANESE HAD ALWAYS been good students. The Japanese way was to find the foreign expert, listen to him, learn everything they could, and then adapt the information to Japanese needs and dimensions. The earliest teachers at Nissan had been Americans, most particularly an extraordinary man named William R. Gorham. In terms of technology, Gorham was the founder of the Nissan motor company. In 1983, sixty-five years after he first arrived in Tokyo and thirty-five years after his death, young Nissan engineers who had never met him spoke of him as if he were a god and could describe in detail his years at the company and his many inventions.

  Gorham was an American original, the inventor and mechanical engineer as missionary. He was a man who loved to tinker in an age when tinkering with mechanical devices was at the center of an exciting and expanding new industrial order. As a boy of fourteen, in 1902, he took a simple engine from a lawnmower and grafted it to a child’s wagon, thus creating his own self-propelled, motorized wagon. Coming to his maturity at the time of World War I, he judged that as an inventor he was too late for the auto industry, and he concentrated on airplanes instead. He developed a water-cooled aircraft engine that he considered a breakthrough, and he was disappointed when American industrialists took little notice of it or him.

  His father, a traveling salesmen, had worked the Orient, selling the Chinese rubber for their bikes and oil for their lamps. He loved to boast that he had sold them two million pounds of rubber erasers before they even had pencils. He had taken his young son William with him on a sales visit to Japan, and the country had made a strong impression on the boy, one that had lasted into adulthood. Frustrated by lack of recognition in the United States, he decided that Japan would be more receptive to his work. He answered an ad run by the Japanese government for engineers to design fighter planes, and in 1918 he took his wife, Hazel, and his two infant sons and moved to Japan. By the time he arrived in Tokyo, the war was over, and the Japanese no longer wanted fighter planes. But, he would later claim, since he didn’t have the money for the voyage home, he and his family stayed on. He liked the society immediately, the civility and subtle courtesies of daily Japanese existence, and he liked being treated as a great American mechanical guru. A Christian Scientist, he approved of Japanese personal qualities: They were industrious, careful, not wasteful, and serious about their work. They were also good at obeying, and Gorham was a man who liked to be obeyed and obeyed quickly.

  Gorham’s airplane engine did not turn out to be a success, and the Japanese aircraft industry was too weak to support him, so Gorham looked for other challenges. He saw the streets filled with rickshaws and decided they were not an acceptable way to travel in the modern age, so he invented the Gorham Motorized Rickshaw, a three-wheeler with a simple engine. It was an immediate success not only in Japan but throughout Southeast Asia. At one point he moved his family to Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main islands, where they lived very simply. At first the local school officials refused to admit the Gorham children, claiming they had no capacity for educating foreigners. But Hazel Gorham was made of stern stuff, and she stared them down, and the school had its first gaijin (foreign) students. On the Gorham boys’ first day of school, it was snowing and bitter cold. When the two little boys arrived, wearing their leather shoes, the principal met them at the door and told them if they were going to attend a Japanese school they would dress like Japanese, and he sent them home to get the wooden getas that all the Japanese children wore. That was their welcome; it was to be an austere, disciplined childhood, both in school and at home.

  Their father, having invented the mechanized rickshaw, then built a diesel engine for Japanese fishing boats. His legend grew. There was nothing, it was said, that this American could not do, and more important, no one that he would turn away. He was a new kind of god, an American mechanical god who had come to help the Japanese. About that time, Yoshisuke Ayukawa, eager to start a Japanese auto industry, got in touch with him. Gorham immediately liked Ayukawa, and as it happened Gorham had already produced his own car, the Gorham-Shiki (or Gorham-style) automobile. It was, said one friend, like two bicycles stapled together with a small motorcycle engine between them. That car was a small success, selling about sixty units, enough to convince Gorham that he had the talent to design a very good workable car. He knew, however, that he lacked the patience and interest to market and sell his car. As early as 1921 he had begun working as a consultant for Ayukawa, and in the mid-twenties he was designing gas engines for boats and farm equipment for him. In the late twenties he started working with Ayukawa to design a small, inexpensive car. At that time the few cars being made in Japan were elaborate and expensive, for the very rich, but Ayukawa had long dreamed of a car like the Model T, which the average citizen of Japan could afford. Gorham responded enthusiastically, for he revered Henry Ford. Gorham’s son later remembered countless family dinner conversations about Ford. No one dared praise a GM car around Gorham; people who bought GM cars were fools. “Too many cooks spoiling that soup,” he would say disdainfully of GM. When Ford was about to unveil the Model A, it was as if Gorham himself were having a baby.

  Gorham and Ayukawa needed a considerable amount of professional help in their venture—Gorham was talented but he could not run an entire automobile factory—and they needed to build a manufacturing line. So Gorham took off for America in 1932, hired Americans to come out and to help and teach the Japanese at every level. Not only would his countrymen be well paid, he emphasized, but their work would be appreciated, and they would be listened to as they had never been before. There was George Motherwell, a specialist in forging, and Harry Marshall, a Ford man, and others. Gorham also wandered around looking for manufacturing equipment. In Detroit in those days companies opened and closed regularly, and Gorham visited the recently defunct Graham-Paige plant, looked it over, and with Ayukawa’s consent purchased its manufacturing line and machinery. Everything was broken down, then packed up and sent to Japan. It all was reassembled in Japan, and Japan had its first auto assembly line. A year later, in 1933, the first Datsun, a car almost completely designed by an American, William Gorham, came off that line, the forerunner of millions of others.

  Of the American car men only Gorham stayed on. He and his family led a Japanese life and ate Japanese food, even though he never learned to speak very much Japanese; the Gorham sons spoke Japanese and played with Japanese kids, particularly the Ayukawa children, to whom Hazel Gorham taught English. Gorham was fond of Ayukawa, a man who understood not just engineering but how to be creative and entrepreneurial within something as clumsy and conservative as a zaibatsu. Ayukawa, in turn, loved Gorham, a man who was afraid of no challenge, tried to do everything perfectly, and wanted remarkably little for himself.

  Gorham went on to invent hundreds of things, many of which were widely used in Japan, but he never made very much money off his inventions, because he was not interested in money. Instead he loved the doing of it, and the value that the Japanese placed on what he did. He took pleasure in being around men who were so passionate about engineering and who wanted to learn everything. He loved the way the Japanese paid attention to everything he said, but he often despaired of them because their manufacturing capability constantly fell short of what he felt they should be able to do. Time after time he would think they were finally ready to do something on their own, and then they would come apart at the critical moment. There was, he often told his sons, an almost fatal lack of confidence on the part of the Japanese. They had at once so much skill and ability and so little confidence that he wondered if they would ever make it into the modern industrial century.

  In the mid-thirties, as the Japanese military rose to power, things changed, and Japan began to pull back inside itself. The military, it became obvious, did not want Nissan building a Japanese people’s car, it wanted trucks instead, and so auto assembly came to a halt. Ayukawa went to Manchuria and played an important role
in the development of the heavy industrial projects that the new imperial Japan wanted there. He asked Gorham to work with him, and for the first time Gorham turned down his friend. (Ayukawa was judged after the war to be a Class A war criminal; he was purged from Nissan, but later, as the governmental policy changed, he managed to spend some time in the Japanese Diet.) The late thirties were a hard time for Gorham; he saw that war was coming, and that he was going to be caught between his two countries. On one of his buying trips back in America he argued Japan’s case with American businessmen. He was opposed to the rise of the Japanese military, but he believed that American pressures on Japan, the trade restrictions, were simply playing into the hands of the jingoists, with nationalism in one country begetting nationalism in the other. It was a sad time.

  In 1940 his older son, William, was studying at Cal Tech, but his younger son, Don, was still in Japan, just finishing Tokyo Imperial University. Gorham took him aside. “Your mother and I,” he said, “have thought about this a lot. We think there’s going to be a war with the United States. Our lives are here. Our friends are here. We would like to live here and die here. This is our choice. We have thought about it a great deal. I am going to take out citizenship soon, but I will wait until you are safely back in America.” Just before Don Gorham returned to the United States, he went to say goodbye to Ayukawa. “As long as Ayukawa’s eyes remain black,” said the older man, meaning that as long as he was alive, “I give you my personal guarantee that nothing will happen to your father.” Young Gorham burst into tears, left Japan, and, like his brother, served with naval intelligence during the war.

  His father did become a Japanese citizen and took a Japanese name, Katsundo Goahamu. (Katsundo meant conqueror, and Donald Gorham thought the name meant William Gorham the conqueror.) He and his wife were put under house arrest after Pearl Harbor, but the gentlest house arrest imaginable; they were allowed maximum privileges, there was no harassment, and they were given double the normal food rations. Though Gorham technically did not work for Nissan anymore, Ayukawa continued to pay his salary throughout the war. There were also constant conferences at the Gorham house between William Gorham and Ayukawa and his younger engineers about how to make better machine tools for Japanese industry—which was, of course, the Japanese military machine. He started by helping design machine tools, and then having taken that first step, he was pulled along in tiny increments. Soon he was designing planes. He rationalized it by stressing to himself that they were only training planes, but the requests for more and more participation never abated. It was all done very skillfully; Ayukawa was under pressure from his superiors, and from time to time he would let Gorham know that unless Gorham did a little more, Ayukawa would be the one who would suffer. It always worked, of course.

  As soon as the war was over, Gorham turned himself in to American authorities and reported very accurately what he had done during the war. He told his son Don that he had been caught up in circumstances beyond his control. He also volunteered to help the Americans should they need technical help in the rebuilding of Japan’s industry. The American authorities decided not to charge him with being a traitor; he had, after all, been a Japanese citizen. Indeed, they were unusually understanding. Within a few months he was working in liaison with MacArthur headquarters on industrial problems. He died in Tokyo in 1949. At the end of his life he was helping old friends at Canon on their new cameras, as part of the preparation for Japan’s first major industrial conquest of America.

  If Gorham had found the Japanese willing students in the prewar days, then his lineal descendants, those Americans who came to Tokyo after the war, found them even more attentive. The defeat at the hands of the Americans, and in particular the obvious superiority of American technology, had proved to the Japanese that they knew nothing and that they had everything to learn. That was their greatest asset, that and the traditional belief that it was quite proper to go to the foreigners, be they Chinese or Westerners, and find out whatever it was that they did better, bring it back, and Japanize it. Starting in the fifties, Nissan, like so many other Japanese companies, began importing experts to Tokyo and exporting teams to America to study what the Americans did and how they did it. America was the land where everything worked. The Americans thus would be the teachers, and the Japanese would be the students. Japan’s only resource was its people, dutiful, obedient, disciplined, educated, eager to restore their nation to greatness. The key to modern greatness was industrial strength. There was no arrogance to the Japanese in those days. If anything they were too humble, too ready to seize on any American and credit him with omniscience. All Americans were experts.

  In 1955 when Donald Stone, a retired engineer from Willys-Overland, was brought to Nissan to lecture on engines, all the Nissan engineers were very excited. Nissan had scouted around carefully and checked Stone out, and there was no doubt that he had excellent credentials, that he was one of the most knowledgeable men on the subject. The Japanese engineers were even more pleased when Stone showed up. Though he was small for an American, almost Japanese in size, he looked the part, rather tweedy and professorial, which was appropriate, because the engineers expected him to run the equivalent of a small university for them. That way they would know all the American secrets.

  They were soon disappointed in Stone. They had expected fifteen lectures in fifteen categories—a lecture on the carburetor, a lecture on the crankshaft, a lecture on the ignition system, and so on. But it became clear that Stone, professorial though he might look, had almost no interest in lecturing them. He appeared bored with his lectures, delivering them in a weary monotone, rushing through them. What he really wanted to do was to go to their factory floor and discover their problems. The Nissan people were about to get a critical lesson in American engineering: The Americans were not very theoretical. Stone, it turned out, was a brilliant teacher, but not of the sort the Japanese expected. He was not a man of theory but a man of practice, and he believed that the best place to learn and to teach was not the classroom but the workplace.

  The Japanese had always heard about American pragmatism, and now they were witnessing it. Every day after he had raced through his lecture Stone called the Japanese around him informally and asked them what their problems were. At first they were shy about speaking up, but then gradually they became less so. They were, after all, engineers speaking to engineers, and Stone was easy to talk to. There was no superiority in his manner. What are your problems? he would ask. Well, a Japanese engineer would say hesitantly, the crankshaft keeps bending. So they would go off to the Yokohama factory where the crankshafts were made, and they would inspect it, and Stone would make them explain what had gone wrong, and then, patiently, he would prod them into coming up with ideas for correcting the problem. He was teaching them that engineering advanced by small degrees, always based upon performance. He was also teaching them that they were better at their jobs than they thought, that all they lacked was confidence. He repeated to them again and again his basic approach: Find out what was wrong, try to understand why it had gone wrong, and then break down the corrective process into modest steps.

  At the time Stone arrived, Nissan was preparing to develop a brand-new engine for a smaller car. The smaller car would be used for domestic consumption and possibly for export, though at the time that prospect seemed distant. The dream of a new Nissan-designed engine was an old one. After the war, as Nissan began to resurrect itself, it had reluctantly concluded that its technology was too limited, its engineers too inexperienced, to design its own engine, and that it would have to find one overseas. Genshichi Asahara, who was both president of Nissan and its senior science executive, had thought first of the Americans, who had been so generous to other struggling Japanese industries, such as steel. But an automotive marriage with the Americans was difficult; their cars were too big, and their engines burned too much gas. Volkswagen was interested in a deal, but Asahara was not. The VW had an air-cooled engine, he pointed out, and Japan
ese engineers would be more familiar with a water-cooled engine. Some thought his reasons were more complicated, that he was reluctant to make another German-Japanese tie-up so soon after the war. Shortly thereafter he chose Austin. In 1952 he went to England to sign the licensing deal. In those days Austin was doing well, and British engineering and manufacturing were admired throughout the world. Asahara took a Nissan executive named Kanichi Tanaka with him. “It will be a little unpleasant going there,” Asahara told Tanaka. “There may be some rudeness. It is not personal. It’s just the British being British.” Tanaka was awed by the size and splendor of the Austin plant. It was grander and more modern than anything he could have imagined. He also was aware of the hatred on the faces of the workers every time he walked through the plant. Looking at those faces, he knew the war was not yet over. But the men from Nissan came away with the rights to the Austin engine, and it was the right one—a 1.5-liter engine, good, solid, and dependable. “Now we have our start,” Asahara told Tanaka on the way home.

  But now Nissan wanted a smaller engine for a smaller car. Yet, only two years after the great strike, the company was still short of funds and short of technological resource. The Nissan engineers asked Stone for his help. “You don’t need a new engine,” Stone said, to their surprise. “You’ve already got the perfect engine for what you want.” Which engine was that? one of the Japanese engineers asked. “The engine you’ve already got,” he answered. “The Austin. All you have to do is to adjust the size. You can use the same basic engine and the same manufacturing line and save yourselves a lot of money. As I understand it, you don’t have a lot of money to throw around.”

  No one believed him, so he began to explain. They had a good basic engine. They need only to change it a little. Stone studied the engine for a few days and recommended that since they wanted to go from a 1500cc engine to a 1000cc, the way to do it would be to shorten the stroke—the distance the piston traveled from one end of its motion to the other. Since the stroke was currently 89mm long, it should be shortened by one third to 59mm. The shorter stroke would create a less powerful engine for a lighter car. It would save them manufacturing costs just as it would save the consumers gas. Stone was adamant about this solution, but no one believed him, because it seemed unlikely that the company could get so much for so little. Stone insisted on a demonstration. They worked on it, cutting the engine down as he suggested, and to their amazement, he was absolutely right. It did everything he said it would, and it allowed them to go into production much sooner than they had anticipated. It saved them a great deal of money. It was named, in his honor, the Stone Engine. It allowed Nissan to compete in the market for smaller cars. It also let Nissan enter America with an engine that could expand, in increments, as the American requirements demanded a larger and larger engine. Having shrunk their basic engine from 1500cc to 1000cc, the Japanese, who had become as practical as Stone had taught them to be, simply took that basic engine and built it back up again.