Actually—and it was not something that the people at Nissan liked to recall in later years—they had had to be pushed to export their cars to America. The first push had already come, a year before the Australian rally, from a man named Nobe Wakatsuki, who worked for a major trading company called Marubeni. (In the company’s own history of its experience in America, Wakatsuki makes only the smallest appearance, without even the mention of his first name.) The role of the trading companies was vital in the world of Japanese commerce. Because Japan was so isolated, physically, psychologically, and linguistically, dealing with foreigners was inordinately painful for most senior Japanese businessmen. They lacked not just the language but, more important, the ability to deal with people who were not Japanese. Thus the Japanese, since they were totally dependent on exports and imports, had created the shosha, or trading company, to act as a middleman between Japanese firms and the great world beyond.
Wakatsuki was a genuine Japanese aristocrat; his grandfather had served as prime minister twice in the prewar period and had been one of the handful of influential civilians who had tried to oppose the rise of Japanese militarism. He had been pushed aside by the military but had remained an adviser to the Emperor during the war. The young Nobe had been close to his grandfather after the war, had taken care of him as he was dying, and had listened to his stories about the rest of the world. Because of that he had grown up less suspicious of foreign ways than the average Japanese. He was a cross-cultural person, extroverted for a Japanese, ebullient and confident, almost, it seemed, incautious. If he was a good and loyal son of Japan, he was also a rather skeptical one. In 1954 the Marubeni trading company had picked him to be its man in Los Angeles. He had already been unusually successful in the United States, arranging, among other things, for the export of American nuclear reactors to Japan, a deal that had surprised the Japanese, who had not expected the Americans to part so readily with such technology. In Los Angeles, looking for new deals to make, Wakatsuki became aware for the first time of the importance of the car in American life. Americans, he decided, began conversations by asking each other first where they lived, and then what kind of car they drove. They seemed quite surprised on meeting him to find out that he did not own a car. A car, he soon learned, was essential not only to getting around in Los Angeles but to a person’s identity as well. Wakatsuki was always looking for a Japanese export product that the Americans would need, something basic but that would occasionally need to be replaced. In Japan such an item was the geta, the Japanese sandal; in Japan everyone needed getas, and eventually they had to be replaced. In America, he realized, the perfect item was the car; everyone had to have a car, and, because it was a rich country, people turned cars in after only three or four years.
On his own he investigated the requirements for importing a car into America. He was surprised to learn how easy it was. In Japan, he knew, the regulations were as thick as a phone book, designed to keep intruders out. The American market, by contrast, appeared blithely open. The only regulation seemed to be that that the cars must have sealed-beam headlights from General Electric. He visited the California Chamber of Commerce and asked about the possibility of bringing Japanese cars to America. “I didn’t know the Japanese made cars,” the man there said. “I thought they got their cars from Jimmy.” Jimmy? Wakatsuki asked. Jimmy who? Jimmy, it turned out, was GM. As he gathered information, he kept feeding it to his Marubeni colleagues back in Tokyo, urging them to get something going. They in turn went to Nissan, and Nissan somewhat suspiciously examined Wakatsuki’s reports.
In the fall of 1957 there was to be an auto show in Los Angeles, and Wakatsuki exhorted Nissan to send some cars. Marubeni was dubious, and so were the Nissan people. A friend of Wakatsuki’s told him, “They are saying, ‘There goes that crazy Nobe again. He’s always too quick.’” But eventually Nissan decided to send two cars and a pickup truck. When Wakatsuki went to the dock to see them come off the ship from Japan, he could not believe his eyes. The car was the ugliest he had ever seen. Is that a car or a black box that moves? he wondered. He turned to a friend of his who had come along, a Nisei Japanese who had once worked for Lincoln, and asked how they would ever be able to sell it. “Nobe,” said his friend, “this is America. The first thing you have to understand is that everyone has the right to try anything. They will always let you try. The other thing you have to understand is that one percent of all Americans are crazy. They like to do something crazy, and so perhaps a few of these will do something very crazy like buying a Japanese car.” The car was displayed at the Los Angeles auto show, and people were fascinated.
“What is a Datsun?” a customer would ask Wakatsuki.
“It’s a Japanese car,” he would answer.
“I didn’t know the Japanese made cars.” Then the customer would open the hood. “That’s an Austin engine,” he would say.
“Yes,” Wakatsuki would answer, “but it’s an Austin engine made in Japan.” Wakatsuki decided to price it the same as the VW bug, but people were resistant. If it was Japanese, they insisted, it had to be cheaply made, and therefore it should not cost as much. Because the styling was old-fashioned, the Nissan people eventually made a virtue out of necessity and sold the Datsun as a classic car. In a way that was what it was. More than even they realized, it was a car from another time. Japanese auto manufacturing had been primitive even before the war; it had just been getting started when the military converted the nascent industry to truck manufacturing. Then American bombs leveled most of the plants. In the postwar years the factories still had dirt floors, and there were apprentices whose job it was to spray down the floors every day to keep down the dust. The manufacturing process was very similar to that of an American factory in the twenties. In the rest of the world, highly automated machines were starting to be introduced, but buying them was out of the question for Nissan. However, Nissan’s labor was cheap. The company now had absolute control over the workplace, and thus not only a skilled work force but a hungry one. Nissan could use this advantage to keep itself competitive while it earned the hard currency to invest in modern machinery.
In 1958 the Japanese began their assault upon the strongest of American markets. They approached that decision cautiously. They would send a car and a pickup truck to America to be tested under American conditions. The car that Nissan intended to experiment with was a closer relative of the first Gorham car, mechanically, than anyone wanted to admit. It was supposed to be a passenger car, but it was more like a taxi, and indeed in Japan its main customers were not ordinary consumers, who could not afford cars, but taxi companies. It was for function, not pleasure. The car was not built for the highway, with acceleration, speed, and comfort; in Japan highways barely existed. It was built for survival in the city, to be driven on some of the worst streets in the world by drivers who drove with such ferocity that their fellow citizens called them kamikazes, after the suicide pilots who had crashed their planes into American ships during the war. It was designed for short hauls on bad roads. Its brakes were not very good, because no one ever got going fast enough to need truly strong brakes. It lasted forever.
With the car and the pickup Nissan also sent the first of what were to be hundreds of teams of engineers to study American cars and the American market. It was the beginning of a major invasion. The job for the four men on that first team was to study the Datsun as it performed not under simulated conditions but under real American driving conditions and to see if Nissan could make enough minor adjustments to produce a viable car for export. The four were among Nissan’s best young engineers. One member, Kuniyuki Tanabe, was not only a smart, up-and-coming engineer but related by marriage to Kawamata, Nissan’s president. That gave the team extra leverage; it was a powerful connection never discussed but always felt.
The four men were acutely aware of their car’s weaknesses. It was not really a car, thought Tanabe, but a truck. It had an exceedingly heavy frame, and the steel of the body was too thick. The Jap
anese steel industry might be improving, but it was not yet sophisticated, and it lacked the ability to bring steel down to the desired thinness, six or seven tenths of a millimeter; the Datsun’s was a full millimeter, which made the car heavy. It was also awkward and slow.
They soon realized how poor they and their country were, and by contrast, how rich America was. Each man had $15 a day for expenses. That had to cover everything. Even in the pre-inflation days of 1958, $15 was very little money, and each of them kept a chart showing how much money he had spent and how much he had left. For the first few nights they stayed at what seemed to them a good hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the Biltmore, but then to their dismay they found it cost a great deal of money, so they had to move to a fleabag that cost only $6 and seemed to be inhabited largely by pickpockets. They might have been absolutely terrified, four Japanese who spoke barely a word of English, but they had each other. Each would help and protect and comfort the others. Each would lift the others up. Whatever the hardships, they were always shared. It was a theme that was critical to the success of the emerging Japan, people sharing both their strengths and weaknesses. None of the four was to use the trip to America to get ahead of the others; the career of each would succeed only to the degree that the group succeeded.
The language was a constant problem. They had all taken English lessons, but it had been too hard. Tanabe had taken his at the end of his regular twelve-hour day at Nissan, and he had never managed to stay awake. Now, in America, he, like his colleagues, always got things wrong. Once Tanabe was doing some test driving in Nevada and a state trooper signaled him to pull over. It was just what Tanabe had feared, a confrontation with American authorities, and so he began patiently in his broken English to prove to this awesome symbol of American law that he was a good Japanese. He started to explain every single thing he had done in America since his arrival, until finally the trooper, impatient with all this incomprehensible blather, yelled, “For God’s sake, go on and get going,” and waved him on. Ordering meals was an ordeal. Whenever Tanabe wanted a small orange juice at breakfast, a large tomato juice would arrive. They never knew what they were going to get to eat, and they were often bothered by the richness of the food and the sheer size of American meals. Once Tanabe and his colleague Shin Maki stopped at a roadside grill, looked at the menu, and decided to order the day’s special, ham steak. They were appalled when an immense slab of meat arrived. They knew immediately that they had been cheated. In Japan, ham, which was expensive, was very thinly sliced. “Excuse me,” Tanabe said irately to the waitress, “but we ordered ham.” A short, heated discussion ensued. Soon the two Japanese were ushered back into the kitchen and shown a huge ham. It was where the steak had come from. They had simply never seen meat sliced that thick.
It was the first time that any of the four had ever felt poor. That was the oddest sensation of all; they lived in what was manifestly a poor country, yet the poverty was so evenly distributed that it seemed not a judgment on them as individuals but, instead, a larger social condition. But in America, how little they actually owned and possessed came home to them, in endless ways, whether it was in the daily rationing of their meager allowance or professionally in the constant sense of America’s industrial opulence and their own pathetic accomplishments.
They were always aware of that gap between their poverty and America’s richness. Teiichi Hara, the senior member of the group, sometimes felt overwhelmed by the scope of the world of automobiles in America. Here he was, trying to test his two little Japanese vehicles, and around him was nothing but cars, thousands of them, all bigger and faster than any he had ever seen, all roaring past him on the grandest highways he had ever seen. The Americans driving those cars would honk their horns angrily when his little Japanese car could not accelerate from the ramp onto the freeway fast enough. Hara was stunned by the impossibility of his task. Even as he and his friends were fumbling to improve their little car, the Americans, he was sure, were out there learning even more on their brilliant test tracks in Detroit.
Tanabe, who was younger, felt differently. It was like coming to America with a toy car, he knew, but rather than being intimidated by American automotive muscle he was thrilled by how much there was to learn. Tanabe was an auto engineer, and for a man of that profession this was Mecca. It was the country of Gorham, and he was a disciple of Gorham. He had never met him, but he knew the date and place of Gorham’s birth, he knew Gorham’s middle name and the inventions he had brought to Nissan, even the names of his sons, whom he had never, of course, met. Tanabe knew that when Gorham had designed the first Datsun, he had drawn up the parts himself and sent the designs off to be machine-tooled, and that when the parts had arrived they had—it was almost miraculous—fitted together perfectly. But it was more than Gorham, it was that this was America, and America was the land of machinery, all machinery, but principally automobiles. He wanted to make cars like the American cars and the only way to do that was to come and study them. Visiting America, he decided, was like going to the greatest auto university in the world. It was there every day in front of you, the size and the strength and the love of cars. There was so much room, and so much power. He felt intoxicated by the sight and noise of cars. But there was so little time to take it all in. The four had only one month in America. They needed more time, they knew, but time cost money, hard currency, and there was almost none of that. What little they had had been earned from the sale of those buses to Thailand.
Since there were no test tracks in Japan, they had to do their testing on the American highways. Their problems, they soon realized, were how to stabilize the car, how to cut down on the vibration at higher speeds, and how to improve the brakes. They were engineers, not mechanics, and they desperately needed a mechanic, because they had to fiddle with the engine every day. But there hadn’t been enough money to send over a mechanic. Wakatsuki had found them a small garage, but they had a terrible time trying to explain their very precise technical requirements in English. Their manuals were not in English, and finally they began to do everything themselves. Day after day they would run the car and then come back and tinker with the differential gear, trying to keep the engine from revving too fast. They found themselves taking the differential gear apart and then putting it back together. They had been away from that kind of work a very long time, and it was a little humiliating, Tanabe thought, that men who thought themselves skilled as engineers could be so incompetent as mechanics. An American mechanic who worked with them taught them how to improve the adhesion on the brakes, how to regrind them and make them apply evenly so that the car would not swerve. At times Tanabe felt sure the American mechanic was wrong, and he realized later that he had automatically condescended to the American, reacting against the idea of receiving technical lessons from so uneducated a man. But somehow the mechanic was always right, and Tanabe was surprised that a man with so little technical training could know so much. Slowly their car got better, its acceleration improved, and it began to handle the American highways.
The day that Tanabe knew that somehow there would be a chance for them in America came right at the end of that hectic and often frightening month. It was the day they went up against the Volkswagen. They were test driving every day on the California highway system. There was one stretch on the San Diego Freeway outside of Bakersfield that they particularly liked because it was a God-given test track, a long climb up a hill and thus a prolonged challenge to the power of the engine, and very hard on the gears. On this particular day, as they were approaching that stretch, a Volkswagen with two Americans in it pulled alongside the Datsun with the two Japanese inside. The Americans stared at the Datsun. Tanabe, who was driving, did not like their looks, or their expression, which seemed to say that the Datsun was unworthy. The two cars drove alongside each other for a few moments, the Americans still staring, and then, as happens at a moment like this, Tanabe, angry and frustrated, made it a race. Eventually, he thought, you have to make a try. Back and
forth they went, one car taking a little lead and then the other, until they came to the big slope, not a steep hill but steady and punishing for a small car. Tanabe decided to go to third gear and give it all the power he had. Gradually the Datsun began to pull away from the VW. At first it was a small edge and then the length of the car, and then the VW began to slip back. Tanabe did not wave out the window, but he did not take his eye off the rearview mirror until the VW disappeared. We can beat the Volkswagen, he kept thinking, we can beat the Volkswagen. What a good engine, what a tough little engine. Then it dawned on him: If we can beat the Volkswagen in a country where people are still lined up to buy it, we will be all right in America, we poor little Japanese.
They were all getting ready to return to Tokyo for their final report, which would recommend that with some upgrading the Datsun had a chance in America, when the accident took place. Hara was driving with Maki in the Datsun, and Tanabe was right behind them in a borrowed VW. Suddenly a big American car in front of Hara hit its brakes. The Datsun smashed into the American car, and the VW smashed into the Datsun. Maki’s head went through the windshield, and he lost two teeth. One snapped off at the gumline, and one broke in half. A California highway patrolman showed up and seemed a bit irritated when he found that Hara did not have a driving license. But someone telephoned Nobe Wakatsuki, and Wakatsuki, who seemed to have an absolute genius for fixing things that went wrong in America, made a few phone calls, and Hara did not have to go to prison. The patrolman suggested, however, that Hara never drive on California roads again. Hara, the shiest of the group, was very embarrassed about what had happened and thought it an occasion of considerable shame. He had dishonored Nissan. So chagrined was he that it was decided that they would make no mention of it when they returned to Tokyo.
Reckoning Page 38