Reckoning
Page 54
Tanaka was a perfect reflection of the middle-class surge taking place in his country. For it was 1964 that marked Japan’s debut as a middle-class society. Probably Japan even during the hard times of the forties and fifties was much more middle-class than the average Westerner realized—poor in the fruits of the middle-class life, perhaps, but rich in its social structure and its ambitions. But now the fruits were available too. For twenty years the entire nation had sacrificed. The results, in industries like steel, had been evident not just to the Japanese but to any Westerner paying attention, and now the domestic economy was showing signs of great vibrancy. 1964 was for the Japanese a benchmark year. It was the year the Olympics were held in Tokyo, in effect a national coming-out party for a nation ravaged both by war and by the national sense of shame that had followed defeat. With the Olympics, Japan was being accepted back into the family of nations. It was the year that Japan confirmed its new international reputation for efficiency and quality instead of cheapness and shoddiness.
The prospect of hosting the Olympics had dominated the Japanese imagination for more than a year before the games themselves opened. Buildings went up in Tokyo, and highways were built on a massive scale. For a time, in the early days of the construction, the city looked once again as if it had been torn asunder. Gerry Curtis, then a young graduate student of twenty-four, later a distinguished Japanologist at Columbia, remembered that year with special affection. A foreigner moving around Tokyo in those days, he recalled, could almost feel the swelling confidence of the Japanese. It was not just the Olympics, he remembered, but the fact that the city’s first skyscraper was being built at the same time, the Kasumigaseki building; every day at lunch-time scores of Japanese would show up at the building site, many of them having ridden the subway vast distances simply to marvel at this rarest of edifices, a skyscraper that was Japanese. Clearly this was additional proof that Japan could indeed become a modern and great nation.
Everywhere that year there were construction teams and cranes and bulldozers and traffic hassles. Then almost miraculously it was done, and, even more miraculously, right on schedule. The Olympics buildings were completed, a superhighway now cut through the center of the city, and the bullet train, the fastest and most comfortable train in the world, connected Tokyo to Osaka. The thousands of doubting gaijin who arrived for this particular athletic festival were stunned by the efficiency and courtesy with which they were treated, but no one was more impressed than the Japanese themselves. It was an electric moment for them; they were amazed by their own performance, and they became in that moment remarkably un-Japanese. They welcomed the foreigners and embraced them. The gaijin were all right, the gaijin seemed to approve of Japan, Because television sets in the home were still relatively rare, people gathered in bars to watch the games, and foreigners like Curtis found themselves hugged and toasted and virtually unable to buy a drink in this outpouring of Japanese pleasure. Given how uncomfortable most Japanese were with foreigners, it was most unnatural behavior. It was as if three centuries of reserve had dissolved. What he was observing was the entrance of a nation into twentieth-century affluence.
For Tanaka and his fellow workers at Nissan it was just as well that there was some material reward, for this was exactly the time that the company underwent the single most difficult challenge in its modernization. It went to two shifts a day. Orders were increasing at a remarkable rate, but the plant facilities were limited. The only solution was to do what companies in other industrialized nations did—operate on more than one shift. Shioji understood this sort of thing. When he was in America, he had visited American auto plants and was amazed to see that the Americans ran their factories not just sixteen hours a day but on occasion twenty-four. Shioji found that very impressive, that there were regular night shifts. What was even more remarkable was that the American workers did not seem to mind.
But the Japanese minded a great deal. It was mainly a matter of housing. In America a man working the night shift suffered a certain amount of social hardship in that his hours did not coincide with the hours of most other human beings. But at least he had a bedroom that could be sealed off from the rest of the family, so that he could sleep during the daytime hours. In Japan the houses were small, the walls were thin, and rooms often served two functions; a room could be a parlor during the day and a bedroom at night. How could a Japanese worker on the night shift sleep during the day with the rest of the family going about its business in the very same room? There were simply too many people in too small a space, and there was almost nothing that could be done about it. Housing was Japan’s great national problem and America’s great blessing. Food was no longer scarce for the Japanese by the mid-sixties; nutritionally the two nations were moving toward parity. But in housing, the richness of America and the comparative poverty of Japan were reflected. Shioji had visited the homes of workers in Detroit and was surprised to see how well ordinary people lived. They all seemed to have big kitchens filled with dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers, and freezers. They all had dining rooms where nobody dined, and they all seemed to have dens with pool tables. The Americans took their housing for granted, he thought. Even in Europe workers lived in small, though comfortable, apartments. But Japan lacked the resources and the space for large, expensively built apartments. Its housing was small and flimsy. Normally that was not a problem, for the Japanese accepted limits, but the need to work at night and sleep during the day would cause acute disruption.
Shioji, told by Kawamata that Nissan had to go to two shifts, ran into immediate trouble with his own men. He pointed out that it was the Americans who had pioneered in the use of multiple shifts. His workers refused to believe it. No civilized country, they insisted, would permit its workers to be so mistreated. Shioji tried to explain how the Americans worked their system, but even his top aides bristled. Americans, they replied, work too hard, and we do not want to be like them. (Shioji thought of that with some irony twenty years later, when Americans decided that it was the Japanese who worked too hard.) They argued, and Shioji told them they would have to try it, that it was not a matter of choice, that the only way Nissan could become a major car manufacturer was with two shifts. The investment in machinery was such that it could not sit idle for two thirds of the day. He explained, and they listened, but they did not accept what he said.
Everyone hated the early experiments. No one could sleep. There were always children in the room, making noise. The schedule of mealtimes was upset. Even men as tolerant and durable as Tanaka, who believed in work, believed in the company, and believed in Shioji, resisted. When Tanaka was at work he wanted to be asleep, and when he was asleep he wanted to be at work. He was always tired. When he rode the train instead of driving, he often fell asleep on the train and went right past his stop to the end of the line. Then he would have to ride all the way back, trying not to fall asleep again. Food was always a problem. He was either too hungry or not hungry at all. Sometimes he ate four times a day. His stomach began to give him trouble. He tried not to be cross with his children. He was aware that his wife was working very hard with the children, trying to keep them quiet. He would come home from work early in the morning. The children, just getting up, would be noisy. It was just becoming bright out; he could not sleep, but he knew it was his duty to sleep.
He finally complained to Shioji. He was embarrassed to be doing that, but all of his friends felt the same way. Nissan and the union went back and forth on it for more than four years, trying to find a way that might work. They tried alternate weeks, and then alternating every two weeks, and then alternating every month. No one liked any of the arrangements. They tried three weeks of day and one week of night shifts and no one liked that either. Then they tried paying 50 percent more for the night shift, and it barely soothed the anger. Nothing seemed to work. Shioji had never seen such a reaction among good workers. He decided after about three years of experimenting that there was not any way that would be satisfactory.
24. THE PIONEER
IN EARLY 1960, YUTAKA KATAYAMA, who two years before had forced Nissan to enter the auto rally in Australia and then led the team to victory, was told to look at Nissan’s operations in California. The job was as much banishment as reward. After his win in Australia and his triumphal year as a national hero, the company had no job for him, for he was not really a company man. His old job as advertising manager had been given away to a union loyalist. There was no place for him in Tokyo, and he was not the kind of person to accept a lesser job. Kyoichi Harashina, his friend and sponsor, had lost out in a power struggle to Kawamata and been exiled to Nissan Diesel. Katayama’s future looked bleak. Another friend in the Nissan hierarchy, trying to help him, suggested that he be sent to the United States to survey Nissan’s brand-new American endeavor. It was an unimportant task at the time, so no one objected. He was assigned on a temporary basis, without his family.
Katayama knew that he was being banished, but he was delighted nonetheless. What his superiors thought was his exile he thought of as his liberation. He had been to America once before, as a student, sent by his father to expand his horizons, and he had loved it. He had been struck even as a boy by the freedom that Americans, even young Americans, enjoyed. They always seemed to be able to make their own decisions. Even the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans who were second-generation, were less dutiful; they were also open, like the Americans, given to telling sudden, impulsive truths about themselves. That startled him at first, but he soon became comfortable with the greater personal candor. Now, going back as a grown man and living in Los Angeles, he was struck even more by the freedom in America and the sense of possibilities. Americans believed they could do whatever they wanted, the way they wanted, when they wanted. The lack of ceremony and formality, symbolized by the absence of blue suits, cheered him. In Japan, if you were to transact serious commerce, you wore a blue suit. If you were not entitled to wear a blue suit, you wore laborer’s work clothes. There seemed to be no middle ground. But in America and particularly in California, there was no telling what a man did by looking at his clothes. The head of a company, he soon found out, was likely to be wearing an open-collared sports shirt while the fastidious man in suit and tie might well be a relatively minor clerk. Katayama, who had no desire to wear blue suits himself and hated dealing with a world of blue suits, was relieved. Here men dressed for the office and for the golf course in the same way.
In addition, and most miraculously, it did not seem to matter to the Americans whether he was a Japanese or not; what mattered to them was what he was selling and what the terms were: Was it a good deal? An American trying to do business in Japan, he was sure, would never have found so many doors open as Katayama was finding open to him. In Japan the cultural and bureaucratic barriers to helping a foreigner were high, as were the innate suspicions of what a foreigner was up to. The only legitimate role for a gaijin in Japan was to teach English to Japanese. But America seemed to welcome foreigners. Yutaka Katayama, to his amazement, found himself more at home in California than he had been in Tokyo. Soon the American job became a permanent one. No one else seemed eager to go to America, that alien, often terrifying place, so he was placed in charge of Nissan’s operations in the Western United States. He sent for his family. What was supposed to be a brief tour lasted seventeen years.
He was poor in America at first, barely able to survive on his salary, yet he knew that every dollar of hard currency he was spending represented real sacrifice for the company. To save money he developed an economical system for having his regional salesmen report in: They called every day at certain prescribed hours by long-distance phone; if the phone rang three times and then stopped, it meant that the salesman had nothing to report. It was typical of their early operation. Every penny mattered.
Katayama’s big problem in the early days was that the car he was selling, the Datsun, was simply terrible, crude and underpowered. No one knew it better than his salesmen, who called Datsuns “mobile coffins” because of the unbearable heat inside the cars. There was no real heater; the car was heated involuntarily by the engine, and anyone who drove all day in a hot climate, such as the American Southwest, would get baked. This was merely one of its deficiencies. There were many others, none of which Tokyo would admit to.
But Tokyo was beginning to send engineers to America to modify the car for American requirements. They came in small study groups known as U (for United States) teams. Katayama pounced on these engineers, relentlessly indoctrinating them in his view of the Datsun’s shortcomings and the need for improvements, creating allies for the debates he was already carrying on with the home office. He worked them over so hard that they called their sessions with him Katayama University. He thought the task ahead was much more difficult than Tokyo realized, and he had already found Tokyo very slow to accept the gravity of its problems in America. (Frustrated by Tokyo’s failure to do something about the problem of overheated interiors, he began on his own to deal with an air-conditioning company in America; only then did Tokyo pay heed and come up with a Japanese system.) What Americans wanted in a car was different from what was right for the Japanese domestic market. Yet at first the company was not rich enough to produce a Japanese car and an American car; there would be only one, and it would be a Compromise. But everything that would make the car better for America conflicted with what Tokyo wanted for the car back home. Katayama felt strongly that Nissan should adjust more to American needs and tastes, the American market was where the great new opportunity was. Convincing Tokyo of that, he knew, was going to be a long, hard job. However, though the company bureaucracy might be hopelessly political, eventually it would have to listen to its engineers. Besides, he and his peers at other Japanese companies had one major advantage over those in comparable positions elsewhere, for they represented a country that had a controlled economy and was eager to export. Japan did everything it could to facilitate exports while making sure that its own citizens were careful to save—slowing them down, if need be, with heavy commodity taxes. Thus in the seventies a Datsun or Toyota might cost as much as $750 less in Los Angeles than it did in Tokyo.
Katayama’s counterpart on the East Coast was Soichi Kawazoe. He had far better connections at home than Katayama did; for example, he had done the English translation of the paper that Shioji wrote for his Harvard Business School course and also translated a speech Shioji had made for a ceremony honoring Walter Reuther. Tokyo assumed that the East was a bigger, richer market than the West and it had therefore given Kawazoe, its favorite, the choicer assignment. Not surprisingly, a distinct rivalry developed between the two men.
Katayama moved more slowly than Kawazoe. He decided that the first thing to do was to study the American market and find out what it would take. He learned a number of things very quickly. The first was that he was probably lucky to be on the West Coast rather than on the East, for people in California were less fixed in their habits, including their buying habits. In most cases they were people who had already severed their connection with some part of their past, the place where they had grown up, and had gone west to try a new place. Thus they would be more willing to take a chance on something new, like a Japanese car. The second and more important thing he learned was that in America, unlike Japan, the dealer network was critical. In Japan dealers played almost no part in the sale of cars. Japanese firms farmed exiled managers to the dealerships, paid them poorly, and largely disregarded them. It was a passive job there. In America it was a crucia
l job, for the dealers were the true customers of the company. If the dealers were strong and vital, then the company might succeed. Katayama came to understand this immediately, and gradually he created a network of dealers along the West Coast that he was very proud of. Tokyo, already disapproving of the power that dealers had in America, was uneasy about Katayama’s network. They were, in truth, a most unlikely group, with a high incidence of eccentricity. Many of them were men who had been around cars all their lives, often as repairmen, but had never been able to come up with the large amount of money required for an American dealership. There was, for example, Ray Lemke in San Diego, who as a boy of sixteen had repaired Model Ts and who had once handled the Go-Go-Mobile, one of the country’s more exotic automotive attempts. “There was no way someone like me—a mechanic—was ever going to have a Ford dealership,” Lemke said years later. “The best I could hope for was a used-car dealership, and a lot of us Datsun dealers had been in the used-car business, and we knew the poorer customers very well.” Katayama quickly decided that Lemke was the perfect new Datsun dealer; he was hungry and he knew cars. Katayama gave him one car and told him to sell it; when Lemke sold it, he said, there would be another. “It was pretty raw at first,” Lemke remembered years later, “just me and the wife. On Sunday I’d be in the office writing up sales, and the wife would be out on the lot trying to hold on to the customers until I could finish.” In 1984, as a very rich man, Lemke finally sold his dealership. By that time he was selling nearly two thousand cars a month.