For a long time Ishihara managed to stay out of the bitter internal factionalism that scarred Nissan. He belonged to neither Kawamata’s side nor Asahara’s side. He was probably the only executive in the company who managed to straddle the chasm between the two men. Asahara was fond of him and thought of him as a protégé. Kawamata, for whom he worked, was fond of him too and seemed to be encouraging him as a potential successor. But he had serious private doubts about the power being usurped by the union; it was not something he complained about or fought, but he did not like it, and it was an invisible barrier between himself and Kawamata. When Asahara mounted his coup against Kawamata, Ishihara stayed on the sidelines. (There were, in fact, those who thought he had given tacit consent to the move against Kawamata.) Kawamata had not forgiven him, and a breach between the two men opened.
Ishihara was a formidable-looking man. More than any other Japanese auto executive, he looked like an Asian counterpart of his burly, forceful Detroit peers. In Detroit, in the tough world of auto making—going back to the days when a foreman, as a matter of job specification, had to be able to whip the men working for him—physical strength had always been an asset to advancement. In Japan that was somewhat less true, but Ishihara was the exception, undoubtedly benefiting from his imposing appearance. He was a former rugby football player, and there was an almost pugnacious physical quality to him, which he flaunted. Watching him, Keith Crain, the Detroit auto editor, once told friends that if he ever got into a back-alley fight, Ishihara was the one man of all auto executives he would like with him.
Although he looked like an auto man, in truth he was an accountant, a man of finance. After the failed coup, Ishihara’s career seemed in suspension. He was given an assignment in Mexico, hardly a prized one. Not long after that he was placed in charge of exports to the United States. That assignment was not exactly a plum either, and most of his friends warned him against taking it. It was, they claimed, the riskiest posting there was. “You will go there, and we will never see you again,” one of them said, “unless we arrive in America one day and get in a cab and find you driving it.” When his friends cited the dangers, he answered that yes, he knew of them, but not taking the post was dangerous as well. He pondered the question a long time, finally deciding it was impossible to turn it down and still have a career at Nissan. He accepted it for that reason and also because he thought it had to be done, because he of all the top executives was most likely to be able to pull it off, and because if he failed, he did not deserve to run Nissan anyway. Besides, since the company was starting from scratch in America, if someone made a real success of it, then he would forever be placed ahead of the rest of the crowd of potential presidents. It was a calculated risk, and Ishihara took it. There was a Japanese proverb that Ishihara remembered: If you sit patiently on the stone for three years, you will be rewarded. It meant that either you would get what you wanted, because you were so patient, or, failing that, you would benefit from those years of adversity.
He was export manager of Nissan in the fall of 1960, when he was made president of the American branch. Though there was no love lost between him and Katayama, his colleague in America, for a time their purposes coincided. There was, after all, an ocean between them, because Ishihara chose not to live in America. To Katayama he seemed just one more of that legion of insular Japanese businessmen who looked upon America as a place from which to take something, either knowledge or technology or perhaps some hard currency, but not as a place in which to immerse oneself. There was more than an element of truth to that, for though Ishihara was by Japanese standards an internationalist, a man who wanted to bring Nissan to the world, his internationalism was essentially very Japanese. He was quite willing to be an internationalist—meeting regularly with foreigners and doing business with them—as long as he could live in Japan and be surrounded at almost all times by other Japanese.
Nonetheless he was an extremely powerful ally for Katayama. For though they might differ on specific tactics, and though their ambitions might be very different too, and though Katayama might be more willing to adopt a truly American business style, they were as one on the central goal, which was the success of the American enterprise. That gave Katayama a lever he otherwise sorely lacked. For Ishihara’s troubles with Kawamata notwithstanding, he was of the company as Katayama was not. He was a powerful force there, he was still considered a potential president, and he had supporters both beneath and above him. Though his background was in finance, he was still considered more of a car man than Kawamata. Thus his recommendations had a great deal more impact than Katayama’s Katayama might complain that a Datsun would begin to shiver and vibrate when it went over forty miles per hour, and Tokyo would disregard it, but when Ishihara said it—that they would fail if something were not done—then Tokyo listened.
Besides, and this was critical, Ishihara was from the financial side. The engineering and the production sides were never the problem. They were car people, and though they might on occasion be a little annoyed that American automotive habits were different from those of the Japanese, there was not an engineer at Nissan who did not thrill to the idea of building a faster, higher-performance engine and a sleeker, more stylish car. It was the financial side that was always the obstacle. The financial people were conservative—all they could think of was that immense sum they owed the bank—and their instinct about any new venture was reflexively negative. To their mind the company was already stretched too thin, too many new factories were being built, there was too little cash, and America remained an uncertain world dominated by automotive giants. Only Ishihara, an Ishihara living in Tokyo instead of New York, could handle them. His requests were not the requests of some distant, lowly manager who had gone native in America and who was probably trying to create his own empire at Nissan’s expense; these were the requests of one of their own, a man of profit. He knew all the numbers, all the games that the financial people played, and he had their trust. Because Katayama was living in America, he was perceived as alien. Every time he challenged Tokyo, it was additional proof that he was more American than Japanese. Ishihara’s word would be trusted as Katayama’s would not. Ishihara was acutely aware of this. Once, early in the course of the American venture, during a visit to the California offices he took Katayama and Nobe Wakatsuki, the trading company executive who in 1957 had urged Nissan to send cars to the Los Angeles auto show, to dinner. The question of Tokyo’s reluctance to accept suggestions from America hung heavily in the air that night. It was very hard to make Tokyo respond to American needs, Ishihara said. “I am the only one who can do it, who can push it through,” he told them, “and I can do it only from Tokyo. Always remember that.”
There was soon ample evidence of it. Nissan capitalized the American company at $1 million. To the Japanese that seemed an enormous amount of money. There were strict governmental limits on how much a company could spend overseas. They were sure $1 million would last five years. But America turned out to be a terribly expensive place. Breakfasts at a hotel could cost the unwary traveler several dollars. Advertising on radio and television was like burning money. Even arranging dealerships turned out to cost money, for lawyers were expensive. Nothing was cheap in this country. There was no way to save. Within two years there was only $100,000 left from the original $1 million. In late 1962 Ishihara went back to the board, hat in hand, and asked for another $500,000. They had, he acknowledged, spent more rapidly than anyone had anticipated, but doing business in America had proved far costlier than imagined. He had done everything he could to save, but it was impossible to save in the Japanese sense of that word. If they held back now, the American company would come to a complete stop, and Nissan would have to retire from the American market, which meant in effect from the export market.
When he made his presentation at the board meeting, there was no real challenge to him. The board voted the money rather readily, and he felt very little heat. But the American operation continued to be costly
, and results remained hard to come by. A year later he had to go back and ask for another $500,000. This time he knew he was going against the wishes of the board. Some board members suggested he had been careless and that for so much money there ought to be more to show. Ishihara replied politely that he was still confident they could attain their objective, that Nissan could make a car that would do well in the American market. Again he repeated what he believed, that if Japan was to have any world export market in autos, it had to prove itself in America, against the best. But they had all underestimated how expensive starting out in America was. He was positive that if they held on a little longer they would succeed. Indeed, he was willing to bet his career on it. If we don’t make it with this request, he added, I will resign from the company. When he made that promise, no one, he noted, tried to talk him out of it.
The eyes on him at the meeting, he thought, were as cold as stone, and he could even see a small amount of pleasure in the faces of some potential adversaries. The board again gave him $500,000, but it left no doubt that he was not to come back again, and that his promise should be a serious one. If he failed, he might as well quit, for he would have no future at Nissan.
It was, he often reflected later, a very close call. In 1964 the company began to show a profit, about $200,000. Years later, when Ishihara was president of Nissan and was frequently congratulated on the brilliance of Nissan’s performance in America, he was always mildly amused, for he knew how near they had come to failure.
25. THE LIBERATION OF YUTAKA KATAYAMA
TO KATAYAMA, ISHIHARA WAS simply someone in Tokyo who had responsibility for America. He was an asset, and an ally, but not a colleague. To most of the people in America who had any encounter with Nissan’s American operation, it was still Katayama’s company. He was there every day, impassioned, pushing for dealers, trying to sell cars. He often delivered cars himself to the dealers, because it was cheaper and because it gave him a chance to hear what they were saying. Once on a Saturday morning when a customer came to headquarters needing a particular part, Katayama was there alone; he went back into the parts department and found it. Not knowing how much it cost, he charged the customer $1.
America, he said later, was his paradise. There, everything was possible. He had never felt so free in his life. He had nothing but scorn for most of the other Japanese businessmen he met in America. When younger Japanese businessmen came to Katayama for guidance, he scorned the insularity of his own countrymen. Too many of them, he said, when they came to America, knew only the map of Japan, and thought only of the people in the home office, and trusted only other Japanese. Sometimes, out for a meal with American friends, he would spot a group of Japanese businessmen seated nearby, five or six of them, no Americans. “Look at them,” he would say, “afraid to be in America.” Worse, when Japanese like these talked about Americans among themselves, they still used the hateful Japanese word for foreigners, gaijin. Did they not know that they were the gaijin now? They did not go out and get to know the market; they sat in their offices being very Japanese, trying not to make mistakes. Timid rabbits, he thought. He would do business like an American. He would take chances, and he would say what he thought.
“I am Katayama of Nissan,” he would say when checking into a hotel or arriving at a meeting, and that was enough. He was the head of a company just as Lee Iacocca and Pete Estes were heads of companies, though of course he made about $25,000 a year or about one thirtieth of what they made, and soon about one thirtieth of what most of his own dealers made. This did not bother him. The other auto executives traveled with great retinues, and there was always someone to meet them at the airport, someone to get them a drink, someone to light a cigar, someone to make sure that when they went to their favorite restaurant they got their favorite table. He preferred to travel alone; he could learn more that way. He could meet people on planes and in restaurants and bars, and not be separated from them and the truth by underlings eager to protect him from the truth. He ventured forth constantly, savoring and studying the country. There was not a sports event in Los Angeles that he did not find interesting, and he became a devoted football and baseball fan. He was a great hiker, and there was no mountain worthy of the name in the West that he did not climb. He became a devoted fisherman and he worked the rivers and lakes in the state of Washington, fishing there with his dealers and their friends. He was a good amateur painter, and wherever he went he took his paint kit and sketched the American landscape. Each year he would take the sketch he liked best and make it into his Christmas card. By the end of his tour his Christmas list had ten thousand names. Nothing, his friends thought, told more about him than this; here was a man who had come from a country where there was no Christmas and no tradition of Christmas cards, and he had compiled what surely must be one of the nation’s longest lists. Few Americans understood the modern American Christmas-card ritual as well, or practiced it as personally. He wanted all of his American friends to eat at a nearby restaurant called Masukawa because it was good, it was Japanese, and the owner had been to Keio University. At first, it had been almost empty at lunch; a few years later, largely because of his efforts, there were long lines there every day.
Katayama was a man, thought his friend and speech writer Mayfield Marshall, who wanted nothing more than to shrink the Pacific Ocean. Like many Japanese, he loved flying kites, and those Americans who worked for him had to be prepared to leave the office at almost any hour and fly kites (just as the Japanese who came to work for him had to be prepared to go to a barbecue for dinner or to watch a professional football game—to most of them a semibarbaric sport only dimly understood). When, after a few years in Los Angeles, he bought a large plot of land on the San Diego freeway, someone asked him what it was for. “One day it will be our headquarters building,” he replied, “but for now it is our field for flying kites.” He corresponded with innumerable American kite freaks, and one of his proudest days was when the editors of Road & Track invited him to their offices near Newport Beach, held a kite-flying contest in his honor on the beach, and then awarded him an inscribed winner’s trophy. The trophy was of a bird dog and was supposed to go to a dog breeder, but the editors had gotten a small brass kite and stuffed it in the dog’s mouth, which pleased Katayama immensely. That day, he told his friends, the East had met the West. He was fascinated by the difference in the way Americans and Japanese flew their kites: Even here, he thought, the Americans were frontiersmen, finding the wind current and charging into it as fast as they could, challenging it. The Japanese were more delicate about it; they would find the wind, turn their backs to it, and then gently let their kites out.
He was a rare man. He brought a face to the Japanese mercantile presence; meeting him, Americans felt that they knew, understood, and liked the Japan that was behind his products. If he took pride in the growing success of Nissan America, it was a quiet pride in showing what modern Japan could do, and in the success he had helped bring his dealers. He seemed to gain special pleasure from his work with them. After all, he had taken these ordinary and indeed often unsuccessful men, who had had nothing but their ambition and their willingness to take a chance, and helped turn them into millionaires. They were millionaires, he liked to say, many of whom had never owned a suit until they had joined up with Datsun. Years later in Tokyo in his tiny office he liked to point at a map of the Western part of the United States. It was covered with little dots. “Each dot is a millionaire I made,” he would say. The dealers loved him because he listened to them and fought for them. He wanted to find out not so much what the sales were but what they meant—what was behind them and how ordinary people in America really felt. The only thing about America he really did not understand and truly hated and feared was lawsuits. When even a minor suit was filed, he began to shiver. Suitcases, he called them, because his lawyer was always talking about the suit and the case. “You have to save me from these suitcases,” he would say. “They want to kill me with them.”
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p; Suitcases aside, the mid-sixties were joyous years for Katayama. Slowly, the Datsun was getting better. At first he thought it was not jaunty enough, and he argued with Tokyo to make it sportier, but Tokyo was stuffy, regarding him as too much of a sports-car buff. He also argued with the home office over naming the cars. Tokyo kept coming up with terrible names like Bluebonnet, Cedric, and Fair Lady. Katayama, who increasingly fancied himself an expert on American taste, wanted more virile names, like Lion or Tiger. The problem, of course, was that Tokyo’s names were the personal choices of Kawamata, who seemed to have some odd hidden streak of Anglophilia running through him. Fair Lady had been so decreed because Kawamata had once seen and apparently liked the musical My Fair Lady. Generally Katayama accepted his defeats on nomenclature reasonably well, but in 1970, when the first Japanese sports car arrived in America—the car that Katayama had always wanted—and he saw with horror that it had actually been called the Fair Lady, he and his men simply pried the nametag off the car and replaced it with one using the company’s internal designation for the car, 240Z. It was far more appropriate, they decided, and using the company’s own designation was the only way he could change the name without being insubordinate. Generally, however, he had lost out on names in the beginning, and normally on spottiness as well, but he was winning on almost everything else. The car was adapted to American conditions, it was economical to drive, and servicing was very good; there were always parts.
Katayama was convinced that the major American companies were not listening to their customers—or, if they were listening, then those voices were badly filtered through the dealers. The Big Three’s dealers, he knew, hated selling compacts because they made so much less money on them and because they believed, probably accurately, that for every compact sold, a full-size model wasn’t sold. The Big Three went into the compact market only when the import total began to rise beyond their estimates, and even then they did it half-heartedly. When in 1968 General Motors brought in its own foreign import, the Opel, an exceptionally well engineered car, it never put its institutional energy behind it, never pushed it with a major advertising campaign. The Opel was handled by the company’s Buick dealers, who had neither the knowledge nor the desire to sell it properly. For them, each Opel that sold was a Buick that would not sell. When the imports had reached 5 percent of the market in 1959, Detroit struck back with its own compacts, and the foreigners immediately lost ground. But, having fended the foreigners off, Detroit responded in its own Pavlovian way: It immediately escalated the size of its compacts and added on equipment. By 1963 the foreigners had started making inroads again.
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