I think now you’re talking about manufacturing and assembly processes, not part specifications which is how you started framing this.
I agree that the Japanese are better at manufacturing, but the gap has been closing for decades and even be closed now.
This is one of those type of things which is so hard to answer in anything less than a 300 page book.
I first lived in Japan in the early 80s and then from 1990 until this January. I worked for several Japanese companies and then set up a branch office for a US manufacturer competing directly against Japanese manufacturers. I had my own company and consulted both for US companies wanting to expand their market in Japan and also Japanese companies wanting to go over seas. I ran that company until this year. During that 20 plus years, many of my clients included large, well-known manufacturers such as Panasonic and Sony and well as mom and pop outfits.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of what is generally considered common knowledge about Japan is simply inaccurate, exaggerated, misinformed or grossly simplified. Also not unsurprisingly, most of what Japan believes about the US is simply inaccurate, exaggerated, misinformed or grossly simplified.
I’d guess that the popular beliefs about Japanese products were first formed in the late 60s and early 70s when they were the cheap knock-off manufacturers of the world. This is when that belief that Japanese are only imitators comes from. As others say, this is where China is now.
They did learn their lessons well, and started to produce much better products through the late 70s and 80s. The 80s were when movies such as Gung Ho were made about the Japanese taking over the US. By this time, Japanese cars and other products stood for quality.
Imagine though if you would, if your beliefs about something were facts from 40 years ago. Yes, some of them may have been true at the time, but a lot has changed since then.
There isn’t a single answer for the questions in the OP. Well, maybe for the first one. That’s silly. What pre-WWII factories were RCA using to build their color TVs on? Is that the reason their TVs sucked?
The great imitators is a label which is convenient, but unsatisfactory when you realize how little true innovation there is the the world and even less true innovation turned into commercial success for the innovator. One classic example is the user interface of PCs. Microsoft copied from Apple who copied from Xerox. But Xerox never really did anything with their mouse, while it helped put Apple on the map and then made Windows possible.
A lot of products from Japan have been innovative either in their design or how it was incorporated. I think that the charge on mere copiers is a relic best left in the 60s. I’m sure that the Chinese will outgrow their copying phase as well.
I don’t have time to write my book on the great fuckups by manufacturers on both sides of the Pacific, but there are screwups done everywhere. There also seems to be willful ignorance and the assumption that the other side should change.
One of the examples I frequently use of the differences in business culture comes from a time when I was running the branch office of the US manufacturer and we were selling OEM products to NEC. (We made them but put the NEC label of them and NEC sold them through their sales channels as their own. )
One batch of products had five units with some paint on the inside of the product box. These products were professional products, not something sold in Ginza or other high end shopping havens, and the boxes would be discarded after the unit was installed.
NEC requested replacement boxes, which I passed along to HQ. It because surprisingly difficult to get the replacements. I eventually did, but only after a lot of hassle.
When I tell this story, I almost inevitably get a different reaction from US audiences and Japanese ones. The Japanese see this as a given that the boxes should be replaced, do not understand how that could have happened and why no one noticed. US audiences see this as something which doesn’t matter. The paint wasn’t on the product, it was on the inside of the box. Who cares?
The point is that Japanese consumers care. Should they? I donno. This adds cost to the process to be checking for these sort of things, but anyone successful in a fickle market recognizes the folly of attempting to dictate to consumers who have choices.
Someone mentioned the Japanese take the long-term view while US companies are focused on the short term. While I’ve seen some US manufacturers shoot themselves in the foot with focusing on quarterly results, I’ve also seen a lot of Japanese companies who aren’t focusing on anything. Short or long term.
Coming back to an earlier point about the Japanese of the 60s, 70s and 80s vs. now, in the post war period, they really worked extremely hard and many people made huge personal sacrifices in order to recover from the complete devastation of the war.* For those who wish to hand way away these efforts by dissing them as copiers and the lucky recipients of American largeness sounds to me to be nothing more than sour grapes or ignorance or both.
Japan of the 2010s have a completely different outlook than their parents or grandparents. Japan has been struggling for more than 20 years, as their place in the world is slowly getting chipped down. I was too close to the trees to see the whole forest. I’m not sure what the future will bring either to the people or their products.
*For which I will make my standard disclaimer that this devastation was not required. But I’m not going to get sidetracked there.
In the 1970’s American companies were having difficulties producing high-density ICs reliably; it was Japan that was getting high yields. Someone had an anecdote to explain this. I’m skeptical, but the anecdote was told by a famousish name in IC design and manufacture.
He credited Japan’s success to discipline and cited as anecdotal evidence that when his American yields suddenly changed, he marched onto the production floor and demand to know which worker had recently changed her hairspray brand!
I donno, but I’d seriously doubt this. I read a book once about Japanese quality and they gave examples of differences in US manufacturing philosophies, including IC production. One of the points they made is that Japanese chips manufacturers would go after the one in a thousand failures and US manufacturers would tend to not. I asked an American friend who was working in semiconductor manufacturing in Japan at the time (mid 90s) and he confirmed that a big reason.
I was never a manufacturing engineer, but in a clean room environment, would changing hairstrays make a difference? Would there be “good” hairstrays and “bad” ones? Why would that be the first thing to look at and not something else like bad parts or material?
Even famous people repeat urban legends, so I’m not convinced.
No, they don’t. But, in some countries, you can evade an import tax on vehicles if you import half a car, twice. You’re not importing a ‘vehicle’.
Now known as JVC for Victor Company of Japan. It is interesting how RCA lost ownership of JVC during WWII and never got it back.
There are a legion of anecdotes about Japanese IC manufacturing. One I liked went like this. A US company ordered a batch of memory chips, and specified that the percentage of faulty chips should be a very stringent for time 1%. The shipment arrived, and in it was a letter that said that the manufacturer could not understand why the purchaser required 1% faulty chips, but for their convenience they had been separately packaged.
I knew the site manager for a US owned IC plant, and he was scathing about the attitudes of the workers. He basically said they were mostly stupid and careless, and most yield problems could be sheeted home to poor attitude to the work. Another issue with IC manufacture is that it is very easy to poison the process with chemical contaminants. The presence of even trace quantities of some elements will simply result in 0% yield. There were whispered stories of fab facilities that went for months without a single working chip until they worked out the problem.
One thing about the Japanese success was the strength of vertical company integration - the keiretsu system, something that provided great strength and resiliency for the industries to build up, and to fund much more forward looking ventures.
Regarding semiconductor production. The fact is, the Japanese were the first to take Dr. Deming’s principles of statistical quality control and apply them. This gave them a tremendous advantage: even if the root cause of the problem wasn’t known, by strictly controlling the process, you could get good yields. Dr. Deming was ignored by US chip mafgs.,untill the Japanese success made it impossible to do so.
I myself worked for a small semi plant-the firm hired a man to be president who knew nothing about semiconductors-his first act was to “reduce” costs by switching from high purity gases and chemicals, to “commercial” grades. yields nosdived-but he got a big bonus!
the Japanese, like the Chinese today, got their foot in the door by making crap cheaply, then went on to take over the quality markets too where the premiums are made.
One company I worked with went through the whle Demming and Japanese Management method, hook, line and sinker…
An example we saw was the study on why identical transmissions built by the Japanese lasted longer than US ones. the conclusion was that the Japanese manufacturing exceeded the US design specs. If it said "within 5/10,000 inches, the Japanese made it 2/10,000. Result - less wear, less wobble, less failure. variability is the enemy, consistency is the winner. My takeawy from that was “maybe the engineers need to revisit their specs - what was economically feasible when the desiger finished engineering school is probably cheaper and easier to overachieve today.”
the other thing was consistency. Instead of calling the workers sloppy and lazy, they started to look at problems and causes, using statistics instead of perception bias. What is the biggest problem? Tackle that first.
Another item was culture. The Japanese company man (back then) had a job for life. they could give him a year on the factory floor, a year in ordering, a year in warehousing, quality control, etc. - and then when he started doing design engineering, he knew what the problems could happen. The American companies were silos of indifference, so Detroit notably produced one of the first small cars where the steerng column had to be remoevd to change one of the spark plugs. Remember those electric analog clocks in Detroit lead-sleds in the 50’s though 80’s? None ever worked more than a year or two - but nobody cared… The Japanese coul not let that sort of failure slide. Meanwhile, the promotion system in AMerica was about taking credit and jockeying for position - not helping each other; while in Japan everyone waited their turn and the team as a whole took the credit.
Engineering with the desire to do a good job was another example of their excellence. Anyone who remembers those 70’s cars remembers changing alternators every few years was a regular occurrence when the diodes burned out. Japan started making cars where that did not happen - by “overspecifying” the didode capacity and bearing size/quality so these did not burn out.
Variability was another enemy of quality. The custom vehicle you could order from the dealer meant that an assembly line could choose from dozens of paint schemes, wiring harness options, etc. Mistakes were common and rework repairs were expensive. Where possible, the Japanese minimized these. For example, my bare-bones 86 Honda Civic has the full wiring harness for stereo and other options (including door speakers) even though it came without. The same dashboard was used in all models, there were just knockouts if the air conditioning or other options needed dashboard installs. When the assembly line workers had less choices to decide in that 30 seconds the car went by them, they made less mistakes. Fewer options for parts means less likely to run out of a part.
(Out senior people who visited japanese factories at this time also mentioned that while North American factories were grimy, dusty hellholes like a set from Aliens, you could eat off the floor of the Japanese factories).
The key though, is to design in the quality. If you get a chance to see a decrepid 70’s or 80’s car, it likely has one side mirror hanging off the door. The Japanese started replacing the little vent window with a snap-together side mirror. Mirrors were in bags inside the car and could be put on by the dealer (less damage in shipping); it eliminated the hole-throughs in the metal doors, a common source of rust and an extra step. Even eliminating that extra vent window meant one less thing to install, hence a cheaper car. The controllable side mirror on the door meant snaking a cable into the car, attaching it to the door interior panel control mechanism - all a significant piece of work. with the snap-on mirror, it was all self-contained.
Someone who knows manufacturing could probably tell you how many dollars per car that design saved.
The vast majority of auto recalls have been over design decisions, followed closely by defective parts through inattention to materials from suppliers - not poor or lazy workers.
I think the same applied to electronics - the Japanese were determined to expand and take over the market through quality. Intially, they had a cost advantage in cheap labour stuffing circuit boards.
Here too, a good note about Japanese economy: The elite, super rich Japanese industrial tycoons were generally complicit in WWII and had their assets confiscated by the Americans. The head of Sony, for example, mentioned in his biography that he was “rich” as in he could afford to send his kids to a Swiss private school, but not rich as in he could buy his wife a 2-million dollar diamond ring on a whim like Liz Taylor would get. Companies geenrally wer financed by the big Japanese banks. American companies were obsessed with the next quarter’s bottom line and keeping profits up. Most Japanese companies’ stck were heavily owned by the banks that financed their expansion. these banks were less obsessed by quarterly results, and more interested in continued cash flow to pay back loans for factory expansion; perversely, this meant the Japanese were more interested in long term results and Americans abandoned markets to them as their quarterly profits were undercut.
But the Japanese obsession with Quality meant they spent time improving their products; design for hi-fidelity reproduction, more precise components for better results and durability. American products settled for “good enough” while Japanese undercut them with better and cheaper. Eventually America gave up.
Japanese engineering invention should not be underestimated either. A good example is the Trinitron tube. Original colour TV tubes were arrays of coloured dots with a metal mask that allowed 3 beams to be aimed so each hit the correct colour. The trinitron replaced this with a verical slot mask and vertical colour stripes. The aim did not have to be as precise so less tuning adjustments, more of the beam got through for a brighter picture, etc.
So - tolerance of lower profits, cheaper labour, better teamwork and obsession with quality. What does it take to succeed?
A one in a thousand fail is 1,000 DPM - and any chip with that kind of fail profile at the next stage is a complete disaster. I’m sure you weren’t being literal, but you have to recalibrate quality expectations when working in semiconductors.
The Western Electric fab at Allentown produced ICs for among other places the plant at Oklahoma City where the #5ESS switch was assembled. My test and supply engineer friends there said they could tell when there was a new set of people on the various Allentown shifts, because quality levels of incoming parts could change. So the anecdote might have some truth to it.
I gave a bunch of talks on tools for improving IC quality in Japan in the early 1990s, at big companies. I can tell you another reason this mattered. You can’t easily see the quality of much of a product, so when what you do see seems to indicate a lack of attention by the manufacturer, it is considered a sign that the stuff you can’t see has poor quality also. At one place I worked not putting the manual in the box was considered a defect just like the system not powering up.
I’m realistic however. I saw some netlists for some reasonably large chips from some major Japanese companies. They were really bad.
Paradoxically, the last few years have been shitty for Japan IC makers because, rather than quality, price has been the key factor in demand, and Japanese makers priced themselves out of the market.
Priced compared to bootlegs and clones, or compared to other legitimate products from companies that also have to pay R&D? I’m not being snippy, genuinely curious.
Compared to cheaper products made in S. Korea and Taiwan. I can’t speak to their legitimacy, but I haven’t heard complains from team Japan that the competitors products are knock-offs.
This article discusses it a bit:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4235963/Commentary--Japan-Inc--faces-choppy-seas
The EEtimes article mostly talks about ASICs and SoC components, not commodity components. The chip foundry problems were hardly mentioned. It is a very interesting article. One point is that there are no knockoffs, bootlegs or clones in these markets. Not in the traditional sense of knockoffs being direct copies of a design. The problems described are much deeper, and I would love to read some much deeper analysis. At the level of the chip designs being talked about the problem runs from top to bottom of the production. Panasonic invested greatly in designing its own family of processors and the ecosystem of products surrounding them. (Inside every Panasonic product - like a cameras, video systems etc they use in-house designed chips, with their own processor architectures.) But outside Panasonic, SoC systems based upon ARM, MIPS, and the like may undercut Panasonic’s costs. Other camera manufactures will go with these cheaper designs. Sony is not mentioned, but is another company that has traditionally done almost all its chip design in house. ASICs are a service industry. An ASIC manufacturer does designs under contract, and essentially by definition there can be no knockoffs.
One suspects that the intense competition with the mega Korean brands has taken a huge toll on the Japanese giants, and the economies of scale that made so much in-house design possible have started to fail. Worse, these chip designs become more and more complex. More and more IP blocks are added and need integrating, and an inwardly looking in-house mentality may become a liability. Another danger is ossification of outlook. The skills and tools keep moving onward. It is easy for a company to get left behind with an outmoded skillset, and simply be unable to keep pace. The history of microelectronics is replete companies that failed to address this problem. The managerial and leaderships skills needed to turn a company the size of any of these mega-companies around in the face of the difficulties that currently beset them is rare indeed. Japan has traditionally not rewarded the sort of people now needed well. This may be their biggest weakness.