There’s an old chestnut about how, back a few decades, the stamp “Made in Japan” indicated a manufactured product of terrible quality. However, note this quote from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove :
The movie was made in 1964, and clearly the Japanese camera manufacturers must have had a solid reputation at that time. Were cameras an exception to the “Japan = poor quality” rule, and if so, why? Were any other Japanese goods–certainly not yet cars–known to be of high quality at that time?
Just a WAG: He’d just basically called them savages (for their treatment of POWs)–but intelligent savages that also happened to make really good cameras.
It’s a free bump, if nothing else.
The Japanese got in on the ground floor on solid state consumer and commercial electronics and always enjoyed a high level of quality in that industry. Modern shipbuilding in Japan has also been a major industry, and they’ve come to dominate commercial shipbuilding.
I think the impression that Japanese goods were of poor quality–not untrue–was in part due to the fact that prior to the “economic miracle” there was very little in the way of true industrial, production-line manufacturing. Goods were may via the traditional craftsman methods with a high degree of variability in quality or consistancy of fit-up. This, combined with using the substandard materials that were available to them, resulted in a somewhat deserved reputation for poor quality. Once the Ministry of Trade and Industry started promoting and funding heavy industry in Japan quality improved dramatically.
Regarding the Japanese car industry, one must remember that (for reasons that currently escape me) initial Japanese designs were strongly based or outright licensed from British auto manufacturers. I don’t know that Japanese cars of that era were any less reliable than their British counterparts; it would certainly be hard to surpass the utter failure of the British to build a reliable automobile. The Japanese car industry rapidly evolved with entirely different philosophies toward automobile design than American or European makers (save perhaps for Volkswagon and Saab) and came to dominate the low end of the market by providing reliable, fuel efficient (for the day) cars at a cost that the other major manufactuers couldn’t meet, and then moved up the ladder in implementing (if not originating) many safety and comfort features that most manufacturers deemed unnecessary or too costly. Given its origins, the Japanese car industry actually did pretty well, although at the time of the filming of Dr. Strangelove, its presence or indeed even knowledge of its existence in North America was negligible.
Stranger
Interesting question. I don’t know the answer, so this is all speculation.
First, were there any significant American (or English) camera makers at the time? I know Kodak was making low-end beginner cameras and Polaroid’s instant cameras were just around the corner, but were there any pro-quality cameras being made outside Japan or Germany?
Speculation:
The average Japanese consumers up until the '80s didn’t have nearly the spending power of their American counterparts, so mass-produced domestic goods would necessarily have to be made cheaper, either through simpler design or lower production standards. Now, I’ve seen Japanese-made appliances, electronics and motor vehicles from this era, and most of them don’t look shoddily put together (selection bias: the ones that were didn’t last long enough for me to see them?), but they did look a lot smaller, cheaper and less powerful than American-made goods. During the '60s, the only selling point Japanese goods had in their favor was cost. The factories might have been capable of turning out higher-end goods, but few people in Japan would have been able to afford them, and the expense and difficulty of trying to enter the American market and compete head-to-head with the established local makers probably overshadowed the potential benefits.
Now, about the cameras. Nikon, Olympus and Canon all got their starts before the war (Nikon long before), and had already established reputations as makers of quality optics. If there were no significant American brands to compete with, then it would have been worth their while to export high-end models. Positive reception overseas leads to higher sales which leads to more R&D which leads to better quality which leads to better sales and before you know it, Japan is known for making such bloody good cameras while their cars are being laughed at as wind-up sardine cans.
Of course, point out a popular brand of pro-level cameras made in America and this argument falls apart completely.
W. Edwards Deming, the father of Statistical process control, was embraced by Japan after WW II, after being essentially ignored by US manufacturers: W. Edwards Deming - Wikipedia
He was probably more responsible for the Japanese quality “Miracle” than any other person.
I was born in 1955, and as a child about the only Japanese products I recall coming across before age 10 were small transistor radios, which were cheap in every sense of the word. Of course, at that age I was not yet in the market for expensive cameras.
But you’re right that by that time Canon, Minolta, and Nikon (among others) had all introduced highly reputed SLR cameras. Wikipedia says that the “Upon its debut [in 1959], the Nikon F SLR system revolutionized the photographic market, stealing the thunder of German manufacturers Leica and Zeiss.” It was at least partly the success of those very cameras that led to the growth of photography as a popular hobby in the 1960s. However, outside that rather small area, Japanese products were not common in the U.S. in the mid 1960s.
I suspect this is partly because through the 1950s industry in Japan (and Europe) was rebuilding after the destruction of the war, whereas U.S. manufacturing had expanded substantially during the war and become a huge juggernaut that supplied the country with the vast majority of its consumer goods in the '50s and '60s. TVs, stereos, cars, motorcycles, and many other products that are now inextricably associated with Japan, were all well supplied by domestic companies. European products were not especially popular in most of these areas, either.
Foreign goods were looked upon with some suspicion in the decades following the war, and I would not rule out the possibility that a certain amount of latent racism might have delayed the introduction of Japanese products in the U.S., and colored the perception of those that were.
Japanese camera makers scored big when they opted to focus development on SLR cameras. They made several important improvements to SLR designs in the mid-50s that made them an attractive option for serious amateur photographers.
This sounds very dubious. Japan was not an underdeveloped country prior to WW2, the Japanese Navy was the most powerful in Asia. Why would you be surprised that a country capable of building a world class navy centered around modern aircraft carriers and the largest battleships on the waves can make very nice cameras too? The Chinese today are still years away from what the Japanese had in 1941.
As an aside, I’ve also read some recent Economic history that seems to indicate the involvement of MITI often did more harm than good, and the most successful industries and businesses made it without their meddling. I don’t have enough information in front of me to debate it at this point.
His point was about mass produced goods. Aircraft carriers anywhere (especially at the time) were pretty much individually hand-assembled. This, the Japanese could do as well as anyone. Stranger is arguing that the issue that got Japanese goods a bad reputation was their lagging at reliable mass production techniques.
I’m not sure how true this might be, but I’ll toss out the hypothesis (in the grand tradition of “stereotypes usually have some factual basis”) that Japanese people are, in general, more avid about photography than pretty much anyone else. There’s also the (perhaps related) fact that Japan had a well-established and competetive camera industry dating to before WWII. Canon, Minolta, Nikon, Fujifilm, Olympus, Konica, Pentax, and Mamiya all date back to 1940 or earlier.
Post World War two , it would have been a very bombed out shell of a developed country. Not counting any pre war industrial area that would have been devastated , you have displaced persons, disabled , interned and at least at the beginning , its industry being directed by occupation forces.
Not requiring a lot of space to make them ,cheap consumer goods would have been a good place to start and other than the optics , cameras of the time , probably would not have required a highly skilled work force.
Declan
I think this is dubious. Even apart from the optics cameras are precision instruments, at least compared to other consumer goods. But that is beyond the point – the work force was highly skilled. Although lagging in some domains, Japan was one of the leading technological countries before the war. Certainly, the infrastructure in 1945 was devastated but factories are easy to rebuild. Social structures conducive to scientific and economic development, such as a skilled work force, companies, an education system, work ethics and customs are much more difficult to build. Fortunately, they’re also much more difficult to bomb out of existence.
Cameras were not cheap. According to Canon’s history pages, in 1932 Leica cameras cost 420 yen. A university graduate could expect to make about 70 yen a month, and this would be considered in the upper ranges of income. Part of the reason that Japanese camera makers became successful is that foreign models were simply not affordable to anyone. This was true for many other goods. After the war, one of Canon’s big commercial hits, the Canonet retailed for 19,800 yen in 1961. Daily wages for manual workers were about 580 yen, and an elementary school teacher would earn 11,400 yen per month.
Japanese camera makers chose SLRs because German makers had the rangefinder market cornered. There was a lot of ingenuity that went into making SLRs an attractive option. Japanese makers were simply the only ones making usable SLR cameras in the 50s and 60s. A combination of cheap and skilled workforce, and a strong culture of technological innovation going back a long time were what allowed Japanese camera and radio makers to market hit products in the west.
I’m with #2 on this - the contrast being drawn is that of admiring utility (they make good cameras) vs not wanting to deal with them on account of them being savages - not that of cameras vs other products.
It’s a bit like when people say Mussolini made the trains run on time.
In the immediate postwar era, a lot of Japan’s exports were cheap trinkets, the kind of stuff which presently fills the various “Everything’s a Dollar” stores today.
That stuff was crap then, just like the current Chinese or Malaysian stuff is today. Prewar, the US imported very few consumer goods of any description, so there was a lot of novelty in seeing goods with a made in anyplace foreign sticker on them.
As a result, the meme “made in Japan <==> cheap trinket” landed in fertile soil with litttle competition. Pre- and post-war racism against the uncivilized Asiatics of all stripes helped.
By around 1960 the Japanese were beginning to export good farther up the value chain and evenutally by the 1980s, Japan became a synonym for high value-added high-quality goods.
We blew up Japans and Germanys factories. When they rebuilt they had the most modern machining tools. We were using old fashioned manufacturing tools that were less accurate and not up to date. That is where Japan and Germanies accuracy came from.
I wonder if that’s also a subtle criticism of the perception that (at one time, when the Japanese were trying to improve their manufacturing) Japanese designers copied a lot of other countries’ technology. I do recall a time when (perhaps out of simple prejudice) some technology show folks draped a bag over working parts of their video cameras and told my Mom the reason was “to keep the Japanese from copying them.” Since cameras copy/record images, maybe this is a sly way of saying “They’re technically behind, but they’ve put a lot of effort into tech that can be used to steal from us.” Sort of like (hypothetically speaking) observing that some urban youth gang has dirty clothing but nice clean guns.
Sailboat
Japan optics makers basic learned from the best in the business: Zeiss, Leica, etc. The German companies sent help just before WW2, and to ensure quality the government laid out grounds rules for inspection for quality optics. The rules set the tone, and Japanese optics were second only to the high end German stuff…and maybe not even then!
Post war optics required an industry base, but not an overly complicated one. Lens grinding and coating isn’t hard (and coatings were not standard at the time). The hard part was tooling for the frames of cameras and binoculars. Lots of bakelite.
No, the Germans had a reputation for high quality engineering and manufacture long before the rebuilding after WWII, and the reputation of the shoddy quality of (most) Japanese goods persisted into the 'Sixties and 'Seventies (though by that time overall quality had definitely improved). I think jovan hits it in a nutshell; the Japanese focused in on niche areas like SLR cameras and electronic products that it could produce with high quality and yet inexpensively using modern statistical quality control methods (which, as cited by beowulff, was adopted before the West), and then expanded that methodology to the rest of their industry.
Stranger
While it is ture that in 1941, Japan had become a true industrial nation in it’s own right, it didn’t start out that way. And perception can sometimes be stronger than reality.
In the 20’s, in the aeronautic industry, for example, Japan purchased lisences to build foreign designs.
By the 30’s, Japan began devolping their own designs, based on the operational experience gained, and emphasised the particular features that the Japanese planners felt were the important ones. Never-the-less, Japan continued to purchase foreign aircraft for the purposes of keeping tabs on what the other powers were doing (and presumadely making note of anything that seems like a good idea or feature).
The foreign powers, meanwhile, assumed that Japanese aircraft were cheap knockoffs of the European and American designs right up to the start of the Pacific war. However, aircraft like the A6M “Zero” were definately NOT second rate designs. Overall, Japanese aircraft (and the skill and discipline of the pilots) had greater range and maneuverability compared to the very early war Allied designs based in SE Asia at the start.
If we assume that Mandrake was in the RAF in Burma/Singapore at the time, he may have shared that initial (mis)assumption of Japanese aircraft designs that most military intelligence type shared in this regard.
Note: as the war dragged on, two things occured to really drag down the quality of the Japanese production military aircraft:
Scarcity of strategic materials led to substitutions of materials not as well suited for the task, leading to aircraft structural failures.
Skilled factory workers (and dockyard workers) were not immune to being drafted into the army, and less skilled workers means higher rate of defective products on a longer production time requirement.
So, late war, examining the newest designs may lead to a false impression of poor design, when the problem was actually poor quality control.
Nikon was established in 1917, making imitation Zeiss cameras. However, Konica was was established in 1873, predating Kodak. Of course they did not yet sell cameras but photo equipment and supplies.
People have a hard time picturing how modern Japan was before WWII. Much of this was lost due to the bombings. Ironically, this led to a rebuilding of a much more modern country which now reveres it’s heritage due to it’s losses.