Johnny nails in on the first attempt. Talking out of my ass, Japanese consumers simply expect the products they buy-be it a car, a pair of shoes, or an air conditioner-to be well designed, well-built, and reliable. If the consumer doesn’t give a shit, then the manufacturer won’t invest the time, energy or money to make it any better than what the consumer wants. Japan being the homogenous society that it is, manufacturers and designers have a pretty good idea of the values and mores of their market.
A classic car magazine I read from time to time often gave this warning regarding Japanese cars from the 60s and 70s. Just because they’re more reliable than European cars doesn’t mean they don’t rust any less. Although in the UK I think the problem was that British cars rusted just as quickly so it was less of an issue.
For those of you wanting “inspiring” designs, Pontiac tried that. They produced the Aztek. Car Talk’s Click and Clack described it as two guys starting to build a car at each end and meeting in the middle. I think they were being kind.
Me, I want fins on my car. sigh
The japanese also studied the US car market VERY well-they sent teams of experts to study the American car market. What they found out, is that the avaerage American keeps their car for 4-5 years, then sells or trades it in. They reasoned that the cars would sell best if they were reliable within the first 4-5 years (in Japan, cars of this age get junked or shipped off to Russia). So they designed the cars to have very few failures for the fisrt 75,000 miles or so…which is what Americans want! People criticize the Japanese for building appliance-like cars…but really, for an urban driver in America, the “joy” of driving is largely fictitious-who needs an expensive Mercedes benz, when you are going to spend a lot of time in bumper-bumper traffic!
Hah! The Aztec is what I cite when people tell me my rice rocket is fugly. I might cite the Gremlin, but a lot of people love the Gremlin. I can sorta see why.
Style is a mystery, but it’s clear some folks got it, and some most definitely do not.
You’d have a point, except that Pontiac was overran by idiots at that point, and the automotive press had been raking them over the coals for quite some time over other cars, and Pontiac didn’t listen. They were so stupid that they put a designer for a proposed revival of the GTO who’d never even heard of the GTO! The review of the unveiling (BTW, this is not the current Aussie built version of the GTO, but an idea for a GTO GM had had a few years prior to this.), in Car & Driver included the phrase, “We blew snot bubbles.” as part of their description of their reaction to the car.
I used to buy Datsun 240-Z’s. Owned three of them. Very highly rated Japanese sports cars. All three of them rusted out so badly they became undriveable. These cars are almost impossible to find in Canada now, because the environment here simply destroys them.
On the other hand, I had a 1967 Impala that I got from my grandfather and drove when I was 18. It got parked out in the elements after I stopped driving it, and ten years later I had to move it. I went out to the car, put in a charged battery, pumped the gas a few times, and it fired right up. No rust on the body. We sold the car to a guy who used it in a demolition derby, and it put in plenty of good service for him.
It’s a question of corporate culture. When the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standard was introduced in 1975 at the height of the first oil crisis the Japanese automakers went out and hired a bunch of engineers to help them meet it. American auto manufacturers went out and hired a bunch of lawyers and lobbyists to help them beat it.
Japanese manufacturers fix the problem, not the blame. US manufacturers seem to do the opposite. I bought a brand new 1978 Honda Accord Hatchback that was undoubtedly the worst piece of crap I ever owned. Based on my experience with that thing, you’d think I would never again buy a Honda. However, I own a 1991 Honda Civic that runs like a clock. It has 100K+ miles on it and I’ve never been rigid about the maintenance schedule. I wouldn’t hesitate to buy another Honda, either. Point being, the Honda people saw a problem and FIXED it. GM and Ford have seen a jillion problems and haven’t fixed them the way they should. Plus, the benefits of statistical quality control should never be overlooked. Deming could have revolutionized manufacturing in the US but was scorned; the Japanese listened to him, with results we are all familiar with.
Cite?
Let’s not forget that GM had the catalytic converter installed on all 1975 makes and models which enabled it to meet CAFE standards from year 1. As a matter of history, the person in charge of the catalytic converter project was Robert Stempel, whose successful leadership of this project eventually propelled him to the CEO position - the first non-finance guy to hold that spot since Billy Durant.
Well, we could look at this site, Cite especially the part that says this.
In response to petitions from manufacturers facing stiff civil penalties for noncompliance, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) relaxed the standard for model years 1986-1989, but it was restored to 27.5 in MY1990. The Persian Gulf War in 1990 caused a brief spike in oil prices, but it also demonstrated that it was unlikely that the United States or many of the producing nations would tolerate a prolonged disruption in international petroleum commerce. As a consequence, U. S. dependence upon imported petroleum, from a policy perspective, was considered less of a vulnerability.
If you think the petitions were not from American auto manufacturers I’m asking for a cite on that. Plus, what makes you think that catalytic converters have anything to do with fuel economy?
:smack:
You’re absolutely right - I was thinking (well, obviously I wasn’t, but…) that you were making another point, which I then responded to. My apologies.
:smack:
It’s too bad we don’t have an ass-kicking smilie. 
rolling down the windows to put your legs out doesn’t count!
(I think it’s fágimíd, but I might be getting my future tenses mixed up.)
Ach, I can’t even get that right!
fágfaimid.
and we will leave that there 
Additionally, in an interview I saw with one of the Ford execs, he whined that the emission controls they were required to installed ruined the car and that if they had been allowed to do their own designs, they would have come up with something better. My question when I saw the interview was, “Well, why the hell didn’t you?”
More recently, the automakers lobbied Congress to force the oil companies to produce lower sulfur fuels so that the car makers would have an easier time with emission controls. Note that they had tried to work out a voluntary agreement with oil co.s prior to this, but that had gone nowhere, so the car makers turned to Congress. Obviously, the unwillingness to adapt to changing conditions is endemic to American businesses as a whole, and not simply a fault of the car makers. And let’s not forget the car makers resistance to adopting new safety features.
Not to pick on you particularly, Hyperelastic, as I’ve seen similar sentiments from others in this thread, but if you’d seen instances of superiors screaming in the faces of subordinates, with punctuating smacks to the head for emphasis, you’d laugh as hard as I did on reading about how “egalitarian” the Japanese are. I’ve lived in Japan for close to five years now. One thing I can say about Japanese society with great confidence is that it is by no stretch of the imagination egalitarian. They try very hard to be “the same” but striving to act and look the same as everyone else doesn’t mean that they are trying to treat everybody as an equal.
Japanese society is very stratified in fact. You don’t dare use the wrong term of address if someone is of higher social standing/power than you, or you will be in deep, deep trouble. One of the reasons for exchanging business cards upon meeting someone is so that you can figure out the relative social standing so that you know what terms of address and what level of politeness you should use in your speech, as well as how low to bow. To give you an idea of how seriously Japanese can take this, I read a news story a year or so ago where a nurse refused to let the wife of a dying man see him because the man’s wife didn’t use an honorific form of address when speaking to the nurse. Yes, the nurse was abnormally concerned with this, but when I asked a couple of my co-workers about it, they said that they understood the nurse’s point of view, though they disagreed with what she had done.
The reason they don’t have cubicles is because the Japanese don’t place a high priority on personal space. They also like to feel as if they belong to a group, and typical American-style cubicle farms would make them feel isolated. Separating someone from the group and making them do work by themselves would be a punishment. It also has the practical value of letting the bosses see who is working and who isn’t at any point in time.
The telephone thing is due to a few factors. The Japanese generally don’t like using secretaries, partly because of the in-group/out-group (uchi/soto) feeling. They usually don’t feel the need to flaunt power by having a personal subordinate, because there is a group of subordinates already there. Anyone who has been working less time than you is a subordinate. A section chief bucho can use any of the people in his division to run errands, make copies, etc. A secretary is usually used as the barrier between the out-group non-company people and the in-group co-workers, so generally the only secretaries will be more like receptionists than secretaries. There are fewer specialists, and the phrases, “that’s not my duty” or “that’s not in my job description” are things that no one would ever say, especially not to a superior.
When the new engineers were doing scut work, it was a form of hazing. New employees are treated like new recruits in the army. They have to have their egos broken down so they can be molded to fit into the group. At a summer camp, I once saw a small group of new salarymen-to-be being yelled at by a drill sergeant bucho who was leading them through proper forms of address and greetings (aisatsu). They’d been at it for about an hour before I went to find the source of all the noise. Someone who can scream imprecations and corrections at someone at the top of his lungs for over an hour is impressive. When I got there, he was correcting the depth of their bows, telling them at one point that if they bowed to his boss like that, they were going to get fired about 5 seconds after he was for not teaching them proper form.
The latter part of your post I have no problems with, and actually, I’d like to expand on what you said. A strength of Japanese companies is that the managers are generalists. Anyone who is being groomed as a manager will spend time in several different divisions, getting hands-on experience in many different aspects of making, marketing, shipping, and getting the raw materials for whatever widget they make. By the time they get promoted to something like division or section chief, they’ll have spent at least several months or a few years involved with most of the important aspects.
The downside to this is that the subordinates often have a much better grasp of specifics than the managers. This can lead to problems when dealing with non-Japanese. Negotiations between Japanese and American companies, for example, have broken down more than once because the Americans were talking to the guy who appeared to know what was going on, but that guy was low man on the totem pole and by talking to him directly they were insulting his superiors and putting him in a very awkward position.
Another factor that makes a huge difference is that companies present themselves as a clan/family. Workers are part of the group. If they don’t do a good job, they are disappointing their “family” as well as screwing up the product. The same attitude in the more cynical West would be derided, but the Japanese are trained from literally elementary school onward to accept authority and think of themselves as part of a larger group, so most Japanese have a non-rational reaction to appeals to their social training. They want it to be true even if intellectually they know it’s not.
Another significant point is that salary gaps are lower in most Japanese companies compared to American ones. This is another aspect of the “family” aspect of Japanese companies, I think. Employees are encouraged to think of themselves as contributing their time to improving the company; it’s not just a job that they get money for. Labor doesn’t really get any more money than American labor would, in fact they sometimes make less, but management doesn’t get as big of a slice as American managers would demand. There’s also a lot of unpaid overtime put in by line workers as well as management. It’s a point of pride as well as a way of selecting for promotion to not go home until after your boss does.
This patronizing attitude toward workers has backfired on occasion. Nichia lost Nakamura, the guy who invented the blue laser technology that will probably revolutionize data storage, because they expected him to keep contributing his ideas with minimal reward. He finally got fed up and went to work at UC Santa Barbara. Apparently, he thought that the feeling of being part of a family was worth less than fair remuneration for his work. He got a bonus of something like $150 for an idea that was worth hundreds of millions, perhaps billions.
How this all fits into the original question is that there are a lot of social factors and some big differences in management style that have an impact on how workers approach their jobs. There are probably fewer managers who need to be hit by a clue-by-four since they’ve spent some time doing the jobs they are now overseeing. That means there are fewer unreasonable demands and stupid ideas that get implemented. A large degree of cooperation between certain companies, which I didn’t touch on earlier, is another contributing factor.
I heard that before in the UK. Ford wanted to put a special two-stroke engine under the bonnet of their Ka which would be quite clean and economical (so they say)
Then the UK government decided it didn’t want clean and economical in any old way, but in a way that stuck closely to their legislated idea of what clean and economical actually was.
So then Ford just had to stick with a catalytic convertor and a four stroke engine, because no modern four stroke would fit under the smaller bonnet, they had to stick with an older engine from the 1960s.
So they say anyway, it could be an elaborate ruse to get round an untidy design
You’re right, “egalitarian” is not quite the right word. I, too, saw (and received) abusive behavior from a superior. Maybe the right word is “materially egalitarian” or “outwardly egalitarian”. One could argue that the ingrained notions of status are so strong that outward signs of status are unnecessary.
One of my fellow engineers enjoyed telling the story of how the design manager made him change the oil in his car.
I think there are two camps in how “foreigners” view the Japanese. You seem to be in the “they’re really weird and different camp,” while I am in the “they’re not so different but still extremely frustrating camp.” We’ll just have to agree to disagree, I guess. Here are some points re yours. I’ve worked for four different Japanese companies, including two major public companies and a small, family-ish company. I’ve seen all kinds of behavior and can attest that there are many different modes of “Japaneseness” in business.
He answered the point well. Japan explicitly (which is not necessarily to say correctly) sees its relative lack of a gap between rich and poor (“himpu no sa ga nai”) as a good thing, and this is further reflected in the relatively flat pay scale in companies and lack of extreme executive perks.
I think in the US we talk a good egalitarian game but that is mostly a sham. At the end of the day the CEO goes home to his extreme wealth, middle management drives home in the Saabs and BMers, and the rest of the castes get the crumbs.
In Japan, contrariwise, a big show is put on about status–it’s all explicit, but the end result is much more egalitarian and flat. I think what we have here are two different strategies for dealing with egigencies of primate status and caste.
No, but the economic effects are much more equal–why is that?
That’s simply untrue. All the examples you bring up are about strata in companies which are limited to those companies. A hira-shain in a company is just like anybody else once he leaves the company. It’s not as though he born into a certain caste that limits what he can become in a company. (It’s not zero, of course. There is the equivalent of disadvantaged trailer trash in Japan, too.)
This is crap. I have to put this in the category of “misunderstood Japan.” Simple errors do not get one into “deep deep trouble,” whether one is Japanese or foreign.
Basically true but exaggerated. The basic business bow doesn’t really have degrees. The lowest bows I’ve seen have been toward departing customers as they leave in the elevator. Sure, hira-shain from low-status company to shacho of high-status company–you’re going to see some difference there, nothing radical or amazing.
And it was news, most likely, because the nurse was a freak, right?
This is mostly accurate, but I think the real reason is that, yes, people are not supposed to have special perks, in general. The boss is supposed to suffer along with his subordinates.
Agree.
This is a mishmash. Sempai/kouhai does not map directly onto superior/subordinate.
Some Japanese do flaunt power, others don’t. I don’t see a big cultural difference there compared to the US. I think the reason you don’t see many secretaries in Japan is the same that you don’t in the US: they’re not necessary and in the age of the computer not productive. Again, I don’t see a cultural difference. As for the telephone thing, at every company I’ve ever worked at every person had his/her own telephone (but usually not his/her own direct line). The reason for this is, again, group solidarity/suffering together (“we’ve all got to answer the phone for each other”).
Doesn’t paint an accurate picture. “Bucho” as a title has been on the way out for a long time, replaced by a plethora of nonsense Western-sounding variations. And I haven’t seen Japanese bosses behaving as you describe recently.
I don’t see much truth in this.
See, here is where your portrayal joins what I feel is a very common but very innacurrate category of portrayal: Japan is an especially kibishii (strict) society, and if you don’t do what you’re told a samurai appears and chops off your head. Why do so many Westerners see the culture that way? It’s just so inaccurate, so it’s very frustrating to see it.
I’ve seen plenty of people have shouting matches with their bosses. People disagree. People flout dress codes. People slack off. People act goofy and tell jokes. Some people in Japan are cutups and get away with a lot of shit. Not much happens to them. In fact, in the US you will easily get fired for thoughtcrime; in Japan it’s hard to fire anyone for anything (witness the incompetent train engineer who recently derailed a train and killed a bunch of people after having been warned several times for genuinely dangerous offenses).
Yes, this is one of the Japans out there, reflectly the fascist/militaristic side of the country that has never died. It occurs at certain companies and certain schools. Needless to say, most companies and schools would be ashamed to have that kind of shit going on.
Except that, of course, they would never, ever get fired for such a thing, right? Right.
Depends on the company. Sounds like an extract from a chapter on Japanese business circa 1980.
Depends.
No, reread the textbook and you’ll learn that sometimes a lower guy is used in negotiations in just this way. And, like anything else… it depends.
It depends on the corporate culture.
I agree 100% with this.
Agree.
I don’t think this reflects current realities. In my last two big Japanese companies, I was disgusted by what I saw as the disease of paid overtime. Employees would dick around, staying late to prove themselves “good little Japanese workers”–while supplementing their incomes but what must have been about 25 - 30%! But you’re right, it’s often about putting on a show, and the managers usually don’t get paid overtime.
I don’t think it’s “on occasion” any more. Ways of thinking have changed in Japan. A lot of people switch jobs quite a bit and don’t take the same kind of shit that people used to take.
Whaaaa? All I’ve seen at big Japanese companies is stupid ideas. By the cartload and boatload. People who can’t be fired–permanent deadwood looking for a raison d’etre and just churning out meaningless PowerPoints and reports. I honestly think you could fire 50% of the collective white collar workforce in the country and thereby save a ton of money while improving productivity to boot.
I’m not trying to bust your balls on everything you say just for the fun of it. I am somewhat of a pissed-off gaijin–pissed off by Japan (as every single gaijin who has a neuron eventually is) yet also by all the utter bullshit and crappy endless and plain ol’ theorizing about why Japan is this or that by other pissed-off foreigners.
I mean, it’s a continuum, isn’t it? One goes from utter nonsense about Zen and bushido to intelligent posts like your own that neverltheless (IMO) get significant stuff wrong or fall into common but avoidable traps (like the kibishii thing).
But if I may delineate in broad strokes where we agree/disagree:
Agree. Japan has a groupthink issue–bigtime. For me the dealbreaker about living there is the ridiculous patterns of behavior people engage in to preserve the group way or mood (which varies greatly from company to company, but is always there in some form)–even though the pattern to be upheld doesn’t benefit the individual or the group as a whole.
Disagree. The big (and very common error) is to think that Japan is extremely strict about individual behavior. It isn’t so! So long as one’s heart is in the right place about the group/pattern, one is OK. You can make up for losses in one area by signs and symbols in another.
In contrast, in the US we supposedly have freedom of expression, but one is subject to ostracism at any time for “not being a team player” (i.e., not being orthodox in any of several strict categories: dress, speach, manner, etc.).
Fair enough. I just wanted to correct the impression that Japanese have more on the ball than Westerners. They’re just as screwed up, in a different way, as Americans or Europeans. Even more sometimes.
Take a look at overall efficiency, as in value of products produced per worker hour, and you’d see that the Japanese, despite working as many hours as Americans (i.e.: lots more than the rest of the industrialized world), have relative efficiencies about 30 percent lower than the US. Those are based on the official government values. You’ve spent some time here, how many unbilled overtime hours do you think the Japanese workers put in? I’d say at a minimum 5-10 hours per week, often much more than that. I’d seriously doubt those hours are included in the official stats. On paper they get more paid vacation than Americans, but no one ever, ever uses anywhere close to their max vacation time. Even using half of it would probably be seen as selfish. They also don’t get sick leave; they’re expected to take sick time out of their paid vacation time.
I would say that people here like status displays just as much as Americans, it’s just that a lot of them can’t afford it. Designer products like Gucci bags and Rolex watches are coveted, and the shops to buy conspicuous consumption crap are everywhere, even in one of the poorest prefectures, like where I happen to live. The problem is that you don’t get that rich in business unless you’re well toward the top of the business chain. You don’t get that unless you graduated from the right school, in most cases. The other classic way to the top is to go into politics. Something like 80-90 percent of people in politics graduated from one school: Tokyo Daigaku, also known as Todai.
There is an elite here, and people do display what wealth they have, but they do it in different ways. The cost of living eats up a lot of whatever they get. What you would consider normal (house, two normal cars, major appliances, decent suit) is a display of wealth in Japan. Even in my area, a normal house, with about half the floorspace of an American one, costs between US$300,000 and $500,000. A really nice house could go for three quarters of a million or more. Thirty year mortgages are the norm, while some people have 40 year ones. In some parts of Tokyo, houses are unobtainable at any price. A “Mansion” (what we would call a hi-rise condo or apartment) can go for what a nice house in my area would. I’ve seen ads in the Tokyo suburbs for places over US$1,000,000 that were probably “good deals” from the local point of view. Food is twice as expensive as the US, luxury food like fresh fruit is four times as expensive.
School is not included in taxes, so that’s an extra several thousand US dollars per child per year, on top of saving for future education. Banks pay something like 0.04 percent per annum on savings accounts, so forget about the wonders of compound interest to help you out. Having a single car lands you a few thousand dollars in taxes and extra costs every year. I just paid US$1,500 in taxes and inspection fees to have the right to drive a 10 year old car with a mid-sized engine for another two years, and I’ll have to pay another $500 tax at the end of this month. An import or luxury car would cost a lot more than the approximately $1,000 in taxes alone I have to come up with annually. If you’re talking anywhere in the Tokyo area, renting a place to park could equal the rent on an apartment in a moderately expensive city in the US. And the expressways are all toll-ways. It costs about $10 one way to travel to the next city, about 35 km away. The same trip would take three times as long on a surface road, even if you don’t run into a traffic jam. The irony here is that it costs a lot to have a car, yet some of the poorest areas have no public transport, so they must have cars to get around.
The main reason for most of this is that businesses and the Japanese government haven’t spent very much on improving life for the populace. They concentrate on exports and industrial power, along with public works projects, at the expense of the Japanese people. Domestically produced products that are cheap overseas are sometimes up to twice as expensive here, for example. Hell, rice, the staple of the Japanese diet, is over twice as expensive in Japan as it was in California, where I used to live, and the cost of living in California was higher than the average for the US.
None of this has anything to do with the OP, except by way of demonstrating that we shouldn’t be looking to Japan for the answers to our problems. They may make superior products sometimes, but they’ve got lots of other problems that more than compensate for the occasional superiority. Anyway, as a few earlier posters mentioned, some of their production techniques were imported from the US. They’ve got great quality control, a trained tendency for attention to detail, and a strong ethic of self-sacrifice going for them, but most of you guys would shoot yourselves in the head if you had to live like they do.