Man I askedabout the supposed superiority of japanese-made alternators, and I get a discourse upon the modern sociology of Japan! Van’t we just STICK to the topic??
Strategic Vision? Oh, god, you can’t trust Strategic Vision. Well known for, ah, slanting things. I started paying attention to them back in the election, and asked my father, who (among other things) ran a division of JD Power’s studies, and I can tell you they have a reputation for less than… unbiased… work.
You asked why Japanese cars are so good. Wouldn’t sociology have something to do with that supposed goodness?
Pity you, getting a robust thread for your OP.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/2004/pollsters/index.html
Cite on Strategic Vision. You can examine that site for the history of SV’s polling antics, too.
GM also owns Daewoo, Saab and Opel (or Vauxhal or Holden depending where you live). Daewoo and Opel are listed in the top 10 most reliable car makes (link).
So GM definitely knows how to make a reliable car. The question is why they do not apply this knowledge to their other marques?
Well, GM’s only owned Daewoo for a few years, so it’s not likely that GM’s responsible for their quality. However, they have owned Opel since the 20s, so they’ve got no excuses there, for not learning from the German operation.
Toyota recalls 880,000 SUVs, pickups worldwide:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=7&u=/nm/20050518/ts_nm/autos_japan_toyota_dc
And that demonstrates… what, exactly?
It’s not as if the Big Three have never had recalls before.
I’m not saying it demonstrates anything. I just thought it would be of interest to those subscribed to this thread.
I was at lunch yesterday at some bar and grill and CNN was running a report on this. For some reason, the graphic and caption was about the Prius (I couldn’t hear the actual report)… a car not mentioned in the actual recall. :dubious:
Well, they surely don’t ship them here. Word out in the streets is that if you buy an American vehicle you should be wearing a white shirt with sleeves that tie on the back. Japanese cars are by far the most popular here, followed in a distant second by European ones. I myself have owned two Toyotas, one Honda and one Volkswagen.
I didn’t see many American cars in Europe. Too big for the road perhaps? I am left wondering who exactly is buying American cars?
I try not to think in terms of “screwed up” - it’s pointless when you’re talking about two different cultures. If a group of Americans went through the planning and negotiating that precedes the typical Japanese group camping weekend, they’d be hauled off to the loony bin. The relevant facts seem to be (1) that cars built by Japanese-owned companies are still more reliable than cars built by American-owned companies, even after all these years of handwringing over American manufacturing quality, and (2) Japanese society by hook or crook is more materially egalitarian than American society. I won’t pretend to know exactly what the relationship between the two is. I do know that although I consider myself an America-first, patriotic type, I still buy cars made in America by Japanese companies, instead of “American-made” cars, because I know the profit will go toward investment in future manufacturing, not to pay for a solid gold toilet bowl for the executive washroom.
I was last in Japan in 1993, when overwork was still trendy. In our company, the engineers got paid for overtime up to 30 or 40 hours a month, but they were all expected to work those extra 30 or 40 hours whether there was a need for it or not. I don’t recall anyone working off the clock. In our American division, the Japanese guys (needless to say, they were all guys) did work a great deal of unpaid overtime, but they were all at a managerial level where Americans don’t get paid for overtime either. We American boot-polishers got paid for unlimited overtime, and most people took advantage of it, but personally, I never worked more than about 50 hours a week, I never felt any pressure to work more, nor were my promotions and raises adversely affected.
It was a little different in the factory, compared to our engineering division. There, you got brownie points for staying after your shift to participate in “quality circles”, and you didn’t get paid. But it was strictly optional, and only a couple of hours a week.
And they have learned. The new Cadillacs are nothing like previous GM products. Only the Corvette has seen this kind of attention to detail in terms of engineering. And the fact that they are trying to make a car that is more like BMW, M-B, Nissan, and Toyota offerings in that class shows they are finally abandoning the old approach to American automaking. Opel was a major contributor to this change.
Hyperelastic: You’re right, I should probably have chosen different words than “screwed up.” I think I’m responding to the attitude that many people have about Japan: that the Japanese do it so perfectly and the Americans always have problems. In reality both cultures have weak and strong points in different areas.
Since the economic difficulties of the early '90s I’ve heard that companies have pulled way back on the overwork, especially mandatory overtime. Most companies can’t really afford to be paying for non-productive overtime and they’re starting to realize that mandatory overtime is in fact largely non-productive. Also the government has been more strict about enforcing overtime compensation laws.
Like anything else in Japan, things change slowly. The official end of the day is 17:15 where I work. No one even makes a move to go home until at least 5:30 and many of them are still here at 18:00. They do not get paid extra since they’re all salaried kômuin. My girlfriend, as a contract worker being paid an hourly wage, was still required to stay an hour past her official contracted quitting time every single day, whether there was work for her to do or not. Considering that she got the job through a government-sponsored placement agency there was no chance that they could fudge her pay, so she got properly-paid overtime but she was still forced to stay there even though she had told them before she took the position that she would have conflicts a couple of days a week if she was not able to go home on time. She eventually quit the job because of this.
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Aeschenes: I didn’t appreciate your tone in a few places. In my earlier post, I didn’t say anything like “crap” or “wrong” in relation to the other person’s point of view, or say things like “read the texbook again.” This isn’t the Pit and I don’t like patronizing attitudes. Experiences vary and both of us are outsiders to Japan. I can’t claim to have an absolutely authoritative opinion on a whole culture any more than you can. All I’ve done is show some of my experiences and general impressions. If you think I’m wrong, then you’re welcome to point it out but skip the sniping, please.
I will defer to your view on a few points, since I don’t work in the private sector and most of my impressions about corporate culture come indirectly through friends who work at corporations, observation of employee behavior outside the office, and occasionally from the media. There are a few places where my experience is very very different from yours. I get the impression that you were here longer than I have been so far, and it’s possible that my views on some of these things may change over time, but this is how I see things right now.
I’m trying to contrast the behavior, so I’m deliberately picking up things that are different. People are people and they don’t deal with things so very differently, but when talking about differences between cultures it’s not so helpful to talk about the things people have in common.
You must have lived in a different Japan from me. My next door neighbor lives in a crumbling wattle and daub shack with a corragated tin roof. I know people who have pit toilets and burn firewood to heat their bath water. I live in a semi-rural area, but the nearest McDonalds is only a 15 minute drive, so it’s not like I’m really way out in the middle of nowhere. In contrast, my landlord, who lives about a block away, has a huge beautiful house built partially in a traditional Japanese style (including a family mon on the roof peak) but with modern materials.
There absolutely is a big gap in wealth in Japan, just as there is in the US. I used to live out in the back end of beyond in the foothills of California when I was a kid, and I never met anyone who had to burn firewood for hot water. I’ve also never met anyone in the US with a Hermes or Gucci bag, but I see them occasionally even where I live. My experience does not really support your observations.
Sorry, I’m going to have to disagree with this too. This is a country where the hereditary aristocracy ended up mostly in charge of everything yet again after every attempt at leveling things: the Meji Restoration, WWI, WWII, and the ensuing “housecleaning” that was supposed to have taken place during the Occupation. A vast majority of the people who control Japan (company presidents, bureaucrats, and politicians) graduate from a single university, Todai. A majority of the kids who are successful at entering Todai are, not surprisingly, from the same elite families that have been in charge for a long long time. There is nothing analogous to this in even Europe which has a longer history of elitism and less institutional distrust of authority than the US. There is less mobility, less choice, less chance of success through alternate channels in Japan than anywhere in the West, especially the US. In what way is this not stratified?
My experience is different. Not paying attention to the proper forms or being socially clueless in general is punished much more harshly than in the West. For example, you will not be screamed at for omitting to say “please” in any English speaking country, but you can be for not using keigo when you are supposed to. I’ve seen it happen. I am held to a different standard because don’t look Japanese and my Japanese ability is obviously (and unfortunately) not perfect. In addition to native Japanese I’ve met who have had social sanctions lowered against them, I have “stealth gaijin” (Asian ancestry) friends who have sometimes been very badly treated because they were held up to the standards of Japanese behavior when their understanding of Japanese culture is less than even mine.
I’m not going to say that I can always nail it myself, but there are differences in the bows depending on the circumstance and relative status of the people involved. These tend to even out in time as a relationship progresses, but especially at first people are pretty punctilious about all aspects of formal behavior, including bows. I know for sure that people pay attention to it because I’ve gotten some positive reinforcement when I get it right and I’ve seen people’s reactions to others when someone has been too obsequious or too casual. Maybe you gloss over it but to many Japanese this is important.
You ignored the part of my post where I pointed out the views of my co-workers on the news story. As I said, some of them told me that they could identify with how the nurse felt. Has there ever been an incident in the US where an RN denied access to the family because she was called simply a nurse instead of a Registered Nurse? Would anyone say that they could see the RN’s point of view? For that matter, in the US, are there any stories that even come close to some of the documented and varified oddities that happen in Japan? Aside from those in The National Enquirer, that is.
No, it doesn’t. But do you want to spend a page or two explaining it? Yeah, neither did I.
That’s not really what I said. You just don’t directly refuse to do something if someone asks you to do it; you try to do it if it’s at all possible. If it’s your boss telling you to do it, you definitely do it, and you don’t give him any stupid excuses either. Most Japanese tend to get pissed off when you give excuses, because to them it’s an immature attempt to shift responsibility. I figured this out early on when I tried to explain why I couldn’t do something. I was told, basically, “Don’t tell me why you can’t do it, just do it.”
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but let’s face it, they aren’t exactly going to be on the fast-track to the top for their behavior. If they’re really a pain in the ass, they get transferred to someplace where they’re somebody else’s problem. Nobody likes being responsible for final decisions here. Getting transferred to Hokkaido is the Japanese equivalent of being transferred to Siberia. It’s very difficult or even impossible to continue a career after such. They may not lose their job, but they’re not going to be promoted or get a chance at a much higher salary than they’ve got already.
A very funny comedy troupe, Warai-inu no Bôken made fun of this with their “Kosuda Buchô” sketches. The first time he was transferred to some branch office in the tropics, it was because he did a dead-on impression of his boss. Almost every sketch starts with poor Kosuda packing for his next transfer and ends with a revelation of what he did that got him transferred this time. It’s almost always some joke about, inadvertent criticism of, or embarrassment caused to one of his bosses.
JR has supported his mistakes in that they have stated that they consider the trains coming in to the station on time to be more important than the occasional accident since late trains cause more inconvenience for passengers. He was pressured to keep to the schedule, no matter what. It is at least partially the company’s fault and they’ve expressed little remorse over the incident. He didn’t get fired because JR didn’t want to fire him, not because it presented any difficulty for them.
It may be true that getting rid of regular employees is a bit difficult (though not impossible) but companies are getting around that lately by hiring a greater proportion of contracted employees, who can be fired by simply not offering a new contract, at significantly lower rates than permanent full-time employees. They’re also forcing people into early retirement. People are now required to retire at 60 in some cases.
No, I don’t think they are ashamed to have it going on, actually. That’s why this particular incident stuck in my mind. We foreigners were the only ones who thought it odd, for everyone else it was business as usual. The people who ran the camp resort said that about half their customers were corporate. I found out that recruit camps and other behavior modification programs are quite common in Japan. Over my first two years here, I visited about 40 different schools in my area. Light corporal punishment and verbal abuse from teachers toward students were common–even though it is technically illegal for a teacher to discipline a student that way–and in a couple of instances I even saw teachers encourage students to bully other students with similar tactics. It’s an institutionally and socially reinforced behavior and it’s probably not going to go away anytime soon.
You pick some nits with my understanding of corporate culture. I’m not really in a position of authority to debate these. As I pointed out, I don’t work in the private sector. However, I’d like to point out that it’s a given that generalities are going to be general, in that specifics are likely to vary, so all of your comments about “it varies” were implied already.
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’ll take the rebuke on this one since I think I was probably going more on idealism than reality on this point. It should be true that someone with direct experience in the field wouldn’t come up with so many dumb ideas but it doesn’t seem to be actually true in many cases. I guess it’s the same kind of pressure that “publish or perish” faculty are under at universities. The results are sometimes reminiscent of the Annals of Improbable Research.
I’m not really that pissed off at Japanese culture, though I am frustrated by it. Often.
I share your annoyance at people who idealize Japan a bit too much, which is why I stuck my oar in at first. I don’t mind if someone has a different point of view because I sometimes learn things that way. If nothing else, I learn about some of my blind spots.
OK, just to legitimize my post: I’ve lived/worked in Japan for almost 20 years, at some small companies and at some of the biggest companies in the country. I graduated from one of Japan’s national universities, and have native-level reading/writing/speaking ability in Japanese. I now work at probably the most well-known financial firm in Japan.
(aside) I actually tend to go back and forth between US/European companies and Japanese companies - 3-5 years at a JPN company, get fed up and frustrated, quit and go work for Western company, another JPN company comes waving money around and promising that ‘we’re different, we really want to ‘internationalize’ and learn how to do things like the top foreign companies do’ and I’m stupid enough to believe them, lather, rinse, repeat. (/aside)
One quote that I’ve been recalling was from, I think, a Japanese politician who commented in a moment of rare honesty, said that Japan had the best blue-collar workers, average blue-collar workers, and the worst managers.
Er, no. I would say that almost every company of half-way decent size does this, and still does this in good ol’ 2005. Also, note that this isn’t just for the ‘grooming’ phase; it holds for the manager’s entire career at the company. Which is why the new head of software development will have been in charge of distribution for the past two years, or why our new head of research will have been in charge of the treasury desk before that.
Yes, there are some benefits to having a broad knowledge of the company’s business and an extensive intracorporate network - but the biggest problem is that there is no real incentive to excel at that position if a) your salary doesn’t really change much anyway, and b) you’ll be transferred out in a few years anyway. At Japanese companies, the best way to stay on the promotion path is to simply ‘not screw up’. Promotion by attrition.
The biggest problem is that Japanese companies simply don’t know how to hire people. Mid-career hires are on the rise, but the bulk of hiring is still done at once, from that year’s pool of new grads. Department heads almost never do their own hiring - instead, the HR department handles hiring etc. for the entire company. The HR department figures out how many new people they need to hire, they interview and hire X number of college grads, and basically disperse them throughout the company pretty much at will. Department heads on good terms with HR will get the brightest kids and the prettiest girls, people on HR’s shit list will get the obvious misfits and dullards. I am dead serious. There is no input from the department heads on the kind of people/skill sets they need. Your major at college means next to nothing. Any skilled employee a company gets was through sheer luck.
The emphasis on ‘the group’, on not sticking out or causing trouble, etc, means that when things are going well, a Japanese company can be a truely amazing thing. No egos to massage, an educated workforce that works hard, including working overtime for free (so-called ‘service zangyou’, free OT - which, by the way, has always been epidemic in Japan and only recently is beginning to be addressed).
It’s when things go wrong that the problems emerge. No one steps up to take responsibility for addressing the problem. They will have endless meetings where everyone will understand what the problem is, and what could be done to correct it. But nothing gets done, maybe it could mean having to tell someone in another department something they don’t want to hear. So it never gets said. US managers thrive on adversity and competition if it means getting ahead; deep down, I think Japanese managers (and companies/society as a whole) would happily accept mediocrity in return for being able to avoid anything resembling confrontation.
The ‘Japan as egalitarian’ thing is also a state of mind: Something like 85% of Japanese regardless of their income consider themselves to be middle class! That, just by definition, is of course absurd, even if incomes are a bit flatter in Japan than the US. The difference is that most Japanese consider themselves to be not much better or worse than anyone else. It partially explains why they put up with so much crap - they assume that everyone else is in the same boat.
This all ties in: The problem with Corporate Japan is not a lack of creative people or good ideas. It’s in the lack of being able to implement these ideas - this actually holds for the basic problem facing Japan as a whole: the society simply does not reward effort or excellence: the problem is with the consensus acceptance of ‘average’ and ‘mediocrity’ being a good thing. The majority of mothers in Japan listed as their number one goal for their children, ‘that he/she doesn’t cause problems for others’.