JAPAN IN STEW OVER RECALLS

[Anonymous]

Japan in stew over recalls
TOKYO
— Perhaps only in Japan could a television series like Project X have
become one of the most popular TV shows. No, it isn’t a science fiction
thriller. It’s about product quality.More specifically, it’s about a
bunch of corporate engineers who invented the handheld calculators and
ink-jet printers that helped turn this nation into an industrial
powerhouse.So little wonder that a recent surge in recalls of defective
products has triggered national hand-wringing and soul-searching in
radio talk shows, on the front pages of newspapers and in the hushed
corridors of government ministries. Even in local noodle shops, the
conversation turns to the bruised pride and fears that Japan may be
losing its edge at a time when South Korea and China are breathing down
its neck.“Craftsmanship was the best face that Japan had to show the
world,” said Hideo Ishino, a 44-year-old lathe operator at an
auto-parts factory in Kawasaki, an industrial city next to Tokyo.
“Aren’t the Koreans making fun of us now ?”“It took us years to build
up this reputation,” Kazumasa Mitani, 32, a co-worker, chimed in. “Now
we see how fast we can lose it.”This, after all, is a country that has
been obsessed with perfection. Tokyo’s sprawling subway and train
networks run like clockwork, accurate to the minute. Television
factories supply workers with rags to wipe down every new set, lest
Japanese consumers return them if they find a single fingerprint. In
supermarkets, many apples and melons are individually wrapped in
protective plastic foam.So in the past two months, the national angst
increased after large-scale recalls of defective products made by
Toyota and Sony, the country’s two proudest corporate names. In the
United States, product recalls occur so frequently that most are barely
noticed. But in Japan, they have triggered something of a crisis in a
country where manufacturing perfection is part of the national
identity.The finger-pointing has no main culprit. Some say young
Japanese are too lazy. Others say American-style management is to
blame.The spate of bad news has not stopped. Sony recently suffered
another blow when Toshiba announced that it was recalling 340, 000
Sonymade laptop batteries, following last month’s recalls of 5. 9
million batteries. And Toyota, which has seen a soaring number of
recalls in recent years, said Wednesday that it would hire 8, 000 more
engineers to strengthen quality.Some in Japan admit that Americans may
find the fuss perplexing. But Japan is the country that elevated the
American quality guru W. Edwards Deming to virtual sainthood and
conquered global markets with its eminently reliable cars, cameras and
computers. For a time, American and European executives even flocked to
the country to learn Japanese quality-control concepts like “kaizen,”
or “improvement.”World-leading craftsmanship became so central to the
nation’s self-image that many Japanese seem to have trouble imagining
their country without it. The recalls are discussed in the same breath
as Japan’s rising rates of crime and juvenile delinquency and other
signs that the nation’s tightly woven social fabric may be starting to
fray.In the news media, Sony’s and Toyota’s quality problems have
frequently topped coverage of wars in Iraq and Lebanon. And Nihon
Keizai Shimbun, the leading economic daily, began a front-page
investigative series this month called “Can Japan Protect Quality
?”“Toyota and Sony have been a wake-up call that something is amiss in
Japan,” said Takamitsu Sawa, an economics professor at Ritsumeikan
University in Kyoto. “Japan seems to have lost something important on
the way to becoming a developed country, and many Japanese want to get
that back.”One of those is Toshihiro Nikai, Japan’s trade minister, who
twice last month took unusually blunt steps in this nation that
normally recoils from confrontation. He sent letters to Sony executives
ordering them to report on quality-control improvements after
back-to-back recalls by Apple and Dell of faulty Sony-made laptop
batteries. Sony promised to comply and diligently sent employees to
receive the letters by hand. It was the first time such orders had ever
been issued to Sony.“This is very rare,” said Atsuo Hirai, assistant
chief at the trade ministry’s information product safety section. Rarer
still was the fact that a few weeks earlier, the transport ministry
issued similar orders to Toyota.Hiroshi Okuda, the retired chairman of
Toyota and elder statesman of Japan’s business world, called on his
countrymen to do more about what he saw as the declining
competitiveness of Japanese manufacturing.“Japan lacks a sufficient
sense of crisis,” he warned last month.

The sense of crisis has moved even into the classroom.
Japan’s
schools, once lauded for their hard-working students and sharp-penciled
test takers, have seen test scores fall recently below such countries
as Singapore, South Korea and Finland. So, dozens of educators at
elementary and high schools across Japan are sounding alarms about
declining standards.At Ritsumeikan Elementary School in Kyoto, the aim
is more discipline and memorization, so students now stand at attention
every morning to recite in unison parts of ancient Confucian texts and
other classics. They are timed to see how quickly they can regurgitate
multiplication tables.“More self-control leads to a better work ethic,”
says the school’s principal, Hideo Kageyama, who has written more than
30 drill workbooks, of which he said 4 million copies have been sold
since 2002. “Our society’s future is at stake.”Japanese companies
continue to dominate production of many high-tech products, from
digital cameras and color copiers to solar cells and the delicate
optics used to etch circuits onto most of the world’s computer chips.
And despite its problems, Toyota still appears on track to dethrone
flailing General Motors as the world’s largest carmaker in the next
year or two.“They’ll learn from their mistakes,” said Yuji Fujimori, an
electronics analyst in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs.Still, Sony’s problems
have not been limited to batteries. The company worked furiously over
the summer to improve problems in production of its PlayStation 3, its
widely awaited game console due out in November.“If asked if Sony’s
manufacturing ability has declined, at this point today I have to say
yes,” said Ken Kutaragi, chief executive of Sony’s video game
division.Various reasons crop up as possible explanations for declining
quality. Universities bemoan that new students are more interested in
literature and the liberal arts than engineering. Applicants to
engineering programs are down to 8. 7 percent of all university
applicants this year from 12. 3 percent eight years ago.“In the old
days, there were a lot of students who wanted to join the front lines
of manufacturing, and really gave it their all,” said Chitoshi Miki, an
executive vice president in charge of student education at the Tokyo
Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s top engineering
universities. “Now, no one even wants to break a sweat.”Others have
begun to blame recent American-style management changes, like the end
of traditional lifetime job guarantees. Fujitsu, the electronics maker,
has backed away from basing salaries on individual performance, saying
it hurt employee morale and undermined teamwork.As Japan wrings its
hands, say some economists, Asian competitors have been closing in. Lee
Kwang-hoon, an electronics analyst at Hanhwa Securities in Seoul, said
that the recall of Sony-made batteries could offer an opportunity for
the biggest Korean makers, Samsung and LG, to rival Sony in market
share.“The biggest change may not be that Japan has dropped in
quality,” said Masaru Kaneko, an economics professor at Keio University
in Tokyo, “but that Asia is catching up.”

[Author]

September 28, 2006 at 10:43 AM