Japanese Fret That Quality Is in Decline
By MARTIN FACKLER
Published: September 21, 2006
TOKYO, Sept. 20 Perhaps only in Japan could a television series
like Project X have become one of the most popular TV shows. No,
it isnt a science fiction thriller. Its about product
quality.
Tarnishing Japan's Image More specifically, its about a bunch of
corporate engineers whose hand-held calculators and ink-jet
printers helped turn this nation into an industrial
powerhouse.
So it is little wonder that a recent surge in recalls of defective
products has set off national hand-wringing and soul-searching
here, 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. Arent 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. Tokyos sprawling subway and train networks run like
clockwork, accurate to the minute. Television factories assign
workers with rags to wipe down every new set, lest a Japanese
consumer find a single fingerprint and return it. In supermarkets,
many apples and melons are individually wrapped in protective
plastic foam.
In the last two months, the national angst increased after
large-scale recalls of defective products made by Toyota and Sony,
the countrys two proudest corporate names. In the United States,
product recalls occur so frequently that most are barely noticed.
But here, they have created something of a crisis in a country
where manufacturing quality is part of the national identity.
The fingers have no main culprit to point to. Some say young
Japanese are too lazy. Others say American-style management is to
blame.
The spate of bad news has not stopped. Just this week, Sony
suffered another blow when Toshiba announced that it was recalling
340,000 Sony-made laptop batteries, after last months recalls of
5.9 million batteries. And Toyota, which has experienced a soaring
number of recalls in recent years, said Wednesday that it would
hire 8,000 more engineers to strengthen quality.
Some here 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 here to learn
Japanese quality-control concepts like kaizen, meaning
improvement.
World-leading craftsmanship became so central to the nations
self-image that many Japanese seem to have trouble imagining their
country without it. The recalls are discussed here in the same
breath as Japans rising rates of crime and juvenile delinquency
and other signs that the countrys tightly woven social fabric may
be starting to fray.
In the news media, Sonys and Toyotas 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, Japans trade minister, who twice
last month took unusually blunt steps in this nation that normally
recoils from confrontation. He sent letters to executives from Sony
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
ministrys 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 Japans 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.
In Japans schools, once lauded for their hard-working students and
sharp-penciled test takers, test scores have fallen recently below
those of countries like Singapore, South Korea and Finland. Dozens
of educators at elementary and high schools across Japan are
sounding alarms about declining standards.
Tarnishing Japan's Image 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 schools
principal, Hideo Kageyama, who has written more than 30 drill
workbooks, which he said have sold four million copies since 2002.
Our societys future is at stake.
To be sure, 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 worlds computer chips. And despite its problems, Toyota
still appears on track to dethrone the flailing General Motors as
the worlds largest carmaker in the next year or two.
Theyll learn from their mistakes, said Yuji Fujimori, an
electronics analyst in Tokyo for Goldman Sachs.
Still, Sonys problems have not been limited to batteries. The
company worked furiously over the summer to resolve problems in
production of its PlayStation 3, its widely awaited game console,
which is due out in November.
If asked if Sonys manufacturing ability has declined, at this
point today I have to say yes, said Ken Kutaragi, chief executive
of Sonys 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
nations 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 team work.
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.
