Total quality mismanagement in Japan?
Martin Fackler
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 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, in radio talk shows, on the front pages of newspapers and in the hushed corridors of government ministries.
Even in local 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 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 country’s two proudest corporate names. In the US, 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 spate of bad news has not stopped. Just this week, Sony suffered another blow when Toshiba announced that it was recalling 3,40,000 Sony-made laptop batteries, after last month’s recalls of 5.9 million batteries.
And Toyota, which has experienced a soaring number of recalls in recent years, said on 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 to learn quality-control concepts like kaizen, meaning improvement.
World-leading craftsmanship became so central to the nations selfimage that many Japanese seem to have trouble imagining their country without it. The recalls are discussed here in the same breath as Japan’s rising rates of crime and other signs that the country’s tightly woven social fabric may be starting to fray. NYT NEWS SERVICE
Martin Fackler
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 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, in radio talk shows, on the front pages of newspapers and in the hushed corridors of government ministries.
Even in local 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 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 country’s two proudest corporate names. In the US, 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 spate of bad news has not stopped. Just this week, Sony suffered another blow when Toshiba announced that it was recalling 3,40,000 Sony-made laptop batteries, after last month’s recalls of 5.9 million batteries.
And Toyota, which has experienced a soaring number of recalls in recent years, said on 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 to learn quality-control concepts like kaizen, meaning improvement.
World-leading craftsmanship became so central to the nations selfimage that many Japanese seem to have trouble imagining their country without it. The recalls are discussed here in the same breath as Japan’s rising rates of crime and other signs that the country’s tightly woven social fabric may be starting to fray. NYT NEWS SERVICE
