Counting Ribs
“What becomes alarming is when you see bones and start counting ribs.”
- LINDA WELLS, editor of the beauty magazine Allure, on runway models.
Despite the importance to women of this issue, this isn’t going to be a post on the unhealthy appearance of clothing models, but about how a national economy can be seen as taking on an appearance similar to that of such a model.
For over thirty years now, the American economy has been in the shadow of its prodigy, Japan. After almost three decades of rebuilding from the ashes left behind by Curtis LeMay in 1945, Japan surpassed the American economy in just about every economic sector across the Seventies and Eighties, most notably in the automotive and consumer electronics categories.
I’m sure it’s JUST a coincidence that the decline of the American Dream for the working class began about the same time.
Our economy went into a slow starvation mode, binging as if the money was still rolling in and purging those who couldn’t produce the profits desired by the investors. Despite all of the warnings, however, no one in a position of influence chose to make the decline of our economy an issue that could be discussed over lunch while at work. Thus, the decline continued, an economic anorexia that wasn’t going to be halted - no one cared enough.
Well, eventually all good things come to an end. The gravy train for Japan is ending:
Japanese Fret That Quality Is in Decline
By MARTIN FACKLER
September 21, 2006
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 difference between what Japan is now experiencing and what the 1970s American experience was is that the Japanese people actually care:
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.”
Ah, would that the American people could see this! But instead, we as a people are far too easily fooled into supporting expensive frivolities (like forcing the world to change into something resembling our image of them through the application of military power) to care about such things.
But then, is it the fault of the American workers - or those who are supposed to keep them informed?
Japan is scandalized that two of its major industrial giants, Toyota and Sony, were recently forced to recall products - something seen as a mark of shame by the Japanese - and their media is all over the story:
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?”
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 here in the same breath as Japan’s rising rates of crime and juvenile delinquency and other signs that the country’s tightly woven social fabric may be starting to fray.
“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.
Such an awareness is completely lacking in the American people. And yet, that should not be the case. It was an American who taught these concepts to the Japanese after WWII:
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.
One would think that since America was so rich, it would be smart. But that was a misconception. Despite Deming’s exemplary success in Japan, it took thirty years for an American company of note to get into enough trouble to bring Deming in to save them:
Ford Motor Company was one of the first American corporations to seek help from Deming. In 1981, Ford recruited Deming to help jump-start its quality movement. Ford’s sales were falling. Between 1979 and 1982, Ford had incurred $3 billion in losses. Deming questioned their company’s culture and the way its managers operated. To Ford’s surprise, Deming talked not about quality but about management.
He told Ford that management actions were responsible for 85% of all problems in developing better cars.
Deming offer[ed] a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management’s failure to plan for the future brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. “Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.”
- [quote from the Wikipedia link]
Ford listened for a while, but then got lazy and began to slide back into its old ways, the result of which is that thousands of Ford workers are going to be seeking new employment very soon as Ford sinks into the annals of history.
But getting back to Japan, they don’t exactly understand what caused this crisis in Japanese self-image to arise. Critics are flailing about seeking to pin the blame on something simplistic, and to come up with equally simplistic ’solutions’:
In Japan’s 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.
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, which he said have sold four million copies since 2002.
I included this section above to make a point through contrast. The school principal is trying to force ’self-control’ into his students through regimentation. Regimentation is a form of external control imposed on an individual, so by definition there is no ’self’ in control. That seems to be a facet of the Japanese persona that they have yet to understand, for it is causing identity problems.
As Professor Sawa puts it:
“Japan seems to have lost something important
on the way to becoming a developed country,
and many Japanese want to get that back.”
I suggest that the school principal’s regimentation of his students is merely a reaction to the differences between traditional Japanese social mores and those of today’s students, who have taken the American standards of personal achievement to heart:
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.”
This could be said of America’s executives and investors. They have come to expect, since the rise of Reagan, and continuing under the Bush Administration, that the working serfs of America will provide them with an easy and enjoyable lifestyle, amply supplied with the good things of life through huge dividends and reduced taxation.
In addition, also like the apparent attitude of American executives and investors, denial rears its ugly head: the problems cannot be blamed on Japan and its people. Such corruption has to come from without:
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.
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.
There is a clue within this description of Japan as a nation which describes why the notion of a decline in Japanese product quality is so distressing: it is a sign that Japan has lost control of the game.
Think of it this way. If you were alive back in the 1970s when Japanese products began to become more popular than their American competitors’ products, the reaction then was for the American people to rally to bashing parties. The symbolic execution of the Japanese ‘invader’ by the Angry American was meant to assuage the feeling in America that we weren’t the lead dog anymore.
But we were ignoring the reality that the baton had been passed, because we didn’t want to admit the truth - we had competitors who could out-perform us, a nation we had defeated militarily in a violent and difficult struggle. We didn’t want to admit that a beaten foe could beat us at another game in another time.
So it is with Japan today. In a sense, they saw us as a nation they had bested economically. It has to be coming as a great shock to them that nations they dominated militarily in the 1940s are now beating them at the economics game:
“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.”
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.
As noted above, Japanese managers have been abandoning the American management concept of individualized pay-for-performance standards when managing team-action is so inured in the Japanese psyche. They are also not about to recall the traditional Japanese management concept of the job-for-life. As American workers face similar issues, and have for a while, at least Japan has a role model in what NOT to do.
But will they learn these lessons, as well as others? There are fears that Japan will return to the fascist militarism of the 1940s now that they are facing economic decline and don’t have the US to draw from for military protection and profitable sales. They will get leaner and meaner as the accustomed hungers are no longer satisfied.
The US got leaner and meaner. Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe soon Iran, are intended to feed that hunger. But the hunt isn’t going well, and the ribs are showing.
It’s bad enough when there’s one mad dog running loose, crazed with unsated appetites. We don’t need a pack of them.
So to round up my analogy, it has become easy to count the ribs, and alarm is called for. The question is, what action to take?
The world doesn’t need numerous regional wars breaking out over a dwindling resource (petroleum) when there are so many other viable options available that can be harnessed without a lot of investment or expertise. Do we really need that Viper traveling at 160 mph when a truck able to do 60 is more in order?
We need some reality in our lives to replace all the fantasies that have been lodged there. That would be a good start toward a sensible reduction in our energy usage - and in so many other aspects of our lives. We’re going to have to understand that making do with less is a good thing, and not the deprivation our greed insists upon.
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