Dispelling The Japanese Myth: An Engineer’s Adventures in Japan

By Nancy K. Crevier

“My first ideas about Japan came from the Japanese movies I watched as a child. I loved sitting on the living room couch on a Sunday afternoon, watching Godzilla breathe fire as he tromped through Tokyo, wreaking havoc,” wrote Darius Mehri in his book, Notes From Toyota-Land

Years later, the Newtown native would have the opportunity to see another kind of havoc wreaked in Japan. Like most Americans during the 1980s, Mr Mehri, a student of Asian studies at The University of Rochester, believed that the thriving Japanese economy and cutting-edge products coming from that country were the result of a cooperative, stable work environment and an advanced workplace structure called the “Toyota Production System,” manned by loyal and happy workers. 

His post-graduation visit to Japan confirmed that illusion. As a visitor to that country, he was very impressed with the industriousness of the people. Japan was experiencing what Mr Mehri now refers to as a “bubble” time, a time of positive worldwide press and a powerful economy. Mr Mehri returned to the United States to pursue a degree in engineering. With his knowledge of Japanese and an engineering degree, he felt many options would open up to him.

 In 1996, the opportunity to work as an engineer for an upper level Toyota group company was offered to him, and Mr Mehri jumped at it. Few westerners are ever hired for design technology positions in Japanese companies. It was only through the intersession of his advisor while finishing up his master’s in engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison that the young man was offered what he then perceived to be a chance to view the heralded Japanese work ethic first hand. The “lean work” ethic and tight teamwork were supposed to be the ultimate in production systems for manufacture engineering.

What he discovered as he lived and worked the revolutionary system during a three-year contract in Japan was that cynicism, bullying, inadequate training and dangerous working conditions prevailed in the workforce. The pressure on the lives of Japanese manufacturing workers by company imposed values was more like the crushing heel of Godzilla than that of a father taking his child by the hand — an image promoted by the Toyota group for which he worked.

Based on his observations and journals he kept during his tenure with “Nizumi,” the pseudonym for the company that he worked for in Japan, Mr Mehri wrote a book detailing not only the misconceptions Westerners have of Japanese work ethics, but also the societal mores and values of the Japanese that affect the workers there.

Notes From Toyota Land was published by Cornell University Press in 2005 and Mr Mehri will be at C.H. Booth Library the evening of Wednesday, February 22, to discuss his memoir and demystify the popular perceptions of Japanese work systems.

“My book is what is called a ‘participant observation study’ and the only other one was written in the 70s,” explains Mr Mehri, who is now a contract engineer in Massachusetts. “It is the first book of its kind, written by a worker working in Japan.”

It is the still-pervasive myth of Japanese superiority that Mr Mehri hopes to dispel with Notes From Toyota-Land.

“When I first started writing,” he said, “my objective was to have [the book] used as educational material for universities. I want to change the way Americans think about the Japanese work system.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the crash of the Japanese economy, Americans swallowed the vision of the perfect, finely tuned work place propagated by the Japanese, says Mr Mehri.

“Americans believed that the Toyota Production System was a unique, superior way of working, and that the Japanese were very loyal to their companies, which in turn were believed to be extremely family and human oriented,” he says.

Mixed results among US companies that have attempted to adopt the Toyota Production System, however, are the result of an incompatibility of Japanese and American cultural ideology, suggests Mr Mehri.

As an entry-level engineer in Japan, he came to realize that the whole image of the company as family was merely a façade and that high production came at the expense of workers’ health and an indifferent attitude toward dangerous working conditions.

What appears on the outside, says Mr Mehri, to be a stable and nurturing environment is in actuality an environment rife with backstabbing, peer pressure and coercive, unwritten rules. Unions that exist in manufacturing plants are unions in name only that rarely deal with issues of importance.

The Japanese attitude of disclosing as little information as necessary to as few people as is warranted creates a work place in which it is difficult to capture the whole picture of the goal, Mr Mehri says. “America is a very open society. There is a tremendous amount of mixing of engineers from different companies, which you would never see in Japan.” For example, if an American worker is dissatisfied with their position, he or she makes the choice to either stick it out or move on to another company. Japanese firms do not hire workers from other companies, as a rule, Mr Mehri points out. “By the time a [Japanese] worker is in his thirties, he really doesn’t have much opportunity to change jobs.”

If the person could find another position, they would be starting over at the bottom of the rung. Decreased benefits and lower pay make movement between companies unlikely and it is this lack of labor mobility that keeps workers in poor conditions, he believes.

What kinds of poor conditions do workers encounter in the Nizumi plant, which is like most other Japanese manufacturing factories? High line speeds in the factories contribute to an excess of injuries, all of which are attributed to the worker rather than faulty equipment and a lack of breaks. “A worker is expected to work 60 seconds out of every minute,” he says. High line speeds, of course, mean higher product output, Mr Mehri points out, but injuries are apt to occur at those speeds. Rarely is a worker compensated for even serious injuries, according to the astute observations of this engineer.

Peer pressure keeps sick workers on the job; if one line worker is absent, there is no replacement. The others must simply do the missing worker’s job for them.

As might be expected, this breeds resentment —unspoken, of course, in the Japanese culture. Public humiliation at higher-level jobs is not uncommon in meetings, and the meetings themselves tend to be unproductive for the most part.

“Anything you need to know, you will find out at a ‘drinking party,’ a sort of social gathering that it would be wise not to miss attending,” Mr Mehri observes. “You wouldn’t just walk up to someone and start a conversation without an introduction, and managers will only tell you what they think you need to know.”

Service overtime is one of the unwritten rules at Nizumi. It requires unpaid overtime to be put in, resulting in 12- to 14-hour workdays for the bulk of the workers.

“It is interesting,” Mr Mehri observes, “that the height of death by overtime [an actual phenomenon in Japan] was in the late 80s and 90s, at the height of the ‘bubble’ in Japan. What does that say about the Japanese system? They are kind of clueless.”

Despite the dysfunction of manufacturing companies in Japan, excellent products continue to be turned out by that country. What many Americans do not realize, however, is that much of the innovative technology used by the Japanese comes from westerners. The Japanese are superior at production — at a cost — but “Americans have innovation and intellectual resources that the Japanese envy,” says Mr Mehri.

At the February 22  book talk, Mr Mehri will read selections from Notes From Toyota-Land and give a Power Point presentation focused on the people and culture of manufacture engineering in Japan.

“I’d like to demystify this admired production system, even though I think that the Japanese continue to put out a great product,” he says.

For more information about the Notes From Toyota-Land book talk, contact Booth Library at 426-4533.