Free overtime

An interesting story I did today is about how Toyota will start paying workers for what had previously been free overtime.
Called QC Circle, they are meetings that Toyota auto workers attend to talk about how they can improve production methods.
The issue is significant because "kaizen," efficiency ideas from workers on the line and empowering workers, are all part of the Toyota Way.
Kaizen is crucial to the legendary manufacturing philosophy that make up the automaker's sterling image.
But the story of the individual worker sometimes can be far more tragic.
Last year, the Nagoya District Court ruled in a lawsuit filed by the widow that the death of a 30-year-old Toyota employee was work-related, or karoshi _ death from overwork.
I looked at the court documents, and the glimpse they offered into this man's life _ and death _ was heart-breaking.
He was doing more than 100 hours of overtime, sometimes working weekdays and holidays.
He was stressed out because his job was checking the car body for any defects, and pressures were high to catch them all.
This man had two young children, and in the beginning he was trying to also be the good father, and was giving them baths and playing with them.
Toward the end of his life, he no longer had the energy to do that, the court documents say, quoting his wife.
He was the team leader of one of these QC Circles, and the court ruled that such so-called voluntary work was part of the work (yes, real work) that contributed to his death.
One day, as he was filling in the records for defects, he collapsed from his chair.
He was rushed to the hospital but later died of heart failure.

Exchange on the Toyota Prius

Did Toyota's Prius get Japanese government money?
That question has stirred up some talk.
It started with a Business Week report, which quotes a former Toyota executive as saying that it did.
That comment was just one line at the end of a long article.
But a person I got to know through blogging pointed it out.
So naturally I had to at least try and ask Toyota.
That produced this article.
Reaction was instantaneous:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Just some above and there's a lot more, including the response from Toyota U.S. on its official blog, and a response from Business Week.
And another.
For me, it was this reaction that got me thinking I should get busy and find out, producing this story.
Also on Prius online.
The account with updates on this blog, and this one.
Topping it all, perhaps, in potential controversy is this.

Toyota opens a shopping mall

Talk about desperately seeking buyers.
Toyota is opening a giant shopping mall in Yokohama with 220 stores and restaurants, including Uniqlo, Wolfgang Puck's and pastry stores, to be there where people hang out _ not wait for people to come to dealerships.
The scenario is that you introduce the idea of buying a car to people who are shopping.
Japan auto sales are falling lately to 27 year lows.
Analysts say people _ especially young people _ don't want a car, even if they get one for free!
Kids who grew up in a more affluent Japan don't covet the same status-symbol items their parents did.
Manufacturers have been struggling in recent years with the challenge of developing models that meet young people's lifestyle needs.
Maybe one day there'll be a hit car every Japanese is going to want _ like an iPod or a cell phone.

Toyota vs. General Motors

All along, the 2007 Car Wars was running close.
Toyota told us 9.37 million vehicles in 2007 worldwide sales.
The company said it wasn't going to release numbers beyond that.
Then GM gave their number admirably down to the last car: 9,369,524.
Too close call.
It was only then Toyota gave us another digit _ 9.366 million, about 3,000 vehicles fewer than GM's.
I asked Toyota officials if they had waited for GM to release numbers.
Maybe they even wanted to release numbers that were smaller to avert a backlash from Americans upset that an industrial icon had been dethroned as the world's top automaker _ a title GM has held for 77 years.
This is the way Toyota sources tell it:
They thought another digit wouldn't be necessary because they had expected GM's sales numbers to be far above the rounded off 9.37 million.
They had gone on past differences between the numbers GM had given for global production vs. global sales. (Global sales tend to be bigger than global production for GM.)
Toyota was surprised to see how close GM's global sales tally was to their own, and so they felt they had to release the extra digit since reporters wouldn't stop asking.
By the way, Toyota is No. 1 in global vehicle production.
Production tends to be easier to keep track for manufacturers than sales, which must add up the count from dealers.
With the race virtually a tie, this means we'll keep watching the GM vs. Toyota numbers game all this year.

GT-R, Toyota robot, Pocket Films Festival

A closed off Tokyo tunnel for that underground (literally) look was where Nissan chose to show off its sportscar GT-R. We stood around for an hour crammed behind a railing with a bunch of reporters and photographers. And finally we got to watch a couple of GT-Rs zip past us. Then actress Ryoko Yonekawa came out of the car.
Easier to get intrigued was Toyota's violinist robot. Here's the story, and the video. When the rolling Robina, which looks like a woman in a skirt, signed its name with a fat marker and said in its smooth feminine voice that she (I mean, it) wanted to help people and be a companion, it was almost moving. Toyota says it's serious about robots. People were skeptical when Toyota showed the hybrid 10 years ago. Now everybody is scrambling to catchup. Maybe Toyota will pull off a repeat scenario with robots?
Yesterday, I was in Yokohama to cover a film festival _ except all the works were shot on cell phone cameras (see photo above).
There is definitely something unique about the art form just because the cell phone is:
_ portable
_ always around
_ interactive
_ personal
The whole thing was more interesting as an idea/concept than as works as such things tend to be. But art getting democratic and immediate is pretty exciting.
It's also an eye-opener about how disappointingly staid and predictable such attempts can get despite the potential freedom in self-expression.
After watching the works on DVD ahead of my interviews, I was awake late at night and Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers" happened to be on cable.
It was astonishing how I remembered so much of this movie, the scenes, the colors, the moods. I watched it to the end. Everything Bergman wanted us to feel still felt new and intimate _ and absolute.
One of the people I interviewed said it's easy to forget who is taking an image, and cell phone films can counter that.
There's no such forgetting with Bergman.

Driving simulator 2

This gives you more of an idea of the dome's size. Toyota says the purpose of the machine is to see how people respond in driving when they are tired, sleepy, etc.
But it'd be a good machine to simply test people's driving skills and see if they're fit to drive.
Toyota says that's not the purpose of the machine.

Driving simulator

This is the view from inside Toyota's new driving simulator: The Lexus is real, but the landscape is all computer graphics.
The simulator is a giant ball that tilts and cocks, and swooshes on a rail in a huge warehouse-like building (See the other photo above to get an idea of its size).
NHTSA has a similar machine.
Toyota refuses to say how much it spent on the simulator.

Father of the Hybrid

People ask Toyota Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada for his autograph as though he is a rock star because he is the "father" of the Prius.
Recently, I did a story about how he worked on Toyota's Prius, the first gas-electric hybrid to go into commercial mass-production.
The Prius celebrates its 10th anniversary in December.
I did another story about Toyota: How American executives are being wooed away by rivals Chrysler and Ford.
That's a new challenge for Toyota.
Toyota is very Japanese in valuing lifetime employment and employee loyalty.
To get ahead in Toyota (Japanese-style,) a worker must be loyal and stay with Toyota for years and years.
I wrote about Jim Press after a group interview when he became the first foreigner to join the board of Toyota.
And then again when he left.

Toyota sportscar

Cars are usually unveiled in hotels, event spaces, company headquarters.
And so we knew something was up when Toyota invited us to a Lexus debut at the Fuji Speedway, near Mount Fuji and a two-hour bus ride from downtown Tokyo.
Professional drivers took reporters for two laps on the F-1 course, at one point reaching 240 kph.
That's so fast your body feels as though it's sinking into the seat, and you can't hold your head up straight at corners (especially with the big helmet on our head that Toyota gave us to wear), and the rear wheels skid on the concrete as though we were in a racing video game.
"Anyone prone to carsickness?" the driver asks matter-of-fact after we get on board, as though we have a choice.
It was a bit reassuring the Lexus IS F comes with a computerizied pre-crash safety system, and the whole package of airbags (curtain/side airbags).
Akio Toyoda, the founder's grandson, and other Toyota executives, showed up wearing black racing outfits.
Toyoda had his name and a Japanese flag embroidered on his belt.
It turns out Toyoda (that's him in the photo above) has a racer license and was one of the drivers who took reporters out on the zippety ride.
The executive overseeing Lexus, Takeshi Yoshida, laughed: "I look like a ninja today."
Going fast on a car is a lot of fun.
It's so thrilling you forget your troubles.
And you remember that elation for days.

Toyota's Press departs for Chrysler

I was on vacation but back at work, although from home, when I found out late at night that Jim Press whom I've written about in this blog was leaving Toyota for Chrysler.
Press, an American, just joined the board of Toyota as the first non-Japanese three months ago.
It was a rather high-profile promotion as a clear message about how Toyota was becoming a global company.
Press' getting headhunted to Chrysler is a sign of how Toyota is winning respect in the industry.
But I wonder who'll be the next non-Japanese Toyota brings on board?

Politics and Toyota

A couple of our reporters were out this week and so I got to do politics stories for a change.
It's an exciting time to be covering politics in Japan because the ruling Liberal Democrats have suffered their biggest defeat probably in the history of their party, which has ruled Japan virtually all the time for more than 50 years.
The Liberal Democrats are credited with orchestrating Japan's modernization and reconstruction after World War II.
But Japan and its voters are changing.
Many young people, usually associated with total disinterest in politics, voted for the opposition in the latest election.
Analysts say the candidates for the opposition have never been better.
And they may be finally giving Japanese voters a chance for a real alternative to the Liberal Democrats.
It's fun to send alerts.
It gets your adrenaline going.
And it's a bit frightening.
But it's always a moment I look back on (during a weekend, say, like today) as one reason why reporting is so much fun.
Our bureau got to do that earlier this week because the agriculture minister stepped down to take responsibility for the election defeat.
Now the question is if/when will the prime minister resign/reshuffle the Cabinet/dissolve the lower house of Parliament.
I also did my usual job covering business on Toyota's earnings.
Toyota posted a 32 percent rise in profit for the first fiscal quarter.
Another time for an alert.

Lexus dojo

Not all auto workers are created equal. And the top Lexus workers are the cream of the crop.
They have impeccable touch, impeccable technique _ and from the way Toyota puts it even impeccable minds.
Reporters got a tour of the Tahara Lexus plant.
Part of the paint job a Lexus gets (and they get a few more coatings than your humble Corolla) is a rubdown by workers with almost loving hands as though they're petting a thoroughbred race horse.
Toyota calls it "dojo." There's a lot of dojo-ism at any Toyota plant, but it's taken to new heights at a Lexus plant.
The official there told us all the perfections they'd come up with for the first-generation Lexus, like all the pieces fitting just right in the interior, are already available for the Corolla.
And so the pursuit for ever higher perfection must always be at the heart of a Lexus plant, he says.
The tour itself was an exercise in Just in Time and effort at efficiency, and we were zipped around from one place to another, constantly being told we were falling behind schedule. And I felt a bit harried.
I guess I'll never make it as a Lexus worker.

American on board at Toyota

A white male isn't ususally speaking from the minority side of the diversity divide.
But Jim Press is the first non-Japanese to join the board of Toyota ( my story on his promotion winning shareholder approval last week).
He talks very softly _ Japanese style _ and says much of Toyota's corporate culture is Japanese _ hence the understatement about becoming No. 1.
I asked him about that: Why Toyota officials keep saying they aren't making beating GM/becoming No. 1 their goal, when reaching the top would seem like a victory for a company.
"Do you read your own headlines? Do you believe it? Would you forget how you got there, if you were? I don't see any benefit in that. Customers don't care who's No. 1."
Then Press asked me where I was from _ to make sure I understood Japanese culture.
"There's no satisfaction of beating somebody," he said. "That's not something you're proud of, is it?"
I had to say:
"Sometimes we like to beat Reuters."
His reply:
"But you're not a Japanese company, are you?"
How can Toyota become more American?
Toyota is already an American company, he said.
He said Toyota has a "hybrid" culture _ clever how he got the automaker's key technology in there!
Press compared Toyota to the immigrant who becomes American _ yet continues to be proud of his/her roots:
"At how many generations removed from the original immigrant do you lose your identity? None. You should keep that. That's part of diversity. You keep the strength of what makes you different, what makes you good and successful. But you're doing it in that country. We want to be the best company in America _ period."

Toyota, Hello Kitty and the Whopper

Sometimes a reporter feels like the fighter in a video game, throwing punches, kicking, twirling and jumping to take on several enemies from all sides, writing a story about Toyota reaching the one million mark on hybrid vehicle sales one minute, while writing a story about NEC Corp.'s Hello Kitty laptop the next minute.
Today I went to cover the opening of a Burger King restaurant.
A long line had formed outside the fast-food restaurant.
Where else but in Japan?
The Japanese business partners behind Burger King's return to Japan are the same people behind Krispy Kreme.
They know how to attract media attention yet manage to put a talk-of-the-town spin on their stores.
That's very important to attract the long lines, which in turn set off more talk and attract more people.
(1) Japanese have a greater tolerance for hourslong cues because they were brought up in a conformist-oriented rigid society that has required them to be one of the masses in a tiny place.
(2) Japanese assume mass interest is a good indicator for quality and desirability, rather than thinking that individuals may have different preferences.
(3) Japanese are afraid about being left out, and so ignorance or disinterest in something that draws long lines is by definition undesirable, dangerous and possibly a sign of derangement.
In Japan, being one of a crowd is (1) the way it is (2) a good thing (3) patriotic.
Being an individual is (1) weird (2) evil (3) not Japanese.
But Japanese are also having a lot of fun being in long lines. It is an event.
Guys were standing in lines at Burger King with their dates.
And the dates looked happy. They didn't think their man was cheap or dumb, but rather an "oshare" jolly guy.
The stereotype about Japanese being subdued is hogwash _ at least among Whopper lovers.
Well-behaved expressiveness was rampant at the the trivia quiz show at the store opening.
What was Japan doing in 1957 when the Whopper was invented?
"Hai!" "Hai!" "Hai!"
OK ... YOU!
"Ganbatteta!"
SeiKAAAAI!
It went on and on, and they each got a Burger King T-shirt.
Being part of a mass (at least a modern-day Japanese mass) is (1) fun (2) hip and so far, thank god, (3) innocent.

Toyota on road to No. 1

Numbers for the first quarter show that Toyota beat General Motors in global vehicle quarterly sales for the first time ever.
That's a milestone for the Japanese automaker.
And the odds are something like 9-1 that Toyota will do that for the whole year.
The contest is already won in profitability.
Toyota is rolling in cash while GM is losing money the last couple of years.
GM has been the world's No. 1 automaker _ i.e., in number of vehicles produced globally per year _ for 76 years.
This past week was earnings time for Japanese automakers _ Nissan and Honda.
Toyota reports earnings in May.

Japanese Automakers 2

A couple of stories about new technology at Japanese automakers:
Nissan and hybrid technology.
Toyota and telematics technology.

Japanese automakers

At a time when Detroit's Big Three are closing plants and slashing jobs to revive their ailing business, their Japanese counterparts are busy opening plants in Japan for the first time in decades.
My AP story and another link , and another.
Toyota named Jim Press, an American, as its first foreigner on its board of directors. Another link That's a move apparently meant to avert a backlash for the surging sales of the Toyota Yaris and other Japanese imports in the U.S.
_ a theme that's explored in my other story.

2007

One of the biggest stories to watch for this year is Toyota's almost-certain-to-happen rise to the top, beating General Motors as the world's No. 1 automaker in annual global vehicle production (and sales).

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/wheels/297527_road29.html

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/12/22/toyota_quietly_ascending_to_no_1_spot/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060920.w-btoyota0920/BNStory/Business/home

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/industries/automotive/16295762.htm?source=rss&channel=mercurynews_automotive

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/other_business/article/0,2777,DRMN_23916_5250509,00.html

And there's Sony. Sony needs to perk up its image (after the embarrassing massive recall of lithium-ion batteries). And the new year has started with everyone talking about the iPhone instead. Sony has so much riding on how the PlayStation 3 and Blu-ray disk fare this year. Maybe we need to even watch for takeover attempts and management shuffles?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060731.gtsony31/BNStory/Technology/home

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/15551932.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15992406/

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20060729-1355-sonyat60.html

Japan hopes to lead the world in robotics, and robots are constantly in the news here. Stories about robots make for a fun read (and fun reporting), partly because Japan views robots as cute nearly human companions _ a contrast to the view prevalent in the West of robots as tools.

http://asap.ap.org/stories/1098253.s

http://www.pdxguide.com/marketplace/moneynews/ASAP01042007news362581.cfm

http://www.columbiantalk.com/read/moneynews/ASAP12202006news355146.cfm

An important development to monitor this year is Japan's defense business. Japan is growing more assertive on the international stage, and the government has made no secret of its ambitions to beef up defense. The nuclear threat from North Korea has encouraged public support for the changes.

http://asap.ap.org/stories/1039331.s