How do I argue against an anti-foreign car person ?

I can say that the culture is about perfection and not making mistakes. That probaly bodes well for building cars.

However the USA is the largest economy in the world and they are second to none.

 

...bearing in mind that China is the largest car market in the world.

 

Yes but per capita income in America is much higher than China. However Chinas middle class is 300,000 million strong.

The USA still creates more patents than anyone. We are truly a culture of innovation

 

Having worked in Japan, I think your research may have missed the subtleties. Most Japanese can not write in Kanji. Reading Kanji is more like reading a comic book or graphic novel and would leave a lot misinterpretation except that the context is fairly narrow. Communicating with pictograms dates back to cave walls. As to the math skills, factory workers are trained, and re-trained, on using statiscal sampling approaches for quality control. Asking a worker to apply the math skills outside of the quality control context is a disappointing endeavor.

If a design has been engineered, and re-engineered, to the degree that it can be assembled by 5000 random people (or a robot) with consistency, then I would look to a Japanese facility for production. As evidenced by some of the Toyota recalls, what you can depend on is that if an assembly instruction results in an poor quality assembly, hundreds of thousands of vehicles will be consistently assembled according to that instruction until someone outside of Japan questions the quality and proves that there is a problem, which will then be attributed to the engineer rather than any assembly workers.

 

So BMW neglected to adapt to the SC culture. You wouldn't open a factory in Israel and demand that people work on the Sabbath. You don't go to China and expect to run production lines during the Chinese New Year season.

When I was hiring in Germany 1 in 200 applicants was expected. Ireland was much better, closer to 1 in 50. Malaysia was a bit more challenging, perhaps 1 in 500.

 

I would replace "perfection" with "following instructions".

 

Regarding Kanji, my experiences in Japan suggest otherwise.

My Japanese mother who naturalized as a citizen in the U.S. writes Kanji, as did her seven brothers and sisters (one deceased) still in Japan. They even write LETTERS to each other using the stuff--and on paper, not on stone tablets (the shipping is too expensive). And I very much resent the comparison of Kanji to reading a comic book--it sounds to me as if you might not have appropriately absorbed the culture during your visit to Japan. Non-fiction texts use a combination of Kanji and hiragana (plus katakana for the phonetic use of words borrowed from other languages). Hell, I even know a little Kanji, and I have never received training in it, unlike Japanese schoolchildren that are required to learn thousands.

And to use your math skills example, though I took math classes all the way through Calculus IV, differential equations, and matrices and linear algebra, even I would be hard-pressed to resurrect that training and solve a differential equation without some brush-up.

The point is that the Japanese worker has at least had that kind of training, unlike Americans who tell me how hard high school ALGEBRA is.

When I was in school, my mother had our relatives send us some Japanese grade school math lesson books. Even when I was in high school and taking all the highest-level math classes offered there, some of the stuff in the grade-school Japanese texts blew me away.

Their standards are much higher than U.S. standards for education accomplishment. Their standards are much higher across the board, as they would have to be given the intense competition for resources and jobs over there. Japan has a population that is 41% of the U.S. population, but that is contained within a land mass that is smaller than California. In order to achieve the same population density in California as in Japan, one would have to almost quadruple California's population.

The culture is something that few outsiders have the sensitivity to understand. It is complex and subtle, and much understanding is tied up in the knowledge of how people relate to each other in the social hierarchy. Many behaviors are adopted from the requirement to get along in areas of extremely-high population density--things that outsiders would strange, like the subway pushers whose job it is to cram commuters into the train so that the doors may close.

I could go on and on. The point is that the average Japanese worker is very different sort of human than the average American worker. The Japanese worker HAS to be, to have succeeded to that point in a much more competitive environment.

 

The fact that Japan has a population of 127 million people and has the 3rd largest economy in the world is evidence they are successful. China recently overtook Japan in GDP but lets not forget China has 1.1 Billion people and much more land. The USA with about 300,000 million people has the largest ecomony almost double it's competition. Many say the American success story is based on it's top education system at the University.

China now graduates more engineers that the USA and India is in third place.

2/3 of American PHD Engineering graduates are foreign born.

U.S. vs. China vs. India in engineering | ZDNet

America is successful because our culture is taking risks, creating businesses and access to the best capital markets and wealthy consumers and businesses in the world.

 

That is totally different than my experience in Japan. I found a total aversion to individual competition within the society. I frequently found individual competition replaced with systems of advancement based on family and tenure. In the corporate world, where entry is often predicated on familial credentials, advancement was achieved with tenure where each year a hiring class would advance as a group. Collaboration was promoted over competition. While I didn't have any first hand experience with the education system, just indirectly through the people I worked with, it seemed like the "competition" was a basic system of annual advancement. Those students that did not advance academically were redirected to other societal roles rather than continuing in the academic educational system. Perhaps this is what you are referring to as "competition".

 

They are of course averse to overt competition; such aggressiveness would undermine the requirement to cooperate in order to manage in high population densities.

The high population density drives an intrinsic competition by the sheer fact of resource limitation. It is inescapable. They must work harder, because if they don't, someone else will take their place. They work too hard, really.

So I am not talking about overt competition--that would be frowned on in Japanese society.

I am talking about the subtle but very real competition that is driven by the law of supply and demand.

 

I think we are on the same page then.

I found that "worked harder" was more often just "worked longer". There was an interesting climate of junior workers arriving before and staying at work longer than more senior workers. The result was that the junior workers often were in a perpetual daze from a lack of sleep and constant infusion of caffeine. Talking with junior workers, at mandatory weekend social events, their career goals seemed to be to acquire enough tenure that they would one day be able to spend less than 12 hours at work.

The thought of spending a Friday afternoon fishing with family and friends was ... foreign.

 

Yet a FYI with smart phones, tablets, and lap tops all connected and synced on the cloud I and many American workers are working beyond the traditional 9-5 albeit much of it is at home after hours.

The Japanese management style Theory Z which was popular in the 80's is there style.

Theory Z - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I suspect that the Japanese factory worker continues to be in direct "competition" with industrial robots, which respond well to Theory Z management.

The good news for American manufacturing is that capital has become cheap enough to greatly expand and implement lower cost robotic assembly for mass produced goods. The downside is that does not restore the full number of manufacturing jobs and the traditional economy of the American middle class.

 

It's true. 60 minutes had a special on it a few Sundays ago. The increase in Manufacturing in the USA is now due to us investing in Robotic manufacturing which is as cheap as low labor third world countries. Robots don't get sick or have political fall out and the fact that it is close to the market reduces transportation costs.

Who knew.

So the buzz went from off shoring to on shoring

 

I think it took a catastrophic event like the 2008 financial collapse to break some of the bonds of labor groups on manufacturing. I don't think the Japanese work force enjoyed the same protection.

 

Yep it's a new world.

 

In a few years you can probably 3d print a Prius in your garage

 

I see self driving cars in 5 years.

I see EV that can recharge batteries from a wireless hot spot similar to getting an Internet connection today.

 

60 years ago people could see flying cars in the near future.

 

The last time I visited my family in Japan, I also dropped in on an Air Force pilot stationed at Yokota who was a close friend while we both were in engineering school.

He was dating a Japanese national, and we all made a date to go up in a small-engine plane and fly over the Tokyo megapolis (it is amazing--city as far as you can see in every direction).

His girlfriend was so overtired from all the work and stress that she was only awake for brief periods. I felt sorry for how overworked she was, and gained some perspective for how comparatively easy we have it here in the U.S. I am happy that they ended up marrying and she likely has a far more fulfilling life now.

The people that I have encountered in my decade and a half in the workforce (all U.S.) who employed nothing more advanced than the "work longer" technique did not fare well. One poor gent worked himself into a nervous breakdown. He tried to come back from it, but it didn't work--I don't know where he ended up.