by David Gelsanliter

Jump Start tells the story of how Honda, Nissan, and Toyota transferred a large and still growing part of Japan’s most important industry to our lower Midwest and upper South, why they picked the sites they did, who they chose to hire and promote, and how they won the loyalty of small town America in the process.

In 1950 Japan made fewer than 32,000 cars and trucks and the United States 8 million, but by 1980 Japan had passed the United States as the world’s leading vehicle producer. In the 1970s Detroit suffered through two oil crises. Rising gasoline prices called into question the Big Three’s ability to make cheap, fuel-efficient cars and, if they did, to make them of the quality attained by the Japanese. In 1970 Japanese car imports accounted for 12 percent of the U.S. market. Ten years later their share had more than doubled.

The American approach to auto making has been to narrowly define the job and then fill it with a low-skilled worker. U.S. plants have carried large parts inventories so that disruptions caused by worker error or effective supplies could quickly be remedied. Auto workers were and are hired or laid off in response to fluctuations in market demand.

The Japanese approach seems to be just the opposite. Jobs are rotated and the emphasis is on training and long-term employment. The worker on the assembly line has real authority. Frequent meetings, the absence of worker reserves, and an emphasis on teamwork generate peer pressure, which, while stressful, reinforces a sense of common purpose. Just-in-time delivery and smaller buffer stocks save money and force suppliers to get it right the first time. Emphasis is on market-share gains rather than quarterly profits improvement. When times are bad, layoffs are a last, not first, resort.

I wanted to find out how Americans in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee reacted to working with former enemies on their home turf – which towns in the heartland welcomed the Japanese, which not, and why. I wanted to discover which of the Japanese auto companies was likely to be the most successful. Honda, Nissan and Toyota compete fiercely with one another and are all very different. Yet each watches, learns from, and often copies the other.

Will a people who believe in racial purity, a nation of engineers adept at incremental change but not known for their creativity, ultimately be able to succeed in a nation of cultural and ethnic diversity such as ours?

Will Honda be able to Americanize its management and engineering staff fast enough? And in an era of “global economy,” will it matter if it doesn’t?

Will the Japanese auto makers in the United States ultimately be forced to buy many more complicated parts from “traditional U.S. suppliers” rather than from the Japanese suppliers they have encouraged to build plants in the United States?

Until now, the inability of Detroit to stem the Japanese advance has raised unsettling questions about America’s ability to compete in the world economy. Yet I wonder whether the Japanese, by coming to our heartland in the way they have, aren’t saving the American auto industry from itself, restoring our faith in the American worker, and showing us, by example, a better way to manage.

This book has been written to try to find answers to these questions.

Book: Jump Start: Japan Comes To The Heartland
Edited by David Gelsanliter
Kodansha International
ISBN: 4-7700-1713-8