ABSTRACT
Tanaka-san,1 the Managing Director of a Japanese electronics company in the west of Scotland and an engineer by training, liked to tell his Scottish employees about Henry Dyer, the Scottish engineer who had gone from this local area to found the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo in the 1870s. The twinkle in his eye and the wry smile were ample evidence of the irony he felt in teaching local history (and its international impact) to his staff, but Tanaka drew a deeper comfort from his personal feeling of repaying a debt to those British engineers. Now his factory could play a part in generating jobs in the manufacturing sector. He confessed his surprise that some skills and technologies appeared to him to have been lost in recent years in the UK, apparent in the difficulties in securing supplies of consistent quality steel and other supplies. But he hoped that the stimulus to suppliers from the factory would play its part in the region’s industrial regeneration. In many ways, the arrival of the Japanese engineers in the UK to set up and operate the transplants seems like turning the wheel full circle from our starting point in Chapter 1, and Henry Dyer and the ‘hired foreigners’ (many of them engineers) who took British technology and engineering knowledge and skill to Japan in the Meiji era. Then, Britain was regarded as the ‘workshop of the world’ and the source of industrial bestpractice’. By the 1980s, Japan had become the source of models of ‘best practice’ in industrial technology, organisation and management, with foreign missions beating a path to Japan in search of ‘lessons to be learned’ and practices to be imported. After several chapters in which the emphasis has been on the contrasts between engineers working in their home environments in Japan and Britain, this chapter returns to cross-cultural and cross-national themes. The central questions are about the arrival and impact of Japanese engineers on the transplant operations of their parent companies, and the crossing of cultures in
their working relations with British engineers and scientists in the transplant factories and R&D units.
