ABSTRACT
In the first half of the twentieth century, before a mass market for automobiles had developed, it was the military that ensured demand for the fledgling auto industry. In 1918, the Act to Aid the Production of Military Vehicles was passed by the Diet, stipulating that the military would requisition vehicles from local manufacturers (Odaka et al. 1988, 22). Ford and GM built plants in Japan in the late 1920s, but the Automobile Industry Act of 1936 required they source parts from Japanese parts makers, and limited overall annual production at the Ford plant to 12,350 units, and the GM plant to 9,470. Local parts manufacturers had made great strides by the time Ford and GM were forced out of Japan in 1939 (ibid., 35). Toyota, which had started out as a manufacturer of automated textile looms, became viable in the automotive sector at this time, and Nissan established itself as foreign competition was excluded (Togo 1993). But the structure of the Japanese auto industry continued to be marked by the
earlier start of parts makers. By the 1980s, 81 per cent of the net sales value of finished automobiles in Japan went to subcontractors, compared to 61 per cent in the US and 59 per cent in Germany (ibid., 54). Early technology transfer was an important part of the growth of the Japanese automobile industry, even as it demonstrated early innovations. Some technology was acquired overseas, as when Nissan imported an entire production line in the late 1930s (ibid., 35). Other technology came through domestic sources. In Japan, military arsenals played a key role in diffusing advanced technology necessary for car manufacturing. This is comparable to the US, where the auto industry first formed in the Connecticut River valley, where gun manufacturers were located in the late nineteenth century and the most skilled work force and advanced machine tools were concentrated. In Japan, the Osaka Arsenal provided forging dies, blueprints and technical advice to several firms involved in early automobile production, including Kwaishinsha which was starting the first line of Datsuns in 1918 (ibid., 26-27). The mantle of the ‘king of industries’, a breeding ground for innovations that have revolutionised production processes in all areas of manufacturing, shifted decisively from the gun industry to the automobile industry as Ford’s large-scale implementation of the assembly line in the early twentieth century ushered in the era of mass production (Womack et al. 1990). Half a century later, the set of innovations that constituted what is called ‘lean production’ gave the Japanese auto industry an advantage even as these innovations have been adopted in other countries and transformed manufacturing processes worldwide (ibid.). Many Japanese workers experienced the kind of deskilling that comes with mass production as manufacturing processes are broken down into ever-smaller parts (Kamata 1982; Kumazawa 1996; Roth 2002), but the post-war Japanese compact between labour and management, guaranteeing the stability of lifetime employment in exchange for company unions aligned with the interests of the firm (Gordon 1985), empowered some workers in large firms to become problem solvers within the context of assembly line production, contributing to continuous improvement (kaizen) of efficiency and quality control (Womack et al. 1990; Nonaka 1995; Cole 1989). Lean production also involved just-in-time sourcing of component parts, innovations that integrated car design with manufacturing and customer relations (Womack et al. 1990). While the automobile industry got off to a relatively early start in Japan compared to other Asian countries, mass automobility did not really get underway until the 1960s, when rising wages and lower costs made personal cars affordable for an expanding middle class. Personal car ownership skyrocketed from just 364,000 in 1960, to 6,559,000 in 1970, to 21,293,000 in 1980.2 Roads that had been dominated by trucks and buses in 1960 came to be filled with personal automobiles (see Figure 8.1). Along with the increase in personal automobiles, there was an increase in paved roads from under 30,000 kilometres in 1960, to 187,000 kilometres in 1970, and 510,000 kilometres in 1980. Leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a new highway system, along with the bullet train, garnered much attention. But most of the newly paved roads
were in fact narrow, pre-existing neighbourhood roads. Mass automobility came onto the scene after urban areas were already densely built up, and significantly after a very extensive urban and suburban rail system had already been in place. Certain suburbs were eventually designed with cars in mind, but many suburban neighbourhoods had been pioneered much earlier by the railroad companies, which ensured ridership and profits by establishing department stores at their terminals in city centres, tourist sites at the other end of the line, and lots of suburban residential housing in between (Sand 2005, 132-161). Japanese streets tended to be narrow, and cities had limited power to broaden them for cars. To a great extent, cars were newcomers that had to adapt to pre-existing spaces that they would share with other modes of transport.
