The Technology War: Behind Japanese Lines

O thought I had finally found a poor person in Japan. A beggarwoman working the streets of the Ginza during Tokyo's evening rush hour, she was so artfully done up in rags and tags that I couldn't resist dropping a copper into her peasant-style bonnet. A copper! I didn't know then but I do now why she looked at me so funny. One doesn't give copper in Japan, even if it is a ten-yen piece worth almost a nickel. That woman, I found out later, is a regular and successful fixture in the lucrative Ginza, one of the world's fanciest shopping districts--Tokyo's Fifth Avenue. She is said to do quite well at her theatrical little trade. No wonder she looked askance at my coin. In the Ginza, you pay two dollars for a cup of coffee. My paltry alms simply confirmed for her what the Japanese have believed all along--that Westerners are barbarians not to be understood in civilized terms.

Nobody is poor in Japan. And almost nobody is rich, either. At least you can't really tell if they are rich. The industrial mogul and his chauffeur dress almost exactly alike--in the ubiquitous dark business suit. The difference between a ride in the chauffeured Nissan (Datsun) President and the Nissan Bluebird taxi is merely one of detail--nothing like the difference between a Dodge taxi and a Caddy limo or a Volkswagen Rabbit and a Mercedes 450SEL.

Japan is the most pervasively prosperous country on earth. Everybody has a nice stereo, everybody has a telephone and everybody has a color-TV set that not only flashes balls, strikes and outs during every pitch of every baseball game but also computes the speed of each pitch, in kilometers, by the time the ball hits the catcher's mitt--as well as the batter's current average after every time at bat. Japan is the country with over 99 percent literacy and three national newspapers selling a total of 25,000,000 copies per day. It is the country with the highest life expectancy--78 for women, 73 for men--of any nation in the world except Iceland. It is the country where the trains run so perfectly on time that if you board the 12:10 for Kyoto at 12:10 and 30 seconds, you are getting onto another train using that same platform to head for someplace else. It is the country where the taxi drivers still open and shut the door for you--without getting out of their seats (it is done mechanically via a lever attached to the steering column).

Japan is the country in which every new car has a warning beeper that goes off when the speedometer hits 110 kph (68 mph)--six miles above the speed limit. When it reaches 120 kph, the beeper becomes a steady buzz. It is the country where a private garbage-pickup company installed a P.A. system on its trucks that plays soft music while making its early-morning rounds to mask the clash and clatter of the job at hand. It is the country where the callow youth like to carry transistorized radios onto the subway to catch the latest Western-style sounds--except that they wear earplugs so nobody else has to share their ecstasy.

Japan is, of course, the home of the transistorized, motorized, diode-driven, miniaturized everything. No matter how much Japanese stuff you think you've seen in American electronics shops, there is nothing to prepare you for the cornucopia of electronic goods in Tokyo. It is a gadget freak's wet dream. The Japanese penchant for turning electricity into consumer comforts has also made it the land of the sliding door. They used to have shoji, the rice-paper-covered light pine doors that slide, and they still do in small restaurants, in private homes and in the windows of the Hilton Hotel. Now they probably also have more automatic glass doors per capita than anywhere in the world. In Japan, even the barber's chair is electric.

Japan is so comfortable with its soundaround electronic gadgetry that there is even a disco/pub in the youthful entertainment district of Roppongi where you can play disc jockey yourself. A good 100 albums are stacked up for you to choose from; the stereo rig is as large and sophisticated as anything this side of Xenon. Roppongi is the hard-core disco and Western-style night-club quarter, where the international modeling set hangs out and rich Japanese kids in loose white linens and silk scarves do tame Travolta imitations late into the night.

Japan is also the country that has solved the Great Umbrella Question; viz., how not to have it stolen without carrying it wet and dripping into your office, restaurant, etc. Since everyone carries the same black folding umbrella, there is an umbrella rack outside every hotel, restaurant and many Japanese office buildings. It is rectangular or circular, with 50 to 100 lockable umbrella slots. Slide in the umbrella, close the lock, pull out the key and put it in your pocket. The locks and keys are almost superfluous, since there is virtually no theft in Japan; but the number on the key serves to help you find your own umbrella. No charge for the rack.

Besides being the world's cleanest country--you could eat breakfast off the street, except that there is probably a law against it--Japan seems to be the world's safest. The crime figures of the country are something of a joke and have been in steady decline for the past three decades. In contrast with every other city in the world, the crime rate of Tokyo has actually dropped in almost direct proportion to the growth of the city's population (which now stands at about 14,000,000, just behind Mexico City's, the largest in the world). Space-cramped shops often extend their displays out onto the sidewalk, leaving expensive clothes and accessories outdoors unattended all day.

A free-floating freedom from anxiety comes over you after a few days in Tokyo; it gradually sinks in that you really aren't in any kind of danger. Leave your pocketbook or camera anywhere and nothing will happen. You don't realize the degree to which we Westerners are always on guard against some violence to our property or our persons until you spend a little time in a place where there is almost nothing to guard against. One of the oddest sensations I ever had was arriving in the airport of Sydney, Australia, after ten days in Japan and having a sense of danger--can I leave my typewriter here for a minute? Will someone take it?--sweep over me. There we were, the crazy heterogeneity of Western man, guys in pinstripes, guys in rags, guys with mischief in their eyes.

The Japanese have no mischief in their eyes. In fact, at first glance, they don't have much of anything in their eyes. "The thing I missed most when I came here," said one Japanese who returned six years ago, after spending most of her youth in the United States, "was that nobody would look me in the eye. Japanese don't show anything with their eyes or with gestures."

The thing that I missed was eye contact of any kind. A foreigner in Japan is very foreign. They seem to look through you, right past you. Part of this is merely the national style, for they don't walk around the streets making eyes at one another, either. But another part of it is Japan's inner-directedness, its unconcern with the un-Japanese, its unstated disdain for people and things foreign. They don't particularly think of their concrete-and-steel, air-conditioned, transistorized lifestyle today as Western; instead, it's Japanese, modern Japanese. And although the fundamental framework was unabashedly copied from the West during the era from 1868 to 1912 known as the Meiji Restoration, one look at Japan today and you know it is Japan's own modern way, not a bunch of imported stuff from the west. After all, the taxi doors open like magic. They thought of that by themselves. Nobody has had the good sense to copy it.

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The hum you hear is the sweet sound of Japanese cars and trucks being unloded from Toyota's custom-built auto ships at Long Beach dock in Southern California. Along the great underbelly of the Los Angeles sprawl lies the inconspicuous hub of the industry that has put U.S. commerce into a trance and siphoned away much of the American sense of self-esteem: the Japanese car importers.

"We were like the French Foreign Legion," explains Norm Lean, a former sports-car hobbyist and industrial-arts high school teacher who is now the highest-ranking American at Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Lean is talking about himself and other Americans working for the Japanese car makers, pariahs of the Detroit-dominated domestic car business who found new professional homes and a willing ear in their Japanese bosses. Lean used to work for Ford. "We all came from U.S. companies or Volkswagen for our own personal reasons. Then we were able to avoid the pitfalls they face in Detroit."

The foreign legionnaires who turn the marketing and management wheels today at Honda, Datsun, Toyota and other Japanese importers are half the reason cars from Yokohama harbor gobbled up a whopping 22 percent of the U.S. auto market in the first three quarters of 1980 (the other half is the product--good and efficient). These are men who found their talents and imaginations smothered during their years with the Big Three but have lived to see Detroit eat the crow they left behind.

"I was converted to small cars 15 years ago, when George Romney was president of American Motors, where I worked," says John Gladen, chief of marketing and research for Datsun in the U. S. "George said someday 65 percent of the cars sold in the U. S. would be small cars--and everybody laughed. Well, last year, 65 percent of the cars sold in America were small cars." Gladen is a legionnaire who worked for all three of the major U. S. companies.

"The problem in Detroit is politics," says one Nissan executive. "It's 'Yessir, Mr. Ford,' 'Nosir, Mr. Iacocca,' all that bullshit. Everybody is afraid to tell the truth. They don't have the right atmosphere. Here you're listened to. You may be wrong, but they don't make a fool of you."

The litany goes on. Cliff Schmillen, former Marine fighter pilot, former American Motors regional sales manager, now vice-president of auto sales for American Honda Motor Co., tells it even more bluntly: "We've all known for 40 years we needed small, comfortable, pre-equipped cars, but those idiots in Detroit wouldn't listen. They made us sell those dogs they were building." The small, comfortable, pre-equipped Honda Accord is the hardest-to-buy car in America today ("We don't sell cars; we allocate them," says one Honda executive). And the small, comfortable, pre-equipped Honda Civic 1500GL may be, pound for pound, the best piece of automotive engineering on American roads today.

Back to Lean, gazing intently across his wide desk just down the hall from the president of Toyota. "We're not layered 14 deep here; ideas bubble to the surface quickly. I'll give you an example. When I was with Ford, it took me a whole year to push through a proposal for a mobile service training van to go around to the dealerships so we could bring the mechanics up to date on the latest equipment without taking them into headquarters. The thing had to be signed off by a dozen people. It was a 'blue letter,' which meant it had to go up to a certain level of management.

"When I came to Toyota, I decided we ought to do the same thing--take a mobile service van out to the dealerships. It took me 15 minutes to get it through. I remember saying to myself, Boy, you made the right decision coming here."

If I appear to be picking mightily on Detroit, it is because this boy whips so well. Where better than the commanding heights of the American economy--when Detroit sneezes, the rest of us get double pneumonia--to examine our mistakes, writ so large as they are there, like the fins on a 1957 Eldorado? Detroit always did think big (its fatal error), so now it's paying big.

Detroit. We use the metaphor so loosely for everything the car industry is in this country--like calling foreign policy Foggy Bottom or the American capitalistic system Wall Street. But Detroit, the place--it is a city--may be a greater part of the problem than we think. Listen for a moment to Gladen:

"I wanted small cars ten years ago," he remembers, "but it was against the Detroit way--so they just threw out the clay. [Prototypes begin as clay models.]

"The Detroit way was to do market research on a product, and if it did not come out with overwhelming mass appeal--I mean giant numbers--they just said no. They would say, 'Why build this little car when most people still want big ones? It costs us just as much to make a Falcon as a full-sized Ford, so why build the Falcon?'

"There was also an entire mentality that went all through Detroit that they had to build tanks. And that small cars had to be cheap cars, not just inexpensive cars. When I lived in Detroit"--today Gladen and the other automobile importers quoted here live around Los Angeles--"you were embarrassed to park a small U. S. car in your driveway. It was cheap! But you could put an import like a VW Beetle out there and people thought of quality, even though the thing cost only $1699 then.

"Today that same Detroit company--I won't say which one--is building that same small car I suggested and it rejected ten years ago."

The very notion of an entire industry of such overriding national importance being centered in or near one city may have a lot to do with our present problems (Germany's automobile industry is spread from Wolfsburg in the barren northern heaths to forested Stuttgart in the south and back up to the smoky industrial western valleys of the Rhine and the Main; Japan's stretches over the 500-mile megalopolitan Pacific Belt). There is an inevitable force of like-mindedness, a tendency to inbreed when the plutocrats of a single industry all live in the same suburbs, send their kids to the same private schools, belong to the same luncheon and country clubs, read the same daily newspapers and magazines. It is especially so if this isn't exactly your most cosmopolitan town. You don't see a lot of Japanese or hear a lot of British accents in Detroit.

The problem is exacerbated by Detroit's location so far from both coasts, where most American taste trends start. It is insidious that our car makers all reside in the one state in the Union with the lowest number of foreign cars in the nation. Only 11 percent of the new cars registered in 1979 in Michigan were imports; in California, the figure was 42 percent; in Washington, D.C., it was 27 percent. It does something to a man's perception of where the world is headed when he hits the freeway every morning and oozes into the city flanked only by Cutlasses and Camaros. Plagued by the twin American flaws of cultural insularity and chronic inattention to detail, he lives in a we're-number-one mind-set that allows him to dismiss glowing reports of more efficient VWs, safer Volvos and sweet-driving Hondas as preoccupations of the Eastern elite. It is frightening to think that Gladen's driveway mentality--a small car was a cheap embarrassment--permeated the board room at Ford, G.M. and Chrysler. But it obviously did.

And if your basic mid-level Detroit executive was a prisoner of Samethink, what about the Henry Fords and the Lee Iacoccas? There is a story that pops up in the modest corridors around Long Beach that when the time came for go or no-go on Ford's ill-fated Pinto, Henry Ford gave the prototype three spins around the test track, said "Go," climbed back into his chauffeured limo and returned to the executive suite. Toyota, by contrast, insists that all 75 executives provided with company cars switch vehicles every 6000 miles so as to stay intimately familiar with the entire product line. The week I met Lean, who reports directly to the president of Toyota, U.S.A., he was the keeper of a new (continued on page 190) Technology War(continued from page 88) Tercel--Toyota's rock bottom of the line last year.

"My wife drove it 300 miles to Palm Springs and back last weekend," he said. "It was 110 degrees all the way."

Maybe fewer people would have died in exploding rear-ended Pintos if Iacocca's wife had had to drive one in the desert.

•

Sunday afternoon in Harajuku, a chic section of Tokyo. The feckless youth of the Japanese race--"the future schlock of the nation," says one wag--are on parade. The boys wear baggy jeans with tight, narrow belts; sleeveless black T-shirts; leather boots; menacing black-plastic wraparound shades; and, strangest of all, their hair is puffed up and waved back, James Dean style.

Some of the girls have dyed their hair orange. They dress as bobby-soxers and practice the Charleston in front of Sony tape recorders that have been set up in the middle of the street, since traffic is blocked off on Sunday. One of the boys does imitation Elvis hip grinds while pretending to strum a guitar.

All of the above is what Japan is not. It is the tiny ground swell--make that a wavelet--of an attempt at headlong Westernization by leaping straight from pure Japaneseness into solid decadence without passing any of the other stages it normally takes before a civilization goes to hell. There is, essentially, no iceberg beneath this tip. What you see is all you get.

"You see a lot of Western exterior around here," drawls one longtime Tokyo resident in the 20th-floor bar of the Foreign Correspondent's Club. "But that is all it is: exterior. Beneath all that façade is a very feudal society."

Scratch a Japanese on his transistor earplug, they say, and you'll find a feudal serf below. The Japanese have a habit of doing things by leaps and bounds, which often means leapfrogging intermediate stages of the evolutionary process. Consider, for instance, how Japan became what for want of better language is commonly called "a modern industrial nation." Just 115 years ago, the country was, indeed, not only feudal on the inside but insistently feudal on the outside, too. Overlords, daimios, vassals, an indentured peasantry, the island nation divided into some 250 fiefs, all that stuff you read about in Shogun. The samurai code held sway, the nation was ruled by the guy with the biggest sword--a military dictator called the shogun--and the country was effectively closed to foreigners. Had been for over 250 years, since Tokugawa Iyeyasu cut down his enemies and established his dynasty in 1603, only four years before John Smith founded Jamestown.

Yet the Japanese had heard rumors of what was going on around them--the colonization of Hong Kong, the Philippines and Indochina by Western imperial powers. Macao had been Portuguese forever. For over two centuries, the Japanese had held off such intrusions by simply ignoring the outside world and pushing those who showed up back into the sea. But when U.S. Commodore Matthew C. Perry lowered his gun sights on the coastal town of Uraga in 1853, the wily Japanese somehow knew the jig was up. Totally unprepared to resist modern methods of conquest, Japan made the conscious decision to go Western--on the surface, at least.

By 1868, the last shogun was gone and the traditional Japanese emperor restored to nominal power, so that the new, progressive era of civilian administration could begin. Skipping the entire Industrial Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Era and all the other bitter steps the West went through to get ready for the 20th Century, the Japanese set out systematically to join the family of modern nations in one great leap forward. They did it almost overnight.

By 1900, Japan was modern enough to fight alongside Americans and Europeans in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China. They deployed a navy and were in a position to field a formidable army, as the West found out to its sorrow a few decades later. They began creating an industrial base that would be lamentably turned almost exclusively to military purpose for the first half of the 20th Century. They had done away with all the fiefs, turning them into government prefectures--a highly centralized, smoothly functioning bureaucracy, which became a kind of new samurai class. In short, Japan in 1867 was where the West had been in, say, 1650. In 1868, she had a plan and a will to modernize. By 1900, she was where the West had been in the mid-19th Century.

Likewise with the kids now parading up and down in front of the Sunday gawkers in the coffee shops of Harajuku. They never heard of James Dean in the Fifties; they weren't even alive in the Fifties. But, true to the Japanese way, they have in one fell swoop achieved a near-perfect imitation of something they never saw. There is no cultural experience underpinning their pseudo alienation; the only quality they have in common with their generational mock-punk counterparts in the West is extreme affluence. Yet beneath each of these Japanese is a boy or a girl who, in a crunch, combs his hair straight, carries a neat little umbrella and bows deeply to his aunts and uncles on family days.

Japan is the example of what modern feudalism can do. One must speak guardedly of feudalism, however, for the one key flaw in feudal societies--their rigid class structure--has been successfully dismantled in Japan's new version. Under this new feudalism, Japan retains all the economic and political advantages of the old system--absolute loyalty, conformist behavior, intense communitarian values--without the disruptive power of repression and imbalanced distribution of wealth. The result is an advanced industrial society with such pervasive prosperity that the economic discrepancies between the top 20th percentile and the bottom 20th percentile of the population are among the smallest in the world. Japan is the communal society that works.

The new feudalism works like this: Besides family, the Japanese company is the most critical unit of society. It is the equivalent of a feudal fief--the employee (serf) pledges lifelong loyalty to the company (vassal), receives, in turn, the promise of lifelong employment, protection and a guaranteed retirement payment by the company chief (daimio).

The employee's life revolves entirely around the company, just as the serf's did under village feudalism. He socializes almost entirely within his company, or across company lines for the greater good of his own company with his counterparts in competitive or complementary companies. This business socializing takes place on week nights, when most white-collar males in Japanese cities go out to eat and drink, returning home around 11 P.M. plastered two or three nights per week.

Weekends are spent with the family but often include outings with other company members, baseball games on the company team, and so forth. Wives, who stay home to tend hearth and herd, socialize primarily with other company wives. (The unliberated status of women in Japanese society, however, may be the sleeper issue of the future that could play havoc with the otherwise stable fabric of the neofeudalistic order.) Many companies, especially large manufacturing firms, provide such amenities as company swimming pools, recreation grounds, cooperative supermarkets and company housing, which brings the employees much closer together.

Certain benefits of this system are clearly apparent. The Japanese company has a guaranteed long-term labor pool that can, over the years, become highly trained, skilled and efficient. So certain is the lifelong-employment system that in the management class--university graduates joining the company--new recruits spend the first two to four years in their company undergoing further training.

"I was shocked when I learned that an American manager begins work almost the day he is hired," explained an executive of Sony Corporation of America in the company's glass-bound headquarters in New York. "When we hire a new manager, he has to study our way for two or three years before he goes on the job."

The Japanese company sticks by its people and its training policies even during recessions. Layoffs are extremely rare. The Japanese company (ever caught up in the Japanese disaster mentality, which always plans against rainy days) is always gearing for the long term, not for the short-range profits. It believes it is best served by maintaining loyalty, even at a deficit, until the brighter day when its people will gobble up the market. Japanese business looks at long-term expansion of its market share. That is the kind of thing that keeps Datsun and Toyota at each other's throats.

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The hum you hear now, 150 miles south of Long Beach, near San Diego, is the sweet sound of Sony color-television sets rolling off the assembly line. Americans bought 600,000 of the 700,000 sets produced here in 1980; the rest were exported to Canada and Latin America. The nimble fingers soldering the chassis units and picture tubes before the final "hot box" aging process (which terribly abuses each set for one to two hours, driving up the failure rate and thus tightening quality control) are not those of inscrutable Orientals bent on capturing the U.S. dollar market; they are the white, brown and black hands of Southern Californians, 1600 men and women who work with only 40 Japanese to produce 80 percent of the Sony color TVs sold in America.

"When your service network is as weak as ours," laughs one company manager, "you have to build an almost unbreakable product." If you own a piece of Japanese electronic goods that has served for years with minimal repairs, you know what he means.

The Sony/San Diego plant was opened in 1972 with much fanfare and a promise, from the company chairman, of lifelong employment to any of the Americans who chose to stick it out with Sony. It is the most frequently cited proof that American workmanship is as good as Japanese--if properly managed.

The management techniques that form the backbone of the Japanese system and that seem to be at work in San Diego are a mutual loyalty pact (Sony laid off no one during its overstocked production slowdown in 1974--1975), frequent worker-management contact ("I walk around the assembly-line floor all the time," says the vice-president in charge of operations, who could just as well stay in his office), encouragement of new ideas (throughout the plant, there are white telephones hooked up to the 600 Line where employees may register complaints or suggestions anonymously), consensus building and egalitarianism.

The two great values in Japanese society are loyalty and cooperation. Leadership, creativity, individualism, originality and nonconstructive criticism are negative values. The highest standard by which a man is judged in his climb up a Japanese corporate ladder is not how he leads but how well he conciliates, how he gets along with others of his own rank in his department and how popular he is among his peers. Merit is, of course, a consideration, though under Japan's lifetime-employment system, all but the congenitally incompetent will be promoted along a more or less preordained schedule. Merit and the ability to generate consensus are the qualities looked for in the successful Japanese businessman, politician, family head, journalist or salesman.

"I wanted to get a certain machine altered in our darkroom," explains the Tokyo chief of a world-wide American news-photo network. "It is something my senior Japanese staffer could do in about 20 minutes. But I couldn't just tell him to do it. I had to build consensus first. If I told him to do it, it just wouldn't happen. I had to go around dropping hints to various people, like, 'What do you think about maybe changing this machine over?' It took four months. They had to talk about it. Finally, everyone agreed. Then it took about 20 minutes to make the change." Such corporate politicking is slow but has the net effect of less resentment and dissension, greater group loyalty, understanding of the decision at the grass roots and high participation of staff members.

In the interest of consensus at Sony/ San Diego, operations chief Mike Morimoto holds frequent meetings with his supervisors (foremen) to develop new policy with them. "Now, if your workers don't understand some change," he told his first-shift supervisors one spring afternoon, "you must explain it to them. If you just say, 'I don't understand the policy, but I have to enforce it,' that's bullshit. That's a cop-out."

This whole attitude comes together in the policy of egalitarianism, one of the most spectacular and yet enigmatic successes of an industrial society with a history of hierarchal social relations. At Sony's plant, as in Japan, it takes some disarmingly simple forms: There is no executive dining room, the managers sharing both grub and tables with assembly-line personnel. In Sony's large parking lot, there is but one reserved space near the front door--for the company nurse. "If I arrive late," says Shiro Yamada, Sony senior vice-president and top banana at the San Diego plant, "I have to walk a long way through the parking lot." In Japan, the egalitarianism takes the form of managers' joining in the morning calisthenics and then wearing the same ubiquitous blue smocks as the rest of the employees during the workday (at Sony/San Diego, they have a mustard-yellow smock, but most people choose not to wear it).

Another way of explaining it stems from Japan's neofeudalistic view of the company as family. As proof of the impossibility of laying off San Diego employees just because of a recession (which temporarily halted the assembly lines and set everyone to painting walls and overhauling machinery), one Sony executive said, "Well, you can't fire your own family, can you?" As though it were just that simple.

Perhaps a British example--again involving Sony--tells it better, since Britain has become the world's example of class resentment, employment disputes, union walkouts and national noncompetitiveness. Despite dire warnings about "the British disease" (chronic inefficiency and strikes), Sony in 1974 decided to open an assembly plant in Bridgend, Wales, where the coal-mine closings had produced a ready and willing labor pool. Sony's simple expressions of egalitarianism--which in Britain included the unheard-of practice of management and labor's going out to the same pubs for the evening pint--sent such shock waves of joy through the town that, to this day, the plant has never been struck or threatened with a slowdown. Britain, whose chief underlying problem is a class system that never died, even after the money dried up, is still staring in disbelief.

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It takes only a few days in Japan--maybe really only a few hours--to understand why we're in so much trouble and they aren't. One is stunned by the remarkable attention to the mundane details of daily life--from the umbrella racks to the liveliness of the restaurant service to the cleanliness of the cars (there are nearly 1,500,000 cars in Tokyo and every one looks as though it entered town through a car wash that morning). If you ask for something in one of Tokyo's gigantic, lushly stocked department stores and they don't have it right there, someone runs (not walks) to find it for you. There is, finally, no getting around the fact that the Japanese simply work harder and probably better than anybody else, that they have perfected the virtues we used to preach--industry, civic-mindedness, thrift (Japanese typically save 20 percent of their incomes), loyalty and personal honor.

What Japan is all about is togetherness. "It is in my country like this," explains Kazuo Ito, a Tokyo businessman. "Never fighting. Always making everything together, together."

Think together, work together, live together, pull together. You can get a good sense of the togetherness by riding one of the morning commuter trains and watching them get 1000 people into a car designed for 400. Or you can get it by sitting in the average six-mat Japanese home, the six mats being a form of measuring space by how many 3' x 6' tatami mats are required to cover a floor (one mat is considered sufficient space for one person to sleep on). A six-mat room is 12' x 9'; thus, the size of the central room of the apartment. The other rooms are smaller. (These tiny spaces reflect the Japanese failure to deal with their one great unsolved social problem: inadequate housing.)

Or you can get it by going into almost any Japanese office. Small-scale desks shoved together, papers piled everywhere in mad profusion, people jumping in all directions at jangling phones and communicating via the interoffice shout, the whole place resembling the floor of the Chicago Commodities Exchange just before close of business.

Another measure of the communal success is the near absence of lawsuits and legal confrontation. While disputatious Americans create a staggering caseload that jams the courts, Japan is the world's most nonlitigious society. While our system fairly begs for more suits, more laws and more lawyers, people in Japan go to extraordinary lengths to settle their few disputes out of court. America today supports some 500,000 lawyers, most in rather fine style; there are only 11,000 lawyers serving the 117,000,000 Japanese. That's a difference in lawyer-to-population ratio of 24 to one.

The Japanese live and work this way for two reasons: One, with that many people sharing a country the size of Montana (only 29 percent of it nonmountainous), they have no choice; and, two, they don't want anyone to be tempted to have a thought that runs against the stream--a thought that might rock their rather fragile boat.

Think together, work together, live together, pull together. Yet the Japanese togetherness seems to produce not blandness but, rather, a channeled energy, the kind of energy that has made innovation of consumer products the hallmark of Japan's postwar industrial success. It is what turned a hearing aid into a transistor radio, turned most industrial production into a superefficient robot system, created the finest picture tube in television history (Sony's Trinitron) and put the miniature calculator into Everyman's pocket. The method is deceptively simple: Let tinkerers (like Soichiro Honda of Honda) and engineers (like Akio Morita of Sony) run the company, keep the accountants and lawyers in their place, then tap the imagination of every employee you can get your hands on.

At Toyota's headquarters in Toyota City, Achi, for instance, the system works so well that some 49,000 employees generated a total of 535,000 voluntary suggestions in one year on how to improve the assembly line. When was the last time an American suggestion box was overstuffed?

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Maybe nothing better explains how the Japanese got into the catbird seat of international trade in the past 20 years than the motorcycle story. It is the sad saga of commercial complacency in a captive culture, revealing how Americans, prisoners of their own mythology, lost the war of the market place without properly entering the race. It also shows the power of the movies.

Back in the Fifties, when America was bursting with post--World War Two industrial might and Japan was climbing out of the ashes, looking for a few good ideas, a motorcycle in America was a big rumbling Harley-Davidson 1200-c.c. thing that thugs, cops and nostalgia buffs drove around. It was definitely not what your upwardly mobile law student rode to class or what your young businessman had in mind for his image building.

The myth of the madman killer as motorcyclist was reinforced by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Hollywood's paean to two-wheeled violence. The notion that one might break through that mythology with the image of a little old lady carrying shopping bags on a motorcycle never entered the minds of America's machine makers. A motorcycle, they seemed to believe, came with black leather, chains and a switchblade knife.

What they didn't count on was Soichiro Honda, a delinquent Japanese village boy who never saw an automobile until he was seven years old. Honda did for transportation in the second half of this century what Henry Ford had done in the first: He put the world on wheels.

Twenty years ago, Harley-Davidson, the only large American motorcycle manufacturer, was selling about 10,000 bikes per year and had a virtual corner on the U.S. market. In 1979, Harley sold just over 50,000 motorcycles. But in that same year, more than 1,000,000 motorcycles were sold in the U.S.; 91 percent of them were Japanese.

"Harley belongs to AMF; they build a push-rod bike and they seem content to cater to that small portion of the market that loves a Harley," says one high-ranking American at a Japanese motorcycle company. Innovation is what Harley-Davidson--not to mention Detroit--is not about. Harley's only engineering-design changes in modern times have been the introduction of an American-made rubber-belt drive, plus new electrical equipment and carburetors--both made in Japan.

By the late Fifties, even into the early Sixties, the very notion of a mass-produced, mass-marketed motorcycle in the United States--then and now the greatest market in the world--was met with either ridicule or derision by the men who make the American transportation machine go. Never mind that there were more than 200,000,000 Americans not yet riding motorbikes; forget about Southern California's weather and a U.S. Sun Belt that makes the rest of the world look like submarine country; don't mention the fact that American students and young workingmen have more money and greater transportation need and more leisure than any other 18-to-25-year-old population in the world: The Americans wouldn't touch it. Honda moved in.

"Nobody told them it couldn't be done," laughs one Harley-Davidson executive today.

The great breakthrough year was 1962. That is when Honda ran its revolutionary space ad proclaiming, "You meet the nicest people on a Honda." The ad showed not Brando and his friends but 11 pleasant people on bikes--the original step-through moped Honda 90. Even more revolutionary, five of the people were female--and one was carrying a dog! It was one of the classics of modern marketing and advertising, the tiny seed that grew into over 400,000 units sold in 1979 in the United States by Honda (plus another 510,000 by Japan's three other large motorcycle builders). Not bound by the Hollywood-promoted notion that Americans would not accept motorcycles, Honda attacked his product's image problem head on. He went to the root of a cultural bias in the largest free country of them all, and he won. It was a more daring and successful step than any U.S. manufacturer was willing to take.

"The key," says Gene Trobaugh, vice-president of marketing at U.S. Suzuki and a foreign legionnaire of the two-wheeled trade, "was that the Japanese doggedly pursued what would appeal to the American market. People were still making jokes about cheap goods coming out of Japan when Honda brought in the 90-c.c. But that was their foot in the door. The little bikes were their seed in the ground.

"These little bikes were obviously not tailored to the U.S. market. The main thing they did was prove there was a market that the American manufacturers had ignored. Then the logical thing was to build bigger bikes--the 370, the 450 and, finally, the 750, the first four-stroke. There was no competition in the United States with what the Japanese were able to do. What the Japanese did was give the Americans, one, a bike size they could handle and, two, an image they could live with.

"You could liken the whole motorcycle thing to the emergence of the autoindustry after World War Two, The two-car family was the big breakthrough in the Fifties. Imagine what that meant in market expansion! The motorcycle business was a similar situation--except that there was no product to fill the need.

"The Japanese filled a need--cheap transportation--but they also created one. They found a great big void in the United States--they filled it, developed and expanded it. Now it's all theirs."

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From the air, Japan is a sculpted garden. As the JAL 747 makes Pacific landfall on the flight from Mexico City (I have been wined and dined in the incomparable luxury of a sleeper service that only the Japanese would think of), the mighty, misty sprawl of Tokyo lies ahead, but the ground below looks like bonsai handiwork. Hills are terraced; rice paddies are carved like butter on a tray; farmyards are planted like tiny decorations on a cakelike landscape.

Later, the Shinkansen bullet train to Kyoto defines the time warp that is modern Japan: Land and buildings and people fly by so fast (140 mph) that nothing is recognizable except, on a clear day, snow-capped Mount Fuji in the far distance. What stands out, oddly, is the attention to detail. At a train station, the 4" x 2' plots of earth between the pillars of a building have all been turned into miniature shrub gardens. Even in the Ginza, where a couple of million shopgirls pass along the sidewalks every day after work, the narrow space beside the curb is planted with geraniums, miraculously untrampled. Every hotel in Tokyo has its rock garden, a piece of earth sculpture. Thinking small, Japanese style, has conquered the world.

"We tend to care more about the small things, I think," says Mike Morimoto. "If you look at Japanese gardens, you see we have such a small house, but in that tiny garden, we have so much variety.

"Even Japanese cars, they are small, but we have tiny luxuries."

And that, class, is how the Japanese won the war.

"Scratch a Japanese on his transistor earplug, they say, and you'll find a feudal serf below."