How Japan Does It

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Much of the employee life outside work is spent in company social clubs, where courses are available in flower arranging and the tea ceremony. Weddings are also conducted in the social clubs; and the company helps pay the costs, including as much as $500 to rent the traditional bridal gown.

The attitudes of the bosses of Japanese companies are also different from those of their Western counterparts. This can be seen particularly with regard to investment for research and development. In the U.S., corporations spend an average of about 1 % of total sales on research and development. In Japan the figure is closer to 6%.

Investment is also directed at constantly modernizing on-line manufacturing techniques. The results are obvious: at Nissan's highly automated assembly plant, 35 workers now aided by industrial robots produce 350 Datsun car bodies every eight hours, seven times the productivity rate of competing U.S. automakers.

Though they are willing to invest heavily in automation and productivity, Japanese managers are tightfisted when it comes to spending on actual buildings, which they view as little more than shells required to keep out the rain while the work goes on inside. Japanese plants are constructed so that they can be expanded or redesigned with ease to accommodate new production techniques or additional assembly lines. After a few years the factories can be razed if necessary.

Unlike many American bosses, Japanese managers go to great lengths to involve their employees in the life of the company. For example, although General Motors actively recruits productivity suggestions from employees and offers up to $10,000 for a proposal that is adopted, the company receives an average of less than one suggestion per employee per year and adopts one-third of the ideas. At Toyota's main plant near Nagoya, on the other hand, officials receive more than nine suggestions per worker per year and adopt the vast majority of them.

One of the most complex aspects of Japanese business is the relationship between managers and the government. Tokyo ministries that set national economic priorities can exert substantial pressure on companies, but their influence is much less than is believed outside Japan. Says Takeshi Sakurada, chairman of the Toho Rayon manufacturing company and honorary president of the Japan Federation of Employers: "The amount of government interference or the role of government in private business is very small as compared with the U.S. or the European Community." Adds one Western economist in Tokyo: "There is no Japan Inc.—if there ever was one."

Japanese businessmen do not have to bear the heavy burden of government regulation that American industrialists do. For example, antitrust rules barely exist. This permitted the Japanese auto companies to get together with government officials and agree on a common design for antipollution equipment. That would have been against the law in the U.S., where each auto company worked independently to develop its own system. Japanese carmakers today are at least two years ahead of the U.S. in emission-control technology. In a similar way, government and business usually work out mutually acceptable agreements for solving the considerable problems of health and environment.

The hand of the government's tax man in business is

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