Next week, the Japanese car-maker Toyota celebrates 50 years of doing business in America.In that half-century, Toyota has risen from newcomer to major force in the U-S auto market. The company is now the leading seller of cars in the world. It took that title away from General Motors earlier this year. The World's Alex Gallafent examines the 50-year evolution of a Japanese giant.
GALLAFENT: Toyota is a company on top of the world. Think of their TV commercials. They're sleek. Confident. They seem to say - 'we own the future'. But it wasn't always that way.
When Toyota came to the United States in 1957, it was - well - a bit of a laughing stock. Their small car, called the Toyopet, couldn't match the size, the power - the confidence - of your average Chevy or Ford. But the Toyopet was a kind of Trojan horse.
See, the Japanese were learning how to beat Americans at their own game. And they started early. In the first decades of the 20th century, Japan decided to improve itself - in all areas - by studying other countries.
KELTS: "..and they would send these officials around the world to study how Europeans or Americans did certain things."
GALLAFENT:That's Japanese American author Roland Kelts. He says those officials came back with plenty of ideas for improving Japanese life - including a design for the country's official school uniform.
KELTS: "It's actually based on the Bavarian school uniform. And the boys still wear them to this day because a Japanese emissary thought it was the best school uniform in use."
GALLAFENT:As with school uniforms, so with car manufacturing. In the late 1920s, Japanese businessmen - including Kiichiro Toyoda - studied Henry Ford's revolutionary assembly line. Kelts says the Japanese had a couple of negative observations, one being..
KELTS: "..that the workers didn't seem very happy."
GALLAFENT: ..and that led to Japanese companies designed to resemble families.
KELTS: "You get the calisthenics in the morning, the singing of the company song."
GALLAFENT: But, essentially, the Japanese went home and simply started to copy what the Americans were doing. It didn't last long.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: "Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 - a date that will live in infamy."
GALLAFENT: World War II got in the way. Post-war, the United States and Japan were left on an unequal footing. American industry stood tall. Industrial Japan was in tatters. For Japanese car manufacturers to flourish after 1945, they had to offer something new, something that wasn't coming out of Detroit. The new thing was a relentless focus on quality. And, ironically, they were instructed in this new philosophy by an American - W. Edwards Deming.
DEMING: "I said that in five years the whole world would know about Japanese quality. That manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. They beat it. They did it in four years."
GALLAFENT:That was Deming talking in 1992 - he died a year later. Deming's big idea was that you could capture quality - mysterious, elusive quality - and measure it, make it a statistic. He said that looking for a single error in any given process wasn't enough. You had to look for the cause of the error. Then the cause of the cause.
Right down to the root.
VAITHEESWARAN: "And when you do that, as soon as you find the first error - stop the assembly line, figure out the problem immediately."
GALLAFENT:Vijay Vaitheeswaran is a correspondent for The Economist magazine and the co-author of 'Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future'. He says in those post-war days, American assembly lines were designed to get as much product out as quickly as possible. If an occasional error crept in, so be it. That wasn't acceptable to Deming. But American automakers ignored him.
VAITHEESWARAN: "They turned their back on this great American genius, Deming. The Japanese who were just at that time coming into the marketplace and were being ridiculed for making very cheap shoddy tinny cars - they embraced Deming as a hero. And no company did better in learning from that approach than Toyota."
GALLAFENT:Toyota used Deming's techniques to improve on the Toyopet. They built the Toyopet Crown. In 1957, Toyota Motor Sales USA was established. Over the years, the company brought ever-improving models to the United States. The Corona. The Corolla. And, come 1980, the Camry. Vijay Vaitheeswaran's dad was an engineer and didn't hesitate to buy one.
VAITHEESWARAN: "He spotted what was to become the best-selling car in the world."
GALLAFENT:By the late 1980s and early 90s, American auto manufacturers were only too aware of the threat from Japan. Japanese U-S market share was growing. And so was American anxiety. Japanese cars were destroyed in symbolic acts of retribution. Politicians got involved, too, as this 1992 BBC documentary reported.
TV ARCHIVE: "Japan bashing, even for congressmen, is the favorite new martial art."
GALLAFENT: Roland Kelts, the author of 'Japanamerica', says it was a traumatic time for Japanese auto manufacturers.
KELTS: "Toyota officials of a certain generation will be quite candid about the fact that it was hurtful - personally hurtful - to watch American auto-workers and politicians take sledgehammers to Japanese products."
GALLAFENT:Hurtful, but instructive.
MICHELS: "You know the challenge back then was if you sell 'em here, build 'em here."
GALLAFENT:Mike Michels is an external communications executive with Toyota Motor Sales USA.
MICHELS: And so through the '80s there was a very steady effort to bring manufacturing over here. I think that was probably the biggest factor that put those sentiments behind us.
GALLAFENT: There were already Toyota plants in the States. But 'Japan-bashing' accelerated the process. So much so that Toyota was able to engineer a transformation of its image in America. A couple of years back, Roland Kelts saw a Toyota ad in a glossy US magazine.
KELTS: "The two-page spread was an American wheat field, with a blue sky in the backdrop. And at the very bottom, the logo and beneath that 'we're an American company' - that was the slogan."
GALLAFENT:Today Toyota makes pick-up trucks - those most American of vehicles - in Texas. But, says Kelts, the soul of Toyota remains Japanese. And that now presents a cultural dilemma for Toyota.
KELTS: "A lot of the popular culture is about the underdog trying very hard, but not quite making it to number one and remaining at number two. It almost seems a comfortable position for the Japanese. I suspect that a number of folks at Toyota are privately quite anxious about overtaking GM as the number one auto manufacturer in the world. It's not a position Japanese tend to find comfortable."
GALLAFENT:Comfortable or not, the company is riding high on the success of its hybrid bestseller, the Prius. But, says Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Toyota - and Japan - face a challenge from newcomers.
VAITHEESWARAN: "Once you get into a world where cars are significantly full of electronics and software, the core competency shifts away from Toyota City and Detroit and towards Silicon Valley, towards Singapore and perhaps towards parts of China and India."
GALLAFENT:If that's true, Toyota might have to reinvent itself all over again.
