The Union/Management relationship in the Japanese Auto industry was and is somewhat unique. In
Japan, or at least Nissan, union leaders had just about as much power as company executives did
after WWII. Union leaders had a huge influence on the direction of the company and usually knew
more about what was going to happen than most of the top execs.
Union Leaders were so pro-worker at first that they nearly sent the company into bankruptcy with
their demands. To counter this, each company eventually established its own union, full of men loyal
to the company. This is very different from the US, where the UAW is the union for all US manufacturers
but not really loyal to any of them. These company unions still exist today with most Japanese automakers.
Another thing you must understand is the psychology of the Japanese car buyer. It wasn't really acceptable
for the lower classes to own cars until the sixties; they were only for the upper middle class and above.
The last thing you wanted to be in Japan was a show off, so cars and trucks were reserved for the rich
and the bold, and for commerce and business. Buses and taxis far outnumbered private cars for most of the
history of the Japanese automobile. It wasn't until the 60's that the average Japanese worker could afford
a car, and it wasn't till then that they were really allowed to become consumers. Even then, a car was a
luxury, something to be pampered. While Henry Ford had sold millions of vehicles before the Second World
War, the Japanese industry, even with exports, had produced a tiny fraction of that.
Why to point all this out? Because in the course of this story you're going to come across sales
figures and production numbers that look tiny compared to US automakers. But you can't make comparisions
based on numbers because there was a completely different way of thinking in Japan. Japanese private
citizens pretty much didn't own cars for the first half of the 20th Century, thus production numbers are
low. Being innovative had less to do with your success than your family ties and education did, thus
progress was slow at first. Unions fear change, and for a while in the late 40's and early 50's Nissan
had very powerful a union, thus innovation was slow for a while.
But things change. Nissan was able to change over time, to go from meek to agressive, to adapt and then
excel in ways no one could have imagined.
Now on let's the story begin...
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Basic facts about the early Japanese auto maufacturing