In the postwar years the emphasis was on producing engineers—Okita and the men around him believed that was of the essence. The world in which Japan would compete was increasingly a technological one; it could compete only by capitalizing on the mathematical and scientific skills of its talented young and getting more and more of them into engineering schools. If the West produced scientists who were more original, then Japan would counter by producing more good competent engineers, proportionately to the size of its population, than any other industrialized country in the world. To encourage entry into engineering, all kinds of scholarships and other incentives were offered to promising young students. In the ten years after the war, Okita estimated, he doubled the number of engineering graduates.
Some thought of Okita as a barbarian for that, for downplaying the liberal arts, and he was on occasion cruelly caricatured in the press as a man who was corrupting Japan’s traditional love of learning for commercial goals. His critics bitterly accused him of distorting the purpose of education; rather than serve the larger good of the nation, they said, he had changed it to serve the economy. He was creating a new functional state of functional people. Okita did not really dissent, for to his mind the economy at this moment in Japanese history was the nation. The kind of education his critics favored belonged to a languid, more privileged past, where the children of the rich could study French literature. The luxury of the liberal arts education could come later. It was better, he argued, to have a surplus in engineering students than a surplus in law graduates. It might be cheaper for the state to produce a law graduate, for providing an engineering degree to a peasant boy was an expensive matter. But the rewards were immense. Creating that many engineers, he said, meant that Japan could afford to keep its engineers right on the factory floor. They might work on something tiny, perhaps a task a good deal smaller than what they had dreamed of while they were students, but the cumulative effect of so many talented engineers working on so many small things would be incalculable. What he planned, of course, soon happened.
15. THE ENGINEER
WHEN HE WAS A boy, he loved playing with model airplanes. It was the only pure thing of his life. All around him the world was collapsing, and the Japanese planes were disappearing from the sky, but his model planes were perfect and flew beautifully. Forty years later, telling a visitor about his childhood obsession, he would go to a cabinet in his living room and pull out his collection of model-airplane magazines of those years, carefully preserved, and show pictures of each plane he had so lovingly made. Going through his boyhood possessions, he also came across a notebook he had used in junior high school; on it was his name, and next to it he had written “engineer.” There had never been any doubt in his mind that someday he would be an engineer.
Minoru Tanaka came from an ordinary background. His parents were relatively simple people of the middle class. They lived in a village outside Yokohama. His father had been the chauffeur of a member of the Diet, driving him around in one of Japan’s early cars, and when the Diet member had died, his widow had given the car to Tanaka’s father, who had driven it as a taxi and used the money he saved to buy other cars, first a Citroën, then a Ford, then a Plymouth, then a Chevrolet. He had gotten one of the early telephones and had run one of the country’s first telephone taxi services. The only real expense was the cars; the drivers did not want a salary and refused to work for Tanaka’s father if he insisted on paying them one. If they received a salary, the customers would know it and would not tip them, and they would end up making less money. By the start of the war the family was prosperous, Tanaka realized later; there was always money to spend on his model planes.
The drive for education had been implanted so early that he could not remember a time when it had not been important for him to excel. His mother, he said, was what the Japanese called an “education mama,” one who ceaselessly pushed her child through school, her own ambition becoming the son’s ambition. In the fourth grade he had been lucky to have Takuzo Hiki as his teacher. Hiki, who was then twenty-three and a bachelor, had only two passions—baseball and mathematics. Of the seventy-two children in his class, the most talented was Minoru Tanaka. Hiki himself was gifted both in mathematics and as a teacher, but he was the second son of a farmer, and in his generation there was never going to be enough money to send him to college. His only chance was to become a teacher, and so he attended Kanagawa Teachers College. He longed to teach in a junior high school, where he could concentrate on math, but because of his limited background he was assigned to an elementary school, where he had to teach everything, including music. He even had to play the piano, a difficult assignment, since he played quite poorly. Undaunted, Hiki kept studying mathematics so that someday he could take the examination that would allow him to teach in a junior high. He conveyed his passion for mathematics to his better students, including Tanaka,
One day Tanaka, the fourth-grader, fascinated by numbers, went to downtown Tokyo to buy a slide rule. The store refused to sell him one because he was so young. Only junior high students could have them, the owner said. So he had to go back to Hiki and get a letter saying that although he was only nine years old, he was a smart little boy and would they please sell him a slide rule. Soon, caught up in the world of math, Tanaka began visiting Hiki regularly to study math with him, often staying so late that he spent the night. Hiki gave him increasingly difficult assignments, and the harder they became, the more excited Tanaka grew. Even after he left the fourth grade Tanaka studied with Hiki, and by the time Tanaka was in the sixth grade Hiki had nothing left to teach him. Tanaka could solve problems that were difficult for students four and five years older. He then became an assistant to the teacher in both science and math. The other boys did not seem to resent this; Tanaka had done well simply because it was so natural for him to do well.
The model planes he loved to build were to him an extension of the numbers he also loved. He soon learned that in order to make the models fly well, he constantly had to adjust their weight and trim—his earliest training as mathematician-engineer. When he was twelve he was finally allowed to buy an engine for one of his planes. It was a day that remained clear in his memory. On previous occasions he had carefully reconnoitered the shop—the Tenshodo Store, in the Ginza—before actually making the purchase. The engine he wanted was the Ishizue (or Cornerstone) model. It cost 60 yen, a great deal of money at a time when many families were living on almost that much a month, but his mother had systematically taken the money out of his father’s earnings for him. Building the engine into one of his planes was the most thrilling moment of his childhood. The pleasure of it all—that he could build these planes to the specifications shown in the kits and magazines, and that they would indeed fly, just as they were supposed to—was overwhelming.
When Tanaka was in the fifth grade, Hiki encouraged him to take the exam for Yokohama Number One Junior High, which was one of the best schools in the country and very difficult to get into. By the rules, Tanaka should not have taken the exam for another year, but pushed by Hiki he went ahead. The assistant principal of Yokohama Number One called Hiki and said the boy had done startlingly well and that if he took the exam again in a year and did that well again, they would admit him. A year later he took the exam and did even better. He was only the second boy from his village to get into Yokohama Number One. That was the critical hurdle. It meant that he would probably be able to go to Yokohama High School and a good college and become an engineer. At first Yokohama Number One was very hard on him. He was an unsophisticated country boy among city kids who went out of their way to make him feel inadequate. Tanaka complained to his mother, but she was unsympathetic. “I didn’t ask you to go to this school,” she told him. “You and Hiki-san picked it out. If you don’t like it, you can always quit.” She knew, of course, that he would never quit. With that he stopped complaining. To make it easier on Tanaka, the family moved to the Yokohama suburbs.
Tanaka was just a little too you
ng for World War II. When he finished junior high, he did not go on to high school, as he might have in peacetime, but instead became a naval officer cadet. He spent the last months of the war waiting for it to end, hoping to survive, depressed about Japan’s collapse. He did survive, and his family was all right. To avoid the bombing of Yokohama, his father had moved the family back to the village where Tanaka had grown up.
The next step for him was to try to get into a senior high school—the avenue to college. Difficult under the best of circumstances, that task had suddenly become even harder. For in addition to the normal number of applicants of his own age, there were many thousands of young men who had gone off to the army and navy instead of going to school, and now they were returning, eager to resume their education. That meant that the competition would be extraordinary. Tanaka was sure it would be too hard to get into the schools he dreamed of, Tokyo Number One or Tokyo Number Two. He decided to try for Seijo High School in Tokyo, which, although not quite as good as those other two, was one of the best in the country. The authorities at Seijo announced that there were so many applicants for the class entering in 1946 that only one out of twenty-three applicants would be admitted. It was the same, Tanaka knew, all over the country. One out of twenty-three. If he was not that one, if he were among the twenty-two, he would not be able to become an engineer.
To cram for the exam he set up a schedule calling for twenty hours of study a day. He saw none of his friends and barely saw his family. Even that schedule, however, did not allow time to study English, and there was an exam in English as well. He knew he must somehow study English during the four hours allotted to sleep. To maximize his privacy—something almost nonexistent in Japanese homes—he created a bedroom for himself in what had been a corridor in the house. He built a bunk bed there, and his father got some straw to put on it for him to sleep on. Several times a day his mother passed food through the sliding door on a tray so that he need not interrupt his studies. He soon lost all sense of time, and he could not tell whether it was day or night. It was the worst six months of his life. His greatest problem was not the confinement or even the lack of sleep but fear of the odds against him. To ease the fear, he developed a rationale: Half of the twenty-three he was competing against, he decided, were not really serious, so that cut the ratio to one in twelve. Then he decided that he was smarter than at least half of the people remaining, so that cut the odds down to one in six. Then he decided that he was working harder than many of the others, and that further shaved the odds. When he sat down at his desk in the exam room, he looked on both sides of him and thought to himself: All I have to do is get better marks than these two guys, and I’m home free. Buoyed by this drastic reduction in the odds, he scored high and was accepted at Seijo.
He did well at Seijo, his talents in math and science carrying him well above the norm even of so competitive a school, and getting into Tokyo University became almost easy. Just before he entered Todai, he went to see Hiki, his old elementary-school teacher. Hiki went into another room and came out with his most treasured possession, a book called An Introduction to Analysis, a classic on higher mathematics by a professor named Teiji Takagi. Hiki had bought it for himself, but it had proved too difficult. Now he gave it to his prize student for Todai. The torch had been passed. There was an entrance ceremony for Todai, but neither of his parents was able to attend, his father too busy working, his mother, he suspected, too shy. That night, however, his mother cooked a dish, rice with red beans, which was prepared only on celebratory occasions. Todai, Todai, his father sometimes complained, the boys of Todai were a bunch of snobs who no longer spoke to the ordinary people they knew when they were growing up; the more he talked like that, his friends knew, the prouder he was.
Tanaka remembered Todai happily. He never had to work too hard there. He quickly became a protégé of Tsuyoshi Hayashi, one of Japan’s great aeronautical experts. Hayashi was considered one of the most distinguished men on the Todai faculty, even though he was young. He had gone to Todai himself and graduated in 1935, one of the few aeronautical engineers of his generation. During the war he worked on the Zero fighter plane, which was exceptionally well designed. After the war he went back to Todai to teach aircraft engineering, though it was called applied mathematics because the American authorities would not allow Japan to have aeronautical-engineering departments in its universities. Hayashi in those days was known as the Wall, because he never seemed to be looking at his students but instead was always facing the blackboard, writing out his own formulas. Though there was no possibility of constructing aircraft, Hayashi was fascinated by the main challenge of aeronautical engineering, building with lighter but stronger materials. To make things lighter and stronger—that was the direction in which the professor pushed his students. Tanaka took several courses from him, and by his senior year he was one of only two undergraduate students in Hayashi’s graduate seminar on light structural theory.
Tanaka, however, in the tradition of Todai students, who worked and competed ruthlessly to get in and then took it easy for a few years, had become somewhat self-indulgent—he had taken up sailing, belonged to the sailing club, and gave his weekends over to sailing—and he was often late for his Monday seminar. Whenever Tanaka came in, no matter how late, Professor Hayashi would say sarcastically, “Oh, here’s Tanaka-san. Let’s start from the beginning for his sake.” In general, Hayashi was tolerant of Tanaka’s youthful excesses, but as Tanaka’s senior year started and Hayashi found out how little work he had done on his dissertation, he became furious with him. “If you had read one book a day for the last year,” he said in reproach, “you would have three hundred and sixty-five books read, and you would be ready. Instead you have done almost nothing.” With that he made a huge list of books, and Tanaka read every one. A few months later, pleased with Tanaka’s work, Hayashi turned to the other students and said, “Well, it looks like our sportsman here can do anything he wants if he puts his mind to it.”
But getting a job after graduation was something of a problem, since few employers knew what applied mathematics was; it sounded too rarefied for them. Hayashi in those days often made telephone calls to potential employers on behalf of his students only to find a cool response. “Why are you trying to send us a mathematician,” the employer would say, “when what we want is an engineer?” There was nothing in the way of airplane designing, for there was no aircraft industry, and nothing that interested him. A friend who had been a year ahead of him at school had gone to work repairing American jet fighters, and there was a possibility of getting Tanaka that kind of job, but it held no interest for the young graduate. That was repair—the work of a mechanic, not an engineer. So Professor Hayashi arranged a job for Tanaka at the Niigata Ironworks, designing ships. For Tanaka, anything that Hayashi suggested, no matter how gently, was the same as an order, and he quickly and gladly accepted the job. Hayashi was the venerated figure of his life, the great teacher who had been merciful enough to take some interest in Tanaka. Tanaka dared not have any other idea of how he would spend his life; Hayashi in this system could make of his prize student what he wished, and could send him where he wanted.
At first the job seemed exciting: Japan was just becoming a major shipbuilding nation, and Tanaka was designing ships. But some of the larger companies were building ten-thousand-ton ships, and Tanaka was working on ships much smaller than that. By the fourth year he was bored. Part of it was the work, which was not as challenging as he hoped, and part of it was in being in Niigata, far from the high life of Tokyo. Tanaka later suspected that Professor Hayashi heard of his restlessness; in any case, at this point he got a call from Hayashi saying that Nissan was looking for an expert in structural engineering, someone quite brilliant, because it wanted to make cars with unitary, or frameless, body structure.
Hayashi was becoming well connected at Nissan. (By 1985 he could note that seventeen former students of his had served on the Nissan board of directors.) A number of his best
graduates had gone to work for the company in the past several years. He was also doing some consulting for it, and he was well aware of what was going on there. In those days, however, he was just cementing his relationship with this new and still somewhat shaky company, where both the technology and, even worse, the attitude toward technology were so primitive. When Tanaka had been looking for work, Hayashi was still dubious about the auto industry, because it all but spurned the use of science and math in its design shops. In those days the companies did virtually no analysis of weight, strength, and structure. There was no theoretical component in the design, only practical. The practical, he thought, had its value, but the auto industry’s disdain for the theoretical possibilities was hard on any skilled engineer working there. The men at the top did things as they had done them before the war, and they were not eager to learn new methods. But this attitude was rapidly changing. By 1956 Hayashi had come to believe that Nissan was serious about wanting first-class technical specialists. Hearing that there was a spot for a true structural engineer, he called and said that Tanaka was the best of the new generation of body-frame people.
Reckoning Page 36
