Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  By 1983 those who knew Nissan well thought that Ishihara was about to lose the British deal. That would mean a considerable loss of face in addition to failure to complete his own international strategy. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher visited Japan. High on her priority list was the Nissan factory. She was greeted in Tokyo by Kawamata, who opposed the deal, while Ishihara, who favored it, was conveniently out of the country at the time. That to Nissan watchers was a sign that the deal was in jeopardy. In the spring of 1983, shortly after the Thatcher trip, one of Ishihara’s close friends told reporters he thought the deal was dead. But then, at almost the same time, there were small signs that Kawamata might be shifting. The old man was uneasy about the scope of the deal, to be sure, but he was also wary of being seen by his peers in the Keidanren as the man who had stopped so important a deal. He began to argue for a more limited approach to England, in effect a trial run to see whether anything was possible with British labor. Perhaps, he proposed, they could begin with a small assembly plant rather than a manufacturing plant, and perhaps they could lease rather than buy the land at first. Though the softening of his position did not then seem that important, for the first time it gave the advocates of the project, both British and Japanese, a lever with which to move him. “I am not so opposed to this project as some people think,” he told one of Ishihara’s people in June 1983. “I know there are differences—if you enter the factory from the Kawamata entrance it looks very small, and if you enter from the Ishihara entrance it looks very large—but in the end it will be pretty much the same.”

  What began to emerge was a rare view of the interior politics of a Japanese industrial company. Much of the strength of contemporary Japanese society came from the modern application of Confucian tradition—of the respect for authority and the obligation of people and groups with vastly differing objectives to reconcile their differences and eventually come together. To the Westerner this always seemed to happen without any real contention or dissent. The Japanese appeared to be part of one big happy family, instead of one filled with constantly competing factions. What was unusual about the struggle at Nissan was not that something as harsh and complex as this was taking place, or that the company was so divided, but that because the British were involved, Westerners could witness the normal disputes that went on in a Japanese company.

  In 1983 the struggle between Shioji and Ishihara began to take place in the press. Shioji became convinced that Ishihara was the source for articles that were being written about him, some of which criticized his night life in the Ginza, his finances, his yacht. Shioji in turn ridiculed Ishihara for the way he handled his yacht. “He knows nothing of the sea,” Shioji told a reporter. “He just wastes fuel out there. It is as if he is working for the oil companies.” He sought a private audience with Prime Minister Nakasone, berating him for returning from a meeting with Margaret Thatcher and declaring that he hoped the British factory would go through. Nakasone, Shioji said, was interfering in a private business matter. Shioji’s own statements about the project were increasingly militant. “You do not start building a second home when the roof of your first house is falling down,” he said, a reference to Nissan’s domestic problems.

  Ishihara viewed Shioji now as an open dissident and believed that what was at stake was not just a factory in England but his own control of the company. That spring he finally moved against Shioji. He decided to break Shioji’s hold on the personnel department, the key to his power, and he did it by moving his own man in there. He held the board together on this issue by treating Shioji’s man well, sending him to an unusually good job as the head of a body plant. Still, by summer Ishihara seemed no less embattled. (A year later he would say somewhat ruefully, “I have been president for seven years, and somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of my time has been spent dealing with the union.”) Then late in autumn things began, ever so slowly, to change. There were reliable reports that influential people in the Keidanren were pressuring Kawamata to support Ishihara. That the head of the company and the head of the union were feuding so openly on so important an issue, the Keidanren members felt, was bad for the company. They particularly disliked the fact that the head of the union was operating against the president with the tacit support of the chairman. There was also good news from England about the site: The land could be leased with an option to buy. That wiped out a major reservation on Kawamata’s part. In late 1983 Kawamata publicly reversed course; the struggle between Ishihara and Shioji, he said, was hurting the company, and since the only important thing was the future good of Nissan, he therefore would no longer stand against the UK project. The admission that there was such a deep chasm within the company was remarkable enough, but Kawamata’s public change of direction was even more remarkable. That day the phone at the British embassy rang off the hook with congratulatory calls. “My God, man,” one American said, “you’ve got it—don’t you see that? You’ve split Kawamata off from Shioji. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  Even so, the months that followed were difficult. The British had a sense that they were closing in on the deal, but it was like trying to steer a ship through dangerous waters in dense fog. A request would come in from Nissan about the deal, and the British could not tell whether it was a serious request or a trivial one, whether it was, in the words of one diplomat, “major face saving or minor face saving.” The British gathered that Ishihara was winning, but they were never entirely sure how strong a hand he held.

  Now Ishihara, more confident of his control of the company and even surer of the British deal, began to move more openly against Shioji. Though there were concessions to Shioji, most principally the confirmation in 1984 that Smyrna would produce not just trucks but, as Shioji had wanted, cars as well, Ishihara was slowly isolating him within the company. In the fall of 1984 the Tokyo branch of the union, mostly white-collar headquarters people and thus somewhat more sympathetic to Ishihara in the struggle than the average worker, dissented from a union proposal. The proposal, though vaguely worded, challenged management on the issue of labor-management relations and authorized Shioji to confront management. Too late Shioji realized that Ishihara had turned Haruki Shimizu, one of his own closest deputies, against him. There had been a subtle courtship, and Ishihara had played to Shimizu’s vanity. Then he had split him off. That meant the end was in sight for the labor boss.

  At the same time that fall, the Nissan management was encouraging and aiding Japanese reporters who wanted to write about Shioji’s finances and personal affairs. His extravagance, thought Ishihara, was an area of vulnerability, for working men would not necessarily find it charming. Shioji, aware that these articles were being orchestrated by the president’s office, was enraged. The culmination came in early 1985 with what one Ishihara friend later called “the famous Focus magazine article.” Focus was a new and highly popular weekly magazine in Japan, a mélange of Time, People, and Playboy. On its cover a headline said: “The Emperor Shioji’s Pleasure: A Woman on the Yacht Who Threatens Nissan’s U.K. Deal.” Inside, the magazine printed a large photograph of Shioji aboard his yacht with a pretty young woman. “The man who is so proudly steering,” said the article, “is the owner of a beautiful sailboat which would cost 40 million yen [about $160,000] to build now. Behind him is his guest who is a piano player in a Ginza bar....The man is Shioji. His income for 1982 was 18.63 million yen [about $75,000]. He owns a seven-bedroom house in Shinagawa, drives a Nissan President and two other 240Z cars. On the day when the photo was taken he returned from sailing, had lunch with her and drove off with her (with a driver, though). The woman put her arms around his shoulder inside the car.” The article then went on to say that at recent high-level meeting the Nissan executives had not been able to finalize their decisions on the British plant because the meeting had been devoted to attacks by Shioji on Ishihara for having the company monitor his personal life and follow him around with photographers. “Shioji,” said the Focus article, “was furious because he tho
ught the company was trying to sell him to the press. He refused to discuss the U.K. deal until he got an answer from the company about this.” The connection of his personal life-style to the British factory was carefully calculated. Shioji was being portrayed as the man who was holding back not just the company but the nation. At the British embassy the Focus article was viewed as a considerable victory and a sign that more victories would soon be coming.

  Then, one evening in late January, there was a phone call from Nissan to the British embassy. The deal was on. This was a Thursday evening, and the Japanese had a very specific scenario in mind: They wanted Kawamata to go to London on Tuesday, meet Margaret Thatcher, and make the announcement before Parliament. That clearly was part of the quid pro quo for Kawamata; he would end up in a cherished ceremonial role as the senior international statesman of Nissan. It was clear to the British diplomats that the time frame was important, that the deal had to be done and done quickly. The impatience showed that the consensus was very fragile and could come apart at any moment. The arrangements on the British side were not easily made, the prime minister and Parliament not so easily rounded up, but finally the plans were set according to the Japanese request. The next day there was another call from Nissan: Kawamata had caught the flu, and please delay the ceremony until Wednesday. No, the British answered, we cannot maneuver the PM and Parliament; fill him with medicine, bundle him up, and put him on the plane. But Kawamata did not seem to respond to the medicine, and so on Monday Ishihara was dispatched instead. In order to give Kawamata some share of the glory, joint press conferences were set up, one for Ishihara in London, one for Kawamata in Tokyo. The Ishihara press conference was predictably very upbeat about the deal and the future; the Kawamata press conference, equally predictably, was downbeat. Originally the deal was supposed to be for production of 200,000 cars, but the figure had been whittled down considerably, as Ishihara had retreated before the opposition within his own company. Now it was a good deal more modest: at first an assembly plant for 24,000 cars, and then, if things worked out, although there was no commitment, perhaps 100,000 cars manufactured there and possibly one day 200,000. At his press conference Ishihara, in an expansive mood, said that 200,000 was a quite viable figure. Back in Tokyo someone asked the same question of Kawamata, and he said there was no commitment to make 100,000 cars. What about 200,000 cars? someone asked him. You might as well say 300,000, he answered.

  None of this boded well for Shioji. He had lost out in the very public struggle with Ishihara, and he now faced an additional problem: In a country with little tradition of individualism and with a time-hallowed instinct to be with the majority, Shioji had acted individually and found himself on the outside. He was perceived as the loser, and in Japan if someone was seen as a loser, a dynamic ensued and there was the likelihood of further attrition as ordinary people made sure they lined up with the winner.

  Later that year Ishihara became chairman. He had made the company his at last, forty-eight years after he had first gone to work there. Where Shioji had held almost dictatorial authority in the past, for almost twenty-five years, now subordinates, aware of his vulnerability, were encouraged to move against him. Now it was as if an invisible signal had been given throughout the country: His power was in decline, and it was all right to defy him. Nissan management was openly encouraging reporters to write critically about him, and there were more hostile articles appearing in the popular press, including another photographic essay about him and a bar girl. The very publication of these articles showed how vulnerable he had become. In February others within labor moved against him, and his position completely crumbled. Once the hammer himself, he had become the nail that stuck out and had to be hammered in.

  43. A GRATEFUL WORKER

  WHEN JOEL GODDARD WAS first hired at the nonunion machine shop in early 1981, after nearly twenty-six months out of work, he felt lucky. He was making an acceptable salary while the rest of industrial Michigan was on its knees. He lavishly praised his new boss to some of his fellow workers. “Listen, Joel,” one of them said, “I know you’re glad to get the work, but ease up—you’ll learn soon enough this guy is far from perfect.” Soon Goddard was torn between gratitude to be working again and resentment of the way he was treated.

  For the first time in his life he was working without union protection, something he had taken for granted when he worked at Ford. It was not the money; it was the atmosphere of the plant that bothered him. In the nonunion shop, the boss was all-powerful, a virtual dictator, Goddard thought. He never let his employees forget that he had given them their jobs and could take them away. If a worker complained or if the boss took a dislike to him, he was soon fired. There was genuine fear in the shop: When the boss walked through, everyone jumped to attention. Workers were allowed five minutes to go to the bathroom. There were no chairs to sit down on. The boss watched them all the time. If he had to leave the shop for a sales appointment, he went around the shop first to check how far each worker had gotten on a particular job so he could monitor how much progress had been made while he was gone. “What the hell were you guys doing while I was away?” he would always ask. He constantly pushed them to work faster, yet Goddard and the other workers knew that he was charging his customers their time plus other charges.

  To get more money, Goddard realized, people had to kiss ass. No one was supposed to know how much anyone else made. There were no benefits of any kind. If you wanted a 50-cent raise, you went in and begged for it, and you were lucky to get 25 cents. The workers had no leverage, and the boss knew it. Not as confident or educated as Ford workers, they couldn’t get jobs anywhere else. When Goddard pointed out to his boss that he was making $2 an hour less than a colleague not nearly as skilled, the boss waved him aside. “He’s more loyal to me,” he said. “You’re going back to Ford the first chance you get.” A key ingredient of the boss’s power was his ability to withhold praise. If he praised the men, he would have to pay them; his hold on them came from letting them know that they did not quite measure up. Since the language of the shop was deliberately negative, the mood paralleled the language; a negative place it became. When the boss sensed that the men were about to ask for raises, he would start saying he doubted he could make the payroll that week. If he gave them their checks on time, he would tell them to hold on to them until Monday or Tuesday just to be sure they cleared. Even one year when the shop did well and there were bonus checks, they were handed out secretly in the men’s room, with dire warnings that no one else was to know how much the worker made.

  Finally, in March 1982, Goddard was called back to the Ford plant at Rawsonville. The day he heard, he went to see the boss and told him, “You can take this job and shove it up your ass. I’m done here. I appreciate the fact that you gave me a job, but you ought to learn how to treat people. A lot of things here aren’t fair.”

  “I’m sorry you feel like that,” the boss replied. “I always thought I treated you well.”

  When Joel Goddard went back to Ford he was thirty-six years old. Suddenly he felt a new pleasure in driving to work. It was like being reborn. He had been through bad times, but he had always had a marketable skill and a strong marriage. Others were not so lucky. About twenty-four hundred workers from the Rawsonville plant were still out. Hundreds of men he had worked with, unable to find work, had just disappeared—crushed as he had nearly been crushed. Some of the wives, not as well educated as Joyce, had been punished by their jealous husbands for finding even $6000-a-year fast-food jobs. Goddard decided he had been a spoiled American kid but had just grown up in a hurry.

  Protected temporarily against the Japanese by the import restrictions, the auto industry was making a comeback. Goddard was aware, however, that his plant was in direct competition with the Japanese and the Koreans, because making parts was a great strength of the Asians. The other Ford diemaking plant, in Sheffield, Alabama, was closing down. He heard rumors that the Rawsonville plant might follow. Who needed expensive diema
kers anymore in an automated world? The word—and in a place like Ford, the word was often reliable since the top union people seemed to be one step ahead of management—was that Ford was planning to transfer much of its diemaking to its plants in Mexico, where labor was much cheaper. Goddard had a piercing sense of his factory’s vulnerability, and his own. A man, it had turned out, did not have a God-given right to work forty-eight hours a week for high wages at a Ford plant. To his surprise, however, he found that few of his colleagues shared his fears. Many of them had not been laid off, and they refused to believe the world had changed. The company often held slide shows emphasizing how stiff the competition was. Goddard’s colleagues were not impressed with the photos of smiling, harmonious Japanese workers at Nippondenso, a threatening competitor that had just established facilities in Michigan to serve not only the Japanese manufacturers in America but the Big Three as well. He himself had a sinking feeling when he saw those presentations; he believed the quality was better at Rawsonville, but he knew how much cheaper Japanese manufacturing was, especially that of Japan’s auto industry’s suppliers. With mounting anxiety he read stories about the rise of the Koreans. But the men around him were blithe. “It’s all bullshit,” one of them told Goddard as they left one of those slide shows, “but if the company wants to pay me fifteen dollars an hour to watch it, that’s okay with me.” The man’s sense of immunity from the world outside stunned Goddard. Was he unaware of the agonizing three and a half years Goddard and others had just gone through? He did not appreciate the privilege of working for Ford, of good wages, a comparative lack of harassment, the right to go to the bathroom and read a newspaper. The man reminded Goddard of somebody, but he couldn’t quite recall whom. And then he said to himself, He reminds me of me.