Reckoning

by David Halberstam

  Slowly they improved. Hyundai, which sold 15 percent of its stock to Mitsubishi in exchange for, among other things, considerable technical assistance, used technicians from Mitsubishi to help teach its people. (Other Japanese companies, it was said, were angry with Mitsubishi for giving technological aid to the upstart Koreans and complained frequently to Mitsubishi executives.) Gradually the workers began to understand what was expected of them. The parts suppliers improved too. Then the company bought machinery that made the line more efficient and the work easier. The critical year, Park recalled, was 1979; until then they had been making a car every four minutes and thirty-eight seconds; in 1979 they were making one every two minutes. That pace was very hard on the workers, but even when he was at the extremes of exhaustion Park never thought of his new life as difficult, for he could always compare it with that of his parents.

  Shortly after he went to work at Hyundai, Park married a girl from Ulsan. Sometimes, as he became more successful and earned more money, he would remind his wife of how much easier her life was than that of his mother. She did not, he pointed out, have to work in the fields all day. A city girl, she became infuriated with the comparisons. “That’s enough,” she would say. “I do not want to hear that anymore. You’ve said it before, and that’s enough. I am not going to live like that. Do not bother to tell me about it again.” He was pleased, however, that he was married to this city woman and could support her so well. Occasionally he would confide to his friends that she was asking for more clothes and more jewelry and that she claimed the other wives had more than she did. His friends confided that their wives said the same thing. All of this, they decided, was proof of how well they were doing. They knew, in fact, that many young men were leaving the farm and coming to work at Hyundai in order to get married. Farm boys soon learned that the most attractive young women would not marry farmers; they wanted to marry a worker at Hyundai. They did not want to work the farms like their mothers; they wanted to live in the city and be new modern women of Korea.

  Park came to realize that he was a prosperous man. His wife was in truth careful with their money, and they saved about $500 of his $800 monthly salary, enough, in due course, to buy a small house in Ulsan. They did not live in the house—they still lived in company housing—but rented it out to others for nearly $100 a month. Park’s goal was to save enough to buy a car himself. That would make him one of the first workers in the company to own a car. In Korea cars were being made primarily for export; the few that were not exported were used as company cars or purchased by successful middle managers. Park had almost enough money to buy a car but not enough to operate one, since gas was very expensive in Korea. He hoped to have the money by 1988. When he bought the car, he would move out of the company housing, which was very near the factory, and live in his own house, which was farther away, on the other side of Ulsan. Most of his friends hoped to buy cars, too, and thought they could do it in five or six years.

  Ulsan, Park knew, was now a symbol of the new Korea and of the fact that the challenge to the West was not just Japanese. Once just a fishing village with a fine natural harbor, it had become an instant city of more than 550,000. It had the feel of Detroit in the early 1920s, flooded by immigrants desperate to escape hardship and share in the fruits of the industrial age. In Ulsan everyone moved fast, no one ever seemed to rest. It was not a beautiful city, and its amenities were marginal. It was not about enjoying things but about making things—ships, containers, cars—and exporting them quickly. From Ulsan, the company town of Hyundai, the Koreans were mounting the latest assault upon American industrial supremacy, competing for the low end of the American auto market. Barely a factor in 1981, when it made about 60,000 cars, Hyundai hoped to manufacture more than 400,000 cars in 1986 and one million in 1990.

  Park thought his life had already exceeded his dreams. His father had somewhat grudgingly accepted the value of Park’s job, and Park himself was proud not only of what he earned but what his labor contributed to. He took considerable pleasure from the fact that Korea, a small, poor country, was exporting cars to a great nation like America, and he was confident that Korea would someday outstrip Japan as an automobile manufacturer. The Koreans, he liked to say, were obviously more inventive than the Japanese. He knew from talking to the technicians that the production line at Hyundai was not nearly as modern as those in Japan, which were highly robotized, and that Korea, because it was weaker in capital investment and rich in human labor, used extra manpower to make up for technological shortcomings. (In fact, American auto industry experts were comparing the Korean assembly lines favorably with those of Japan in the early seventies.) Three years ago, after seven years as a regular worker, Park was made a foreman, and he liked that job, though it was much harder than being on the line. When he was on the line he had to worry only about his own work, but now he was responsible for all the men under him, and he felt constant strain because of that.

  But the men who worked for him were very good. What struck him about the younger men who had just entered the company was that they were considerably more ambitious than men like himself and the others who entered in the seventies. When he had first shown up at Hyundai Motors, it was a small company. Now it was very large, very successful, making an important product and paying high wages, so it was attracting the most ambitious young men of a nation filled with ambitious young men. The company’s older men—the foremen like Park, in their mid-thirties—were beginning to complain that these younger men were perhaps too intense. A sign had been posted in the factory warning the workers not to rush their tasks, urging them to take their time. Still, at Hyundai Motors the president, Chung Se Yung, his managers, and the workers themselves enjoyed referring to the Japanese as “the lazy Asians.”

  52. THE VENERABLES

  IN OCTOBER 1985, YUTAKA KATAYAMA returned to Los Angeles. He was seventy-six years old now, more than a little overweight, quick to lose his breath. He was returning because one of his old colleagues had noticed earlier that it was twenty-five years since Katayama had first arrived in America, and it would be nice to give a party in his honor. All around him, as he arrived, were the signs of his success, the giant billboards portraying hot new Nissan sports cars, the deluge of beautifully crafted television commercials suggesting that America’s youth try these terrific new models. The commercials were a far cry from the first ones, in which John Parker had used himself and his family instead of actors and which were shot by a police photographer. In the twenty-five years since he had first come to America, Nissan had sold eight million cars, and there were in Southern California alone half a million in current use. Given the unlikely beginnings of the endeavor, those figures were truly astonishing.

  The morning of the reunion, Katayama had breakfasted with his old friend Mayfield Marshall, and they had reminisced about the old days, how Katayama at first had kept all the bills in an old shoebox, how they had pushed Datsun in Hawaii through aggressive promotion, renting them for only $5 a day, and how in the early seventies Katayama had pushed Marshall to buy the first Seiko watch he had ever seen or heard about. “Here, you’d better buy one of these,” Katayama had said. “They’re going to sell millions.” Marshall had forked over $15, knowing that he was not only buying a watch but undoubtedly helping to cover the expenses of some young Japanese salesman who was living on virtually nothing and was almost certainly a graduate of Keio University, Katayama’s alma mater. That night the dinner was very emotional. Old memories were stirred. No one from Nissan headquarters attended.

  Katayama did not linger in Los Angeles. He had just returned from Finland, a country he loved to visit because the light was so remarkable and he enjoyed painting there, and he was soon off to Paris to continue to push for one of his dreams, the restoration of the old Paris-to-Peking auto rally.

  In 1985 Sanosuke Tanaka was seventy years old and living in partial retirement. He missed working regularly, but he often appeared at Nissan factories, where he would teach motivat
ional classes and explain to young people just entering the company the importance of work and of loyalty to their fellow workers and the company. He regularly returned to Takabeya village, where he had grown up, to visit his family. The land that the family had gotten during the land-reform period had been sold back to the landowners during hard times, but the family still owned a small plot on which two very simple Japanese houses stood, and in them lived his two brothers and their families.

  On a visit in 1985 he briefly visited his brothers and then went to his parents’ graves. Then he took a visitor to see the house of the largest landowner in the area. The landowners, he said, had once been rich, and they had remained rich without working. Before, they had people like us working for them, Tanaka said, and then, just when they might have had to go to work, everyone began to move out here. They got rich by selling off their land. They became real estate men. So they still did not have to work hard.

  Takabeya village had changed dramatically in the last thirty years, and Tanaka was not sure he liked many of the changes. Once it had been purely rural farmland, untouched by the cities. Now Isehara city, the small neighboring center, had reached out and swallowed up Takabeya village, and Isehara city itself had become nothing more than a suburban extension of Yokohama. He was driving a new Nissan car, a Laurel, big and fancy and loaded down with electronic gear. He drove through areas that had been farms, and they were completely developed and, what was worse, populated by spoiled young sons and daughters of Japan. As Tanaka drove past the main street, a teenager in a punk-rock outfit walked past.

  “Look at that!” he said. “Did you see that? In my village! Look what he is wearing.” He drove a little farther, and a teenage girl, dressed as an American bobby-soxer of the fifties, her contours explicit, passed by. “Another one,” he said, outraged. “When I was a boy we dressed as modestly as we could. We did not want to call attention to ourselves. Now that is all they want to do, cry to the heavens to look.” He was not pleased.

  The visitor asked him if he worried about the direction of Japan’s young people. He paused for a long time. The question clearly bothered him. The Japan of modern affluence was difficult for him to accept. “They will wear their jazz clothes today,” he said, “and then tomorrow they will do what they have to do.”

  In the spring of 1985, with the tensions between Japan and the United States rising again, Naohiro Amaya was once again taking on a powerful, entrenched part of the Japanese establishment. In addition to his other battles, he was on a committee which was trying to reform the rigid Japanese educational system and to make it so that less learning was done by rote and more by the student’s using his analytical abilities. Nothing cut more to the core of Japanese life, acceptance of authority, than the school system. The obedience the child learned there and in the home became the same obedience one showed to all forms of authority for the rest of his life. To make a student more independent was to make an entire society in the most profound way independent. But Amaya and others felt that Japan’s entry into the world, and the nature of the new economy, demanded a different kind of citizen, a more modern one who could think for himself. The graduate of the rote system was a wonderful worker in a blue-collar manufacturing economy—“We have the best blue-collars in the world,” Amaya said—but a new economy of high technology demanded more creativity and thus more independence of young men and women, who must move readily in and out of foreign cities and adapt to and understand different conditions.

  Amaya was frustrated but not surprised by the mounting trade tensions between the United States and Japan. He put much of the blame on his own country. The inability of the Japanese political system to adapt to new realities and to open the nation up to Western markets was distressing to him. America, he thought, for all its flaws in manufacturing, might prove to have a more flexible political system and thus might eventually make the adjustments necessary to the new world economy better than Japan. The quickness with which the Reagan administration had deregulated certain industries and the success of that deregulation had impressed him. In his opinion it was the sign of a political system adapting successfully to new economic realities. In his opinion, America, having gone through a prolonged period of self-obsession which began with the Vietnam War, was only now emerging and taking stock of the rest of the world again. He was impressed at this moment by the degree of flex in the American system, and in the essential American pragmatism.

  By contrast, what was required of Japan was a period of major political readjustment. That would not be easy, for Japan was locked into a particularly narrow vision of itself and its relationship with the outside world, and imprisoned politically by the power of its vested interests. Every sophisticated modern Japanese knew the nation needed to export, and knew in addition that it had to be fairer in accepting imports, and that it was coming under far closer scrutiny from the West. But the political system, an extension of powerful existing interest, was proving to be surprisingly rigid. Because Japan’s farmers were so vulnerable, they were an especially regressive force politically. The rest of the world, already sensitive to growing Japanese economic power, need look no farther for its anti-Japanese rationales than its agricultural protectionism.

  Perhaps that was another reflection of American affluence, he thought, that its richness was so diverse and spread so broadly across the country that no sector in decline could hold the nation hostage against larger communal interest. In Japan, on the other hand, agriculture represented a classic example of domestic economic obstruction. It was old-fashioned and bad, but its political power was unchallenged. Nakasone, the prime minister, understood the dilemma, but his power was limited in his own party, whose members were tied more to their petty narrow connections in agriculture than to the good of Japan. Thus, much was being risked for very little, in the larger balance, and the Americans, quite predictably, were becoming angrier and angrier. The prime minister would periodically meet with Reagan, promise to do something about it, and then find that his own party would not budge. It was a political system married to vested archaic interests.

  Amaya believed that as the world entered its new economy with very different political and economic relationships, each nation had what he defined as hardware and software. Hardware in his sense was the ability of a nation to produce—the sum of its engineers, its workers, its essential skills, plus its natural resources. Of Japan’s strength in the area of hardware, he had no doubt. There could be no greater willingness to work, nor could there be more or better professional engineers on a factory floor. Japan’s problem would be with the software, which he saw as the ability of a nation’s political system to adapt to new realities, to tell the truth to its own population about the way the world was instead of the way they would have it be. The Russians had probably the worst software in the world.

  But he was worried by Japan’s software. Our politicians, he said, are rigid, very rigid. He spoke with palpable disdain for elected politicians who scurried around gaining favor with a group of insular farmers whose interest did not necessarily coincide with the national interest. Their Japan was the Japan of the nineteenth century. His was no longer the twentieth century; now it was the twenty-first. He did not share their nostalgia for either a feudal past or a highly nationalistic past. Amaya wanted to hold on to the essence of the nation but help it change and adapt to a new era, lest its exclusionary spirit end up isolating it from those who were its friends and allies. There was too much talk about regaining a samurai spirit in a nation that more than ever before needed to be supple. He was aware of the singular danger of Japanese insularity, which was traditionally its strength but like many strengths could quickly become a weakness. Fighting Japanese insularity was like fighting its history. Throughout its history, Japan had coveted the hardware of foreigners—other people’s toys—first those from China, then those of the West. But it had pulled back from any possible contamination from their software, or, in effect, from the political and social consequences
of its modernization. The yearning for the old Japan, for a way of life that no longer existed and could not possibly exist, he thought, was powerful and potentially quite destructive.

  America, he believed, would do well in the new economy. Its hardware was quite good. Not as good in manufacturing as the Japanese, but the Americans would make adjustments there; a company based in America would have more of its manufacturing done in Asia. American technology was likely to be more inventive than Japanese for a number of years because of the nature of the American educational and entrepreneurial systems. America’s weakness was that it was less tied to the past than were other societies, like Japan, but it was the American strength too. It was ironic, he thought, that the heads of American companies were not very knowledgeable about their own factories, but they were educated and broad-gauged and knew the world—whereas Japanese manufacturers knew their factories very well, but did not know the world. Because of this he was inclined to believe that American software, in his use of the word, America’s ability to adapt its economy and political system to new circumstances, might be superior to that of the Japanese.

  He was not amazed in 1985 by the sudden force of the American anger over Japanese protectionism. If it did not go too far, if it did not flare into the dangerous kind of nationalism that had dogged both countries in the thirties, it might even be a good thing, for it would help force Japan to modernize. Twice before, he believed, Japan had been dramatically changed by pressure from America—in 1853 when Matthew Perry sailed into Japanese waters, and the Japanese, seeing his black ships, knew that the only way they could preserve their society was to modernize; then again after World War II, during the Occupation, when the Americans forced the Japanese to change and modernize. Perhaps pressure from the Americans would eventually force the Japanese political system to do what it could not do for itself.