The Toyota Production System — The Philosophy of the Japanese Car

In the previous episode, we saw how Europe, rising from the rubble, nurtured people’s cars like the Volkswagen Beetle and a culture of the Autobahn. America inscribed mass production and abundance into its cars; Europe inscribed individuality and the philosophy of the high-speed motorway.

So what of the other defeated nation that likewise began from the ashes?

Postwar Japan had neither America’s vast capital nor Europe’s network of high-speed motorways. It had only limited resources, a cramped land, and a still-small market. By any ordinary reasoning, it could never have become a center of the world’s auto industry. And yet, out of that very ‘scarcity,’ a single philosophy was born — one that factories around the world would later take as their model. It was neither a new car design nor a powerful engine. It was a quiet revolution that questioned the very act of ‘how to make’ a car.

An Idea Born of Scarcity — Just-in-Time

The story is said to begin with a single remark by Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Motor.

‘It is best to gather the parts of a car just in time.’ Obtaining the right things, at the right time, in the right amount — this is the prototype of just-in-time. It may sound obvious. But the common sense of the day was the opposite. Fearing shortages, factories normally stockpiled parts and materials in bulk. Pile the warehouse high with inventory, and the line never stops.

Yet Toyota, in the Japan of the immediate postwar years, lacked the funds to hold such ‘inventory for peace of mind.’ Buy up parts in bulk before anything had sold, and the money would run dry in no time. Precisely for that reason, the company had no choice but to flow only what was needed, when it was needed — to build a lean, wasteless flow.

The one who took Kiichiro Toyoda’s vision and systematized it into an actual mechanism on the factory floor was Taiichi Ohno, who would later become a vice president of Toyota. The Toyota Production System is said to have been forged on the floor by Ohno and others while studying the line production of America’s prewar auto industry and building upon ideas advocated by Kiichiro and his circle. It is also said to have begun, in part, as a way to fill the gap left when skilled workers were conscripted during the war and production capacity fell.

Two Pillars — The Flow, and the Courage to Stop

The Toyota Production System is often spoken of in terms of two pillars. One is just-in-time. The other is ‘jidoka’ — autonomation.

Jidoka is distinguished from mere ‘automation,’ the running of machines automatically. Ohno is said to have added the human radical to the word, coining ‘jidoka’ — automation with a human touch. Its origin is said to lie in the automatic loom invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of the Toyota group. Sakichi’s loom had a mechanism that stopped the machine automatically when a thread broke. When something goes wrong, the machine stops itself. So it does not keep producing defects. And a single worker can watch over many machines.

This idea was carried into automobile manufacturing and turned into the philosophy that ‘if there is an abnormality, you may stop the line’ — no, ‘you should stop it.’ Stopping the line is, by nature, the thing a shop floor most wants to avoid. But Toyota judged it better to halt on the spot and cut off the cause than to let a defect flow past with a blind eye. Problems are not hidden away but brought to the surface. This is what raised quality from the ground up.

The concrete tool for turning these two pillars on the floor was ‘kanban.’ A later process goes to an earlier one to fetch the parts it needs, when it needs them, exchanging cards called ‘kanban’ as the sign of it. The earlier process then makes only as much as was taken. No longer is anything overproduced under the pressure of work orders. The mountains of inventory vanish, and only the flow remains. It is said the idea was inspired by the way a supermarket restocks its shelves only by as much as customers take.

Kaizen — The Endless Question

Regard the Toyota Production System as a mere technique of efficiency, and you miss its core.

What Ohno sought to root in the workplace was, rather, an attitude. ‘Kaizen’ — the stance of forever asking whether today’s way could be made even better tomorrow. Not a finished method handed down from above, but each person on the floor stacking up small ingenuities day by day. That accumulation, in time, becomes a great difference.

Ohno is said to have listed the ‘seven wastes’: the waste of overproduction, the waste of waiting, the waste of conveyance, the waste of processing itself, the waste of inventory, the waste of motion, and the waste of making defects. These are found and stamped out with the eyes of the floor. Of them all, the one he warned against most, it is said, was the ‘waste of overproduction.’ Something that looks like work at a glance but is in fact merely turning unsellable goods into inventory — that he sternly rejected.

The method of ‘asking why five times’ to dig down to the cause of a problem is also said to derive from Ohno. Not content with a surface remedy, one repeatedly asks why it happened, and arrives at the true cause. This was also guidance meant to raise the technical level of the shop floor of the day, it is told.

Of course, this philosophy was not perfected overnight. It was tested on the floor over long years, failed, and honed. And it did not stop at the peculiar craft of one company, Toyota; it became, in time, the foundation that supported the competitiveness of Japanese cars as a whole. Nissan and others, each in their own way, pursued quality and productivity, and postwar Japanese cars gradually overturned their initial reputation of ‘cheap and shoddy.’

A nation poor in resources fills the gap with wit. It does not make scarcity an excuse, but questions the very way of making. This quiet philosophy, through the industrial product called the car, became a byword for Japanese craftsmanship.

But however much one hones the way of making, a stage is needed before its true strength is put to the world. And that stage arrives in an unexpected form. In 1973, a single crisis in the Middle East becomes lines at gas stations the world over, sending demand for small, fuel-efficient cars surging all at once. The day the true strength of the Japanese car is tested in the world’s markets is coming, riding in on oil.