Keiretsu : inside the hidden Japanese conglomerates by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Conglomerate corporations, Industrial concentration, Industrias, Concentración de, Conglomérats (Économie politique), Concentration industrielle, Conglomeraten (economie), Keiretsu, Business Cooperation, Japan
ISBN: 0070425833
Publisher: New York : McGraw-Hill
Published: 1994-04-30T19:00:00+00:00

Yoshida: Does it sound like all we subcontractors ever do is complain? Ihope you don't get that impression, because it's not true. When we talkamong ourselves we almost never complain. We've been living like this fordecades. Nothing will change. We know that. There are good times andbad times, but never different times. So what's the use of complaining?We're in the fix we're in because we chose this life. We like to make things.Little wires and pc boards and disk drives and auto bumpers and every-thing you can think of. We love to make things. We just wish it wasn'tsuch a hard life and so many good people didn't get stepped on the waythey do.

Years ago Japanese industry was much more open. There weren't thekind of strict vertical keiretsu we have today. In those days a small com-pany had a chance to grow, to accumulate a little profit, start up newproduction and become bigger. Lots of big companies today grew out ofthe ranks of smaller companies right after the war. But those days are goneforever. Today a subcontractor will always be a subcontractor. You'retrapped. You'll never have any money, you'll never turn any substantialprofit, you'll never get out of the system. All you can do is enjoy your workand make the best of it. We don't sit around complaining like this. Most ofthe time we're thinking about ways to get along better, to cope with thesituation as it is. That's just common sense.

Kudo: Big companies need subcontractors and subcontractors need ordersfrom big companies. It's a two-way street. If the big firms freely hired thesubcontractors, and used them fairly, without squeezing them, we wouldall be happy. We don't hate big companies. We need them, and they needus. All in all, I think the system is pretty good as it is. It's just that we getsqueezed so badly that a lot of little companies go bust. It shouldn't be thatway.

I love to make things, and I suppose I could keep working for severalmore years. But I won't. I'm going to close my factory soon. I have twosons. I was hoping years ago that at least one of them would want to followin my footsteps, but this has not been the case. I think they saw what thislife is like, but what they couldn't see is my pleasure in working. All theyknew was that I put in long hours, sometimes staying at the factory dayand night for a week, and there was never an increase in pay. Because I'm

the boss, they think I'm in better shape than the workers, and yet we'realways broke. My sons decided that this wasn't the life they wanted. Onebecame a teacher and the other is an engineer, but at a very large company,not a subcontractor. In a few years I'll turn this place into a small apartmentbuilding and try to live off the rent.

The Electronics Industry

Akio Kakinuma runs a medium-sized machine shop near Kawasaki making partsfor one of Japan's best-known electronics firms.

A few years ago the buzzword in the car business was design-in.

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