Reckoning by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam [Halberstam, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8610-4
Publisher: Open Road
Published: 2012-11-29T00:35:00+00:00

PART SEVEN

22. THE STATUE

AS NISSAN APPROACHED THE year 1960, it slowly and systematically became stronger. Its tempestuous labor problems were in the past. What money it was making—and more, much more—was being spent on new machinery, and its debt had grown awesome. The strain on the entire company was enormous. Yet although it was happening in the most painful way, Nissan was evolving into a real industrial force.

Kinichi Tamura, one of the Nissan design engineers, remembered 1960 and the years just before and after as a frenzied time. New plants were being planned and old ones expanded while at the same time the company tried desperately to keep production on schedule. On the factory floor, men tried to work at their stations as all around them construction workers tore the old lines apart, while other men kept pleading for even greater production. It was a madhouse, Tamura thought. He would visit a section to see whether the new machines that had just arrived were being installed, find that they had been, and then watch as a construction crane swept over and knocked them down. Tamura and his colleagues would spend a day marking off on the floor the exact location for the installation of new equipment, and some construction crew would come and accidentally tear the area up—and it would all have to be done over. Tamura could never remember a time like it. Normally he went home at seven in the evening, but in those years he seemed to stay at work until midnight, riding the train home for an hour and a half in the early morning, trying not to fall asleep and miss his stop. He barely saw his family. It was a strange feeling, of total exhilaration and, simultaneously, total exhaustion. For all of his problems, his excitement was almost overwhelming. For he was helping create the modern Nissan, building new wings of factories and installing new machines. He was touching the future. This was going to be a great company, and he was one of its architects. He could hardly believe his good luck.

One of Tamura’s glorious moments came when he helped develop and install Nissan’s first transfer machine. Transfer machines were basic to the work of Detroit, but Nissan had never had one. The transfer machine brought automation to the old process in which workers at station after station each performed one small task on a given piece such as an engine block. Some thirty yards long, the machine incorporated the work of as many as thirty stations, greatly speeding up the line and reducing manpower at the same time. Such machines could be ordered from America, but they were very expensive, perhaps several million dollars each. Do you think it would be possible, some senior Nissan executives asked their manufacturing engineers, to make our own?

At first it seemed impossible, a dream. Surely engineers and designers whose own accomplishments were so primitive could not make anything that complicated. But Tamura and his colleagues went to work on it.

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