I’m David Veech and this is Elevate Your Performance
Best of intentions - I wanted to get back to daily production of these, but there are so many other things going on that I can’t seem to make the time to finish the research necessary to make these historical posts.
I have been teaching a historical timeline for years. These are all things that drove Toyota to create the systems they created. I point these out to tell people that applying lean thinking doesn’t mean you have to be exceptionally creative or innovative. Toyota did the things they did out of necessity rather than innovation. From the start, Toyota copied parts for Ford trucks and Chevrolet cars, but out of necessity built a system for delivering materials Just-In-Time using a Kanban system.
Access to raw materials and the industrial capacity to convert them into useful products is the winner of wars - This is what feeds the size and strength of the military. This is what won the US Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War.
Raw materials have always been Japan’s Achille’s Heel. Raw materials drove Japanese colonialism in the 19th century. The first Sino-Japanese war, which was 1894-95, was fought in Korea, with China losing badly. As a result, Japan gained control of the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, and the Liaodong Peninsula, which is where Shanghai sits. This is where Sakichi Toyoda built a large plant to manufacture his automatic looms that I mentioned in episode 141.
As Japan’s industries grew in the late 20s, materials ran short, so in 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria. As China began to shift from provincial to National governance, Chinese tolerance with Japan’s interference vaporized and in 1937, Japan provoked China to war. The Nationalist Chinese put up a strong resistance, drawing more and more resources from Japan. Japanese atrocities from this war turned other nations in the region solidly against Japan and led to US embargoes of Japanese goods and eliminated US exports to Japan.
Japan’s steel industry was small and dependent upon scrap metal from the US as it’s main raw materials, producing questionable quality in sheet steel needed for cars. Toyota built it’s own steel mill but output from this was low. When Japan nationalized for World War II, all raw materials were stockpiled by the military, which assigned them to companies to fulfill orders for trucks, airplanes, and ships.
The peak production of trucks for Toyota occurred in December 1941, when they built about 2,000 trucks. Because of scarcity of raw materials and constant reduction in manpower as men were called to the front lines to fight, their production levels continued to remain low. (From Eiji Toyoda’s Autobiography, Fifty Years in Motion.1985)
Toyota made it through the war largely undamaged. One plant had been hit in a bombing run on August 14, 1945, just one week after Nagasaki had been destroyed with our second atomic bomb. Toyota City was targeted for August 21 with a conventional bombing raid designed to reduce the entire facility to rubble. But with the Japanese surrender on August 15, the war ended.
In the next episode, I’ll talk about peak production in the US during the war. This was the truest lean production since the assembly line. I’ll explain how we got there with a bunch of workers who had never worked in factories before.
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Have a great day and I’ll see you tomorrow.
For more, see:
1) https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/07/what-prompted-japan-s-aggression-before-and-during-world-war-ii.html
2) https://www.toyota-industries.com/company/history/toyoda_sakichi/
3) https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/text/index.html
4) Toyoda, Eiji (1985), Toyota, Fifty years in motion
