Notes from Toyota-Land: An American Engineer in Japan (review)

Darius Mehri's Notes from Toyota-Land is a colorful, diary-like account of the personal and working lives of numerous employees—regular and temporary, Japanese and non-Japanese—at a Toyota Motor affiliate somewhere in Japan during the 1990s. Anyone thinking about working for a Japanese firm in Japan or overseas should read this book, especially since insider accounts of working-for-the-Japanese, once fairly common, have all but disappeared in recent years.

The subtitle, An American Engineer in Japan, coupled with the reference to Toyota in the title give the impression that readers will learn a lot about Toyota. The author, in fact, claims that his account offers a detailed account of the Toyota Production System (p. xvi). Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, we learn little about Toyota, the Toyota Production System, interfirm relations within the Toyota group of companies, engineers and engineering practices at Toyota and its affiliates, and the Japanese automobile industry in general.

We do learn about Mehri's likes and dislikes during his three-year stay in the employ of a second-tier Toyota affiliate, fictitiously named Nizumi. We also learn about his growing pro-union sympathies and his feelings that Japanese and non-Japanese workers, at least at his company, are overworked, underpaid, and not treated with much respect by many managers.

Unfortunately, Mehri's account cannot be considered scholarship. There is no effort to situate his account temporally, spatially, and structurally within a network of firms that interact with Toyota and Japan's industrial structure; there is no discussion of research design and method—how data are collected and analyzed. The account is anecdotal at best and much of it hearsay.

Occasionally, there is an effort to link his story to the scholarly literature on a particular topic, but the effort is unsystematic and the bibliography spotty. The latest work on Japan's industrial organization and firm-level capabilities, published in the 1980s, 1990s, and thereafter, by scholars such as Masahiko Aoki, Ronald Dore (after British Factory-Japanese Factory), Mark Fruin, Jeffrey Liker, James Lincoln and Michael Gerlach, and Ikuhiro Nonaka are not mentioned. Instead, work published 40, even 50 years ago, is cited when more recent scholarship is not. For example, Nakane Chie's 1970 thesis about Japan as a vertical society is cited, but none of the recent work that challenges Nakane is brought up. Christena Turner's studies of work and union relations in small firms and Hugh Whittaker's work on innovation in small and medium-sized firms are likewise missing.

The only major and recent work on industrial organization that is cited, The Machine That Changed the World, is used as a foil. Mehri often says how misleading the study is, given his experiences in Toyota-land. But he offers no serious challenges to the findings, methods, and arguments of The Machine That Changed the World, the result of a decade-long, worldwide survey of the motor vehicle industry led by MIT. Such failings undermine the value of Notes from Toyota-Land as scholarship. However, as an American engineer's first-hand account of a multiyear sojourn in Japan's industrial heartland, Notes from Toyota-Land can be read with interest.