Another coup for the dogged engineers of the Japanese economic miracle? That’s what Mitsubishi wants its customers to believe. In normal times, many would. But with Japan in its first economic slump since the mid-’80s, times are anything but normal. The Japanese have gone into a national funk. Suddenly, nearly everything linked with their economic success–like long working hours and high savings rates-is open to question. Astonishingly, the hand wringing now extends even to the holiest of all management grails, “quality.” Quality has become the focus of a growing, occasionally comical debate within corporate Japan: is it possible, some Japanese managers wonder, to spend too much time and effort producing good products? Is there such a thing as “overquality”?
The questions, at one level, are silly. “Obviously there’s no such thing as overquality,” says a high-ranking Sony executive. “Quality is good, period.” True, but that’s not what’s nagging the Japanese, as even Sony’s chairman, Akio Morita, acknowledges. Morita helped kick off the entire quality discussion in a now famous article earlier this year. In a popular Japanese magazine he wondered whether Japan could continue to flood the world with high-quality, reasonably priced goods and still get along with its trading partners. However unintentional, the implicit message of his essay seemed to be: perhaps we should be less competitive.
There’s no reason for Japan’s foreign competitors to get complacent. The Japanese are not suddenly going to start turning out junk. What’s really underway is more subtle: a redefinition of what quality means, a process that Japanese consumers-not companies–are driving. Take service. Can companies overdo it and alienate customers? Well, go to any big Japanese department store, and you will wait, perhaps interminably, as one of a horde of clerks painstakingly wraps a purchase in elaborate paper. Some customers love it, but others don’t. A consumer magazine in Japan has even printed an article entitled “Get a Headache When You Receive: Overwrapped Gifts.” At discounters like Toys “R” Us, newly opened in Japan, the wrapping’s not as nice, but prices are lower.
Retailers are hardly the only ones now buffeted by the changing concept of quality in Japan. In the past year, many Japanese consumers seemed to overdose on the unending stream of new and improved products from the auto- and consumer-electronics makers. For years, such companies reeled out new products relentlessly. With market share their primary goal, the equation was obvious. “If you’re first to market with a great product, you make a bigger impact,” says Kenneth Courtis, an analyst with Deutsche Bank Capital Markets in Tokyo. Japanese automakers became the world leaders in getting new models to market. It took Nissan Motor, for example, just half the time to design and produce its funky new Figaro sports car as Detroit takes to come out with a new model.
Consumer-electronics companies were even more frenetic. They punched out a blizzard of more sophisticated products as Japan’s economic boom in the ’80s wore on: VCRs with remote controls that looked as if they were beamed down from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, phone-fax-answering machines with 400-page instruction manuals, even washing machines and rice cookers with their own fuzzy-logic chips. Flashy new technologies like digital audio tape have yet to take off. Shoppers simply got confused. “The only thing fuzzy about my dishwasher are the instructions,” says Yasuko Kiyohara, a housewife in suburban Tokyo.
In the United States, the customer is king. In Japan, the saying goes, the customer is god. Thus, Japanese companies are reversing course. Former Nissan chairman Yutaka Kume, the head of the Japan Auto Manufacturers Association, has endorsed the idea of longer product cycles in his industry, and electronics firms have already turned down the spigot. Part of the reason is government pressure to give Japanese workers a break. But part of it is to give consumers a break. Says one American consultant, “Getting back to simple products that people can use is where the market is right now.” And if history is any guide, the Japanese businesses will do a top-quality job at that, too.
