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8 - Easy-peasy Japanesy: flexible automation in Japan

from Part III - Cybernation and flexibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Bryn Jones
Bryn Jones
Affiliation:
University of Bath
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Summary

At a Tokyo subway station an automatic machine failed to dispense a ticket in return for my coins. As often happens in Japan, a small group formed to try to solve the problem. One Japanese began, in cross-cultural fashion, banging the machine with his fist. Immediately a panel in the machine opened. An angry human face appeared within the machine and, via an interpreter in the crowd, instructed me to hand over coins. The ticket duly appeared. For me this incident was highly comic, though not to my Japanese helpers, but also a symbol of Japanese mechanisation. Though processes are apparently automated, or ‘high-tech’, human assistance is ready to hand, at just the moment when help is needed.

Has Japan by-passed Fordism? Can the future of the factory be found in the shadows of Mount Fuji? If so, is this because of higher commitment to advanced technology or superior social organisation of work? Achieving standardised quality and efficient control of varying production schedules is a persistent problem in small-batch manufacturing. As previous chapters show, pre-existing and still-evolving labour relations institutions blunted and complicated Taylorist administrative controls of labour in the West. Variability of products and components has meant grudging dependence on human skills and decisions – limiting use of the Fordist techniques which gave greater predictability and consistency to mass production. The Alpha case shows CNC and FMS could blend more easily with small-batch manufacturing methods for ‘flexible’ forms of efficiency.

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Chapter
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Forcing the Factory of the Future
Cybernation and Societal Institutions
 , pp. 165 - 189
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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