1984-1985 Japan Manufacturing Study

Tom's 1984-85 sabbatical in Tokyo coincided with peak Japanese enthusiasm for structural ceramics ("ceramics fever," Shinjuku showcase). Used to introduce the broader "ceramics will replace metals" rhetoric of the 1980s and frame why it failed.

Back in the mid-1980s, people in the ceramics community were telling the world: why are you using metals? Ceramics aren't subject to corrosion, they can go to even higher temperatures, we want to build jet engines out of ceramics. I spent 1984-85, my first sabbatical year, in Tokyo, Japan. They had something they called ceramics fever, and a ceramics high-tech showcase in Shinjuku. The Japanese were just enamored with fine ceramics. We're going to take over the world. Metals were consistently called a thing of the past. I'll show you some other examples from that era and afterwards where people said, we don't need metals, ceramics are our world. We're going to talk about why you don't use ceramics for critical structural applications.

Year on sabbatical with U.S. Office of Naval Research, visiting research labs and manufacturing facilities. Concluded Japanese productivity was not superior to US — competitiveness driven by exchange rate (250 yen/dollar). Anecdotes: $36,000 Tokyo rent, $15 Cheerios, C-5A Coca-Cola pallets, $2 hot dogs, embassy commissary access.

In the mid-80s the Japanese were knocking our socks off in manufacturing, and everybody thought the problem was regaining the productive edge. In 1984 and 85 I went to Japan for a year on sabbatical working for the U.S. Office of Naval Research. I was visiting research labs and manufacturing facilities all over Japan for a whole year, and I said, this is not better than what we have in the United States. It might have been making better quality, but at the time there was a significant competitiveness issue. It was 250 yen to the dollar after World War 2 — it had been like 350 yen to the dollar. Today the exchange rate is about 100 yen or 90 yen to the dollar.

Tom in Tokyo 1984–85 saw the ceramic show that drew a million visitors. Used as evidence that the failure of fine ceramics to take over jet engines was not yet obvious to scientists, industry, or the public — Tom's 1992 *Welding Journal* prediction was contrarian at the time. Critical flaw size from the Ashby plot is the technical hinge.

When I was in Tokyo in the mid '80s, they had what they called ceramics fever. They had a ceramic show in 1985, when I left — a million people showed up. Not just scientists; everybody thought fine ceramics were great and were going to take over the world. I came back and gave talks at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I got up and said, the problem with ceramics is they don't have any toughness. The only structural materials made out of ceramics are Portland cement and toilet bowls. I'd throw in the kitchen sink, but you've got to line it with cast iron to give fracture toughness. If you drop something in the sink and it was just made out of ceramic, you'd end up with a shattered sink. So they make it out of cast iron — and gray cast iron is the worst metal of all in terms of toughness. People forget this toughness requirement.

In the 1980s everybody thought Japan was beating our socks off in manufacturing. I spent my sabbatical in the mid '80s in Japan because everybody thought, wow, those Japanese make Toyotas, they certainly are doing a better job than General Motors. Well, it turns out General Motors was more productive, but the law of comparative advantage basically said we would buy Toyotas if you'll loan us the money so we can have a Star Wars Defense Initiative so we can bankrupt the Soviet Union. We had higher productivity than the Japanese but we were buying their automobiles so they could have the money. We would buy their cars, and they would loan us the money back so we could build missiles.

"When I was in Japan in the 1980s visiting shipyards they were trying to do it." Reference to welding-over-paint efforts observed in Japanese shipyards.

So one of my first projects was: "Tom, how can we come up with a weld metal that can weld over paint?" People had been trying to do this for 50 years, and I didn't solve it either. What people have done is gone to different composition paints, but it still doesn't work very well. When I was in Japan in the 1980s visiting shipyards, they were trying to do it. About eight years ago up here at Bath Iron Works, they were trying to do it. In general the best thing is to grind the paint off for three inches on either side, weld it, then repaint it. But sometimes those paint jobs aren't good, and that's why we see the corrosion picture you folks have been showing us — a lot of times it starts in that repainted area because it's not as good a paint job.

Tom's sabbatical in Japan, walking through factories and research labs. Concluded they weren't more productive — they were more competitive because of the 240 yen/dollar exchange rate.

This is the opening part of the book, and I've highlighted the first sentence: to live well a nation must produce well. That's what the whole book was about — why was the United States not as productive as Japan in manufacturing. I'd spent my sabbatical in 1984 and '85 in Japan. I'd walked around these factories and research labs, and they certainly didn't seem like they were as productive as the American factories I'd been through. And it turns out they weren't. They were more competitive because at the time the yen-dollar exchange — when I was renting my home in Tokyo, the exchange rate was 240 yen to the dollar. What is it today? About a hundred yen to the dollar.

Tom lived in Japan '84–'85 when yen was 240/dollar. Wild rice gift anecdote (would-be jail offense). *Beikoku* (rice country) etymology. Used to anchor exchange-rate discussion of currency depreciation as borrowed-money discount.

We have the same type of management today. We have American managers who think they're so bright because they can beat the Europeans. Well, you can beat the French because the French have laws that don't allow you to hire anybody unless you're going to keep them on the payroll for thirty-five years until they retire. There are things like that in Japan. We have to compete with people who decide they want 30% of their populace in agriculture for historical reasons, and so the price of rice in Japan is ten times the world market price. When I lived in Japan, I thought, what a wonderful gift, I'll bring in wild rice. The Japanese didn't have wild rice — at the time it wasn't cultivated, you could only get it from Minnesota or North Dakota, and the Indians would go collect it. No one had successfully cultivated it. They have, since, in the last ten or fifteen years, but back then no one could. I was told, you're going to go to jail if you bring rice into Japan. Just like the Eskimos have something like fifty words for snow, the Japanese have about fifty words for rice.

Office of Naval Research sent Tom to Japan in the mid-1980s because the Japanese had the only world-class technology for accelerated-cooled HSLA steel. The Navy was considering a $100M Title III investment in a domestic steel mill.

The Japanese developed what they call accelerated-cooled steels. Actually they were first developed by Jones and Laughlin Steel in the United States in the 1960s for automotive dies, but we didn't do much with it. The Japanese had a huge shipbuilding industry and they wanted to be more productive to keep the Koreans from catching up with them in the 1980s. So they started developing high-strength low-alloy steels. The reason the US Office of Naval Research sent me to Japan in the mid-1980s is that the Japanese had the best technology in the world for making HSLA steels. We didn't even have a steel company that could make it. The US Navy was considering investing a hundred million dollars in a steel mill under what they call a Title III program, where the government can pay for the capital equipment to produce something the military felt was necessary. They wanted me to go over there and learn how the Japanese did their accelerated cooling to make higher-strength steels with lower carbon, lower hardenability, and therefore better weldability. High hardenability is bad weldability.