Raw Japan
Slices of Japanese business, politics and life
Toyoda’s dilemma: To Race Or Not to Race
Today, reporters got their first chance to hear from Akio Toyoda since he became president of Toyota Motor — the company established by his grandfather 71 years ago.
Just two days on the job and much younger than the five executive vice presidents present with him at the news conference, Mr Toyoda, 53, was predictably cautious in what seemed a thoroughly scripted response to reporters’ questions. At times, he visibly flipped through the pages of what I could only surmise was a prepared Q&A cheat-sheet. Even the soundbites — “we’re setting sail in very stormy waters” — seemed unspontaneous.
But for a few minutes, it seemed, you could see the real Akio Toyoda come through.
It was when he was responding to a question about whether he would continue to race, as he did last month for the third straight year on the notoriously dangerous Nurburgring race track for the 24-hour endurance race.
After all, he’s now the chief executive of Japan’s biggest company and the world’s largest carmaker; getting behind a speed-machine would seem an obvious breach of safety considerations.
In the end, Mr Toyoda answered neither yes or no, but not before giving his audience a taste of his passion for racing — and cars.
Will “Toyoda Restoration” do the trick for Toyota?
Jan. 20 marked a new beginning for more than just Americans, who swore in Barack Obama as their first non-white president in history. It was a big day for the auto industry too: the dawn of a Fiat-Chrysler partnership, and the appointment of a founding family member to the top job at Toyota Motor Corp for the first time in 14 years.
The Toyota move, first flagged in Japanese media a month ago, has been highly sensationalized in Japan.
The local press has likened Akio Toyoda’s nomination to another turning point in Japanese history: the return of power to the imperial family in 1867 from the Tokugawa shogunate, which paved the way for the Meiji Restoration under Emperor Meiji.
“Taisei hokan”, as that historic event is called, has been in the Toyota history lexicon ever since Taizo Ishida somewhat reluctantly took the helm from founder Kiichiro Toyoda in 1950. That year, Kiichiro — Akio’s grandfather — was forced to step down to assuage an angry workforce over sackings that were imperative to saving Toyota from the brink of collapse. Ishida, whose devotion to the Toyoda family is said to have bordered on the religious, vowed to hand back the “throne” to Kiichiro once his duty of fixing the battered company was complete.
Alas, that promise would never come to pass, due to Kiichiro’s sudden death in 1952. It was only 15 years later that the torch returned to the family, with the appointment of Kiichiro’s trusted cousin and apprentice, Eiji Toyoda.
The top job then stayed in the family until 1995, when Tatsuro Toyoda succumbed to illness. His replacement was Hiroshi Okuda, a “numbers guy” whose own father was a stockbroker. That marked the dawn of a new era of management in an industry that found itself steeped in mergers, acquisitions and capital tie-ups formed to survive in what had become a far more competitive world.
