Why is Japan's manufacturing industry in trouble?

Since the beginning of this year, as a representative of high-end manufacturing, "Made in Japan" has been in trouble. First, in June, Takada Company was exploded to conceal airbag defects, which was called "the most serious automobile safety scandal in history" by the American media. Subsequently, Mitsubishi Motors and Suzuki Motors were exposed to tampering with fuel consumption data. In September, Nissan admitted that a large number of unqualified personnel were used in the factory inspection of vehicles to perfunctory the factory inspection procedures. In June+10, 5438, Kobe Steel, the third largest steel company in Japan, was confirmed to have tampered with the factory data of some copper and aluminum products for a long time. 165438+ 10. In October, Mitsubishi Materials Co., Ltd., a non-ferrous metal giant, issued an announcement, admitting that the product data of its two subsidiaries were fraudulent, and then Toray, another fortune 500 company, publicly admitted to tampering with the product quality data such as tire reinforcing agent.

Made in Japan was once the embodiment of excellent and perfect technology, and a series of scandals rarely appeared, which greatly affected its reputation. If the scandal is accidental, it cannot be explained by accident that several fist industries have exposed similar scandals one after another, so it is not unreasonable for some people to say that Japanese manufacturing industry has been pulled down from the altar. As Heine's Law in the field of safety production says, behind every major accident, there must be 29 minor accidents, 300 near accidents and 1000 hidden dangers. People don't know how many "materials" have exploded but not been exposed behind Japanese manufacturing.

There are many reasons for Japan's manufacturing industry to fall into the whirlpool, but in the final analysis, it is still "system" and "technology". From the system point of view, there are obvious management loopholes and lax quality control, but the reasons are not limited to this. Japan's economy has been stagnant for the past 20 years. According to the data of the World Bank, Japan's per capita GDP in 20 16 was the same as that in 1995, both of which were 42,000 dollars. Under the stagnant economic trend and the competitive situation of catching up between China and Germany, Japanese enterprises are also in trouble. Therefore, in order to maintain the competitiveness of products and maintain market share, some enterprises have adopted the method of fraud or "turning a blind eye" to implement the management system. In addition, the implementation of this system has economic costs. When the technical and economic cost of products cannot be reduced, it is a natural choice for enterprises to relax the implementation of the system and reduce the system cost. Therefore, the institutional factors can be largely attributed to the lack of stamina of technology-enterprise technological innovation.

For many years, Japan has been the world's "top student" in science and technology, and is recognized as one of the technological powers. Why is the innovation stamina insufficient? There are three main factors.

First, the lack of innovation strategy and the loss of innovation direction. The advantage of Japanese science and technology is that it is good at introducing, digesting, absorbing and re-innovating, which is feasible and the only way for a late-developing country in the "catch-up period", with benchmarks and clear development goals. Once its status changes from "follower" to "follower" and "leader", as the absolute number of imported technologies decreases or is controlled for competitive reasons, China must form its own scientific and technological strategic ability to correctly judge and grasp the general trend of scientific and technological development, and increase it on this basis. Japan has long followed the path of scientific and technological development in the footsteps of the first country as a chaser and follower, which objectively caused Japan to be good at technological development and relatively weak in scientific research, paying attention to tactics at the operational level and ignoring strategy at the direction level. To this end, on the one hand, Japan has repeatedly missed the opportunities of the Internet and mobile Internet in recent years by clicking on the "technology tree", on the other hand, upstream basic research has been unable to supply and drive the development of downstream technologies. Lack of continuous innovation, in order to reduce the technical and economic costs of products, naturally there is no water without resources. As Nakasone Yasuhiro, the top advisor of the long-term ruling Liberal Democratic Party, once said, "Japan's long-term basic national policy and comprehensive strategy for realizing this national policy are systematically lacking".

The second is the lack of strategic scientific and technological strength and innovative talents. Japan is a world economic power as well as a world science and technology power, but it is hard to say that it is a big country, and it is also hard to say that it is a strong country in science and technology human resources. On the one hand, Japan's total population and the number of people engaged in scientific research and technology development are not the same as those in China and the United States. Moreover, due to the aging population, Japanese young people are not only small in number but also unwilling to engage in scientific and technological innovations that need to be accumulated for a long time. Because there is no grand strategy of "open Japan" to compete with different cultures, Japan has not relaxed its immigration policy to expand the introduction of foreign scientific and technological talents in the case of an aging population. Moreover, Japan's scientific and technological innovation is dominated by enterprises, with the advantage of forming a group of multinational companies with strong competitiveness, but it lacks a strategic scientific and technological force that can carry out major scientific and technological innovations beyond short-term interests, which also leads to a relative shortage of basic research, leading technology and subversive technological innovations in Japan. As Feng Zhaokui, a researcher who has been studying Japan for a long time in China Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out after comparing the United States, Japan and Europe, Japan is "a steady stream of small inventions, and there is a shortage of inventions in China, and big inventions are zero". In contrast, Germany, with a population of13 less than Japan, has the world's top scientific research institutions Max Planck Association and Fraunhofer Association, with tens of thousands of scientific and technological personnel, which effectively ensures the export of Germany's major scientific and technological achievements outside the university scientific research system.

Third, the innovation system failed to meet the needs of the development of the information age. Japan's current scientific and technological innovation system was established after World War II, which conforms to the national conditions of the catch-up period and the industrialization era. The usual practice is to select the key development areas in a certain period as the target according to the domestic and international situation, then formulate implementation measures, comprehensively implement them by means of finance, finance, taxation and economic legislation, and fully negotiate and persuade with relevant enterprises, especially large enterprises or consortia in advantageous markets, and reach an agreement, so that it is possible to achieve the goal with the government. However, this system does not meet the requirements of the Internet age with openness, enjoyment, flattening and small and medium-sized enterprises as the main body. At the same time, due to frequent political changes, it is more in line with the needs of the ruling party for politicians who have been in the lead for three to five years to seek political stability to cater to vested interests and slow down the pace of reform. Therefore, Japan still lacks a kind of motivation, vitality and strategy to reform its institutional arrangements that have adapted to the industrial era, and on this basis, form a new system that can adapt to the Internet and mobile Internet era.

Therefore, if we don't solve the strategic and institutional problems from the root, the once-glorious Japanese manufacturing may still get into trouble, not only falling off the altar, but even falling into a quagmire, and the consequences will not be minor troubles, or even missing an era again.

Just like Japan 40 years ago, it successfully grasped the analog TV era, but missed the digital TV era that began 30 years ago; Twenty years ago, Japan successfully grasped the era of disk and optical disk, but missed the era of cloud computing and cloud storage that started 10 years ago. In today's new energy era, when the world's largest economic and technological country, the world's largest population country and the second largest economy all choose the direction of pure electricity, Japan chooses the direction of hybrid power and hydrogen energy, which is a great victory made in Japan, or a big turning point. Time will tell us the answer.