Notes from Toyota-Land: An American Engineer in Japan (ILR Press Book)

By the end of his stint in Japan, Mehri has matured into an intrepid amateur reporter, exposing the dangers on the assembly line and investigating the sham of the company unions.

Darius Mehri offers something quite unique: an engineer's inside view of the Toyota Production System, based on an extended work experience in the engineering office of the company's homeland keiretsu. Given the special prominence of the Toyota Production System in debates over the appropriate template for restructuring the auto industry in particular and manufacturing in general, Mehri's book will interest practitioners. Mehri also has a great deal of insight into Japan's contemporary culture and politics.

Japan seems to have gone through a mutation in the last decade, as most visibly manifested by multiple races appearing on streets, in shops, schools, and factories. Is Japan becoming global? Darius Mehri represents a remarkable testimony to the internationalization of Japan: an Iranian American employed by Toyota as a computer simulation engineer. This made him a precious top-elite employee in this huge multiplex of the industrial kingdom. Instead of being content with his privileged status, while he was proving a productive engineer, he took every opportunity to learn what was going on under the surface, exploring the company upward and downward and across sections by listening to what workers as well as executives had to say about company life. The information he collected resulted in this book. All these disclosures may sound like a shocking reversal of what we know about successful, industrial Japan. But the corporate survival strategy, often at the cost of individual employee's welfare, sounds familiar.

Notes from Toyota-land is a wonderfully rich firsthand report, sure to be welcomed by anyone interested in the organization of work in Japan. This compelling memoir shows the author's transformation from a naive young engineer to a journalist, social critic, and activist.

Notes from Toyota-land offers interesting glimpses into a work setting-and a world-most Westerners know only at a distance.... It is an attention-grabbing look at the dark side of a company that many experts predict will soon be the world's number-one automaker.

Send an intelligent, spirited, and slightly bolshie young American into a research and design department in the Japanese manufacturing heartland just as the firm faces its biggest crisis in twenty years. Give him a keenly observant eye, unbounded curiosity about what makes his fellow human beings tick, and a passion for recording his observations, and you have all the ingredients for a fascinating and sensitive ethnography of a system growing harsher by the day as it strives to meet American standards of profitability.