International MBA Program
Internship Web Journal
Andrew Day
IMBA Class of 2008
JTEKT, Osaka, Japan
john_day@moore.sc.edu
Journal Entry #5 - August 13, 2007:
So, welcome to the final entry in my internship journal.
When we left off, I was leaving Cost Management to return to my "home" department of Strategic Planning for the final three weeks. I spent the entirety of the period on two market research projects.
The first one was researching all of the prominent competitors in the power steering field. I compiled the latest publicized sales data, each company's newest technological innovations, locating productions facilities and determining what products were produced in what volume at said facilities, and various other factoids regarding competitors in our markets. The final product is a semi-detailed glance at every major player in the power steering industry. The second project was to produce a summary of all major multi-market automotive manufacturers' production facilities, what vehicle models were produced at said facilities, and the engine sizes that each model came in. This report is geared at giving anyone in the department a quick, easy way to reference where potential customers are producing what kind of vehicle.
Following the completion of these two projects, I gave a presentation based on the contents of each to my department, followed by a presentation on the final day of my internship summarizing the various things I'd learned during the course of the internship and various findings from my activities in the different departments. These presentations were a bit nerve-wracking to say the least, given that I was doing them entirely in Japanese in front of not only coworkers, but department heads and senior executives as well. While I've done presenting in the past, doing it in a second language, over material that one is not real confident in, proved to be a very trying and yet ultimately fulfilling experience.
The feedback I got from my supervisors indicated that despite stumbling through each presentation and occasionally slipping from formal Japanese into the local dialect, my presentations were overall quite understandable, much to my surprise.
On the non-work side of life, the last few weeks did not
present too much excitement other than an overnight trip to the mountains with my buddies. While
mountains in America are quite beautiful, I have never seen scenery quite like what the mountains
of Nara prefecture. I also got to see something I never imagined I would find in Japan, a bait and
tackle shop. It was almost a twin of the kind of shop we have here in the South, except everything
was in Japanese, a rather surreal experience to say the least. I recommend visiting one if you ever
get the chance.
I also got to race Typhoon 4, or Usagi as it was apparently named, on my bus trip back to Tokyo as I managed to pick the night it hit Japan for my travels. I don't think I've ever seen so much water on a highway in my life.
Fortunately, I reached Tokyo without real incident, other than being a tad soggy. Soon thereafter, I bid Japan farewell and after spending a night in Dallas Airport courtesy of American Airlines, I've returned to South Carolina for my final year of school. I hope you, my readers, have enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. So long!
Andrew
Journal Entry #4 - June 26, 2007:
So, here I am on the final day of life in Cost Management, looking back. It's been an informative, if not always exciting ride. The cost management department here is divided into two sections, one that is theoretically responsible for cost planning and the other for...cost management, in the sense of reconciling how much stuff actually cost and with the estimates and then figuring out what went wrong or right and making sure corrective measures are taken. In reality, the lines are often blurred as I learned during my time here.
I started off in the "Cost Management" section of the Cost Management department and was there for three weeks. I spent the majority of the time grappling with the painfully obsolete inventory system (I’m guessing the software was written about the time I was born), learning how to summon up the information on individual components of the various steering systems, figure out which of the several suppliers the part was currently being sourced from, and ascertaining the cost associated with said component. From there, I built complete manifests of all the costs associated with various steering systems. I also did miscellaneous other tasks such as updating internal records of the various sales reports from our overseas subsidiaries. I also got to sit in on a big meeting where personnel from cost management, production management, and procurement gathered for a semiannual announcement of results from various cost savings activities and the success or failure thereof.
After that, I moved to Cost Planning. Here, I did a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated tasks, translating documents detailing the cost planning process from Japanese to English, translating English technical documents written by a non-native English speaker from Europe into Japanese (this involved a lot of scratching my head trying to decide the intended meaning of some grammatically correct but completely mysterious sentences using a lot of technical terms taken straight from a dictionary), doing "cost validation" (updating various cost records with current information, looking for errors or inaccuracies in those records, etc), taking an engineering diagram of some portion of a steering column and creating a record of all the individual parts and their associated measurements and processing methods, filing seemingly endless reports and cost estimates in the appropriate binders (of which there are many and most are 6 inches thick with the last 3 years worth of estimates and revisions from all of JTEKT's steering products), giving short English lessons to my coworkers, etc.
A third activity I've been involved in is providing translation support in the negotiations and communications surrounding our ongoing relationship with a partner in south Asia, especially focused on the establishment of a new joint venture. As such, I've sat in on a host of teleconferences and videoconferences, translated lots of contractual documents back and forth from English to Japanese, and helped play host to a delegation of visitors from the partner firm. It's been quite the learning process watching the give and take that goes on. Sometimes, problems arise over seemingly minor contractual issues. Cultural misunderstandings happen over one group's desire to do thing a certain way because of the company's culture or informal policy on an issue. Unexpected requests from a third party throw a carefully crafted agreement into confusion. As a result, even though this relationship is generally quite cordial and by all means quite successful and profitable for both parties, both sides must continually be prepared to negotiate and renegotiate all manner of issues and have endless supplies of patience as they resolve problems.
On the non-working side of things, notably, I finally did some serious
sightseeing with some buddies in Nara. Nara is one of the several historical capitals of
Japan, serving as the seat of government during the bygone period of 710-784. The area is
still renowned as a focal point of traditional Japan, with Nara Park being filled with and
surrounded by a host of shrines and temples, all connected to various points of Japanese history
over the past millennium and a half. I would submit that only Kyoto surpasses it in
number of temples and shrines per square kilometer (though that's only an estimate based on
personal experience, not to be mistaken for statistical fact). Nara is also less than an hour
from where I live and thus makes a great day trip, especially when you have friends that enjoy
hanging out there and know all the in and outs of the place, as one of mine does. So, two
friends and I set out for Nara, and wandered our way through endless temples and crowds, climbed
the Wakakusayama "Mountain of Young Grass" (a quite literal translation of the name that can also
make for a rather amusing pun that is difficult to translate into English) that looked out over the
surrounding countryside, and wandered through an area of the city that is renowned for retaining a
turn of the (19th) century look. This is not my first time to Nara, having visited it 5 years
ago on a previous sight-seeing trip, and it was funny to see how little things have changed.
Another thing Nara is famous for is the herds of rather tame deer that wander around Nara Park
(which is somewhat of a focal point for the shrines, temple, and other
historical structures). For the princely some of 150 yen, you can buy a small pack of
cracker type things and the deer will quite happily eat them out of your hand, and then chase you
down wanting more when you run out. The deer hold some place in the mythos of Shinto (Japan's
native religion), and are apparently regarded as sacred by the more devout. I've heard
rumors that their droppings are also held in some regard, which is perhaps reflected in the
chocolate-covered candies billed as deer dung which some of the more enterprising shop owners sell
on occasion. The part of Nara known as "Nara-machi" (quite literally, Nara Town) is like an
"old towne", essentially the area of an urban center that has maintained the feel of an earlier
time. The time period reflected here is supposed to be from the Taisho era (1911-25), though
my friend was unable to confirm how accurate the maintenance of that feel has been here. It
certainly was not your typical neon lights and endless noises city center that is typical of
Japanese metropolises. The best way I can think to describe it is as very quiet, with lots of
walls, gates and old style houses that were certainly built long before I was born. It was
kind of eerie, to be honest, but definitely a part of Japan I've never seen before. The tea
house that was quite literally a house, complete with an upstairs only reachable by a narrow ladder
I could barely fit on, that we stopped at was also quite nice. I recommend it if you're ever
in the area, though I couldn't tell you exactly where it is as I was lost in the maze of streets
surrounding it. The cheesecake is excellent.
At this point, my internship is beginning to wind down with only another three weeks in my original department, Strategic Planning. So, until next time...
Journal Entry #3 - May 29, 2007:
Okay, so I realize it's June or later by the time you're reading this,
but the way my internship is proceeding in stages, I'm going to fill you on the seven weeks
leading up to April 30th (which was the start of Golden Week in Japan, something I'll explain
later).
So, for the period of roughly March 10-April 30th, I was in the 事業管理部 (jigyou kanri bu), aka Overseas Subsidiary Management. This is a group of roughly 12 people who are divided up into regional groups that interact with the overseas operations of JTEKT's Steering Division around the world. I was put under the oversight of a guy who dealt mainly with Latin America, courtesy of his several years in Latin America on foreign assignment. He is also one of the very, very few Japanese I know who speak a second language other than English (Spanish in his case).
So, what does "Overseas Subsidiary Management" do, you ask? Well, it's not "Manage Overseas Subsidiaries"; at least not as in directly control the operations. A better description would be more like, liaison between upper management and overseas subsidiaries, with a focus on analysis of subsidiary performance in the financial and productivity spheres. A large portion of what this department does is analyze monthly financial and productivity reports from each subsidiary, confirm the accuracy of the reported numbers, clear up vague or uncertain figures, summarize, and then synthesize the data into a big yearly report that details the general financial and productivity status of the international side of the steering business. They also perform a number of advisory and representative services within the division, often traveling to various plants and facilities, doing everything from helping a subsidiary to locate a new supplier for an outsourced part used in production, to insuring compliance to JTEKT's reporting standards on finances and productivity.
I did several things during the course of my time here. First, if you caught my mention of financial statements, think balance sheets and P/L statements (profit/loss for the uninitiated). The first thing I did was read in some detail two books on what essentially amounted to a summary of everything I learned in Dr. Jackson's Management Accounting class, except this was all in Japanese. So l learned lots of big Japanese words that correspond to things like the aforementioned balance sheet, current assets, long-term liabilities, working capital, current account ratio, retained earnings, etc., all while refreshing my memory on all the accounting concepts I learned oh so long ago. After that and communicating with my boss some, I went on an exhaustive tour of accounting ratios and figures that can be used to glean different bits of information about financial health from financial statements, with the purpose of proposing a some that would help to paint a first glance picture of the health of an individual subsidiary. I then suggested several, focusing on working capital management, that are particularly important in the manufacturing work that our company does. After this, I did a general financial analysis of the state of the overseas operations in the first quarter of this year, focusing on sales and profits. It was here that I was able to employ the hallowed Pivot Tables and Charts of Decision Analysis (another fine class, I might add) fame to slap all the figures into one big data set, and then be able to look at figures on any level from plant to region to world, with the click of a button, rather than having to continuously make new graphs every time I wanted to get a different perspective on things. During this time, I also sat in on some occasionally tense teleconferences as a translator, since while my Japanese is not perfect, it is generally better (at least on a spoken level) than the English of my coworkers.
Now, a little on small town life in Japan. I think I
talked a little bit about this in my last entry, focusing on the dorm and such. The town in
which I live is somewhat mountainous (relatively speaking, the peaks around here aren't incredibly
high, maybe jagged hills is a better term), with lots of grape farms, oddly enough, surrounding the
streets and houses and apartment buildings. Also, there are a couple of small universities in
the area, so it's not completely devoid of youth, as I originally feared. In fact, on my walk
home from the train station every afternoon, it's always amusing to see if any of the students I
pass going the other direction will work up the courage to say "hi" or "haro" (the Japanese
equivalent of 'Hello') as we pass. That particular experience doesn't happen that often, but
it certainly seems to be a sport among these perhaps slightly backwoods Japanese who aren't quite
as used to seeing a white guy as their more "cosmopolitan" countrymen in Tokyo or even Osaka proper
(in defense of 'backwoods', I consider myself to be somewhat backwoods and do not consider the term
an insult in the slightest).
Another adventure was when I decided to take up reading and went to the local library for the first time. I had to go through the process of getting a library card, and convincing the librarian that yes, I was a resident and to please let me check out books that were quite obviously Japanese when I was quite obviously not and therefore not expected to be able to read Japanese (I admit, I'm far from fluent in the reading side of things, even more so than my speaking, but if I stick to novels aimed at middle schoolers, I do okay, and learn stuff too!). They're finally getting used to me, even though I only manage about 2 books a month.
At the beginning of this entry, I mentioned Golden Week. Golden Week to Japan is like...well, nothing in particular to Westerners, but at its core, it's a weeklong holiday that runs the first full week of May. Nominally, it's four holidays, the former emperor Showa's birthday, Constitution Day, Children's Day (essentially Boy's Day, since there's a separate Girl's Day on March 3rd), and Green Day. Green Day is basically an excuse to have a long week off since it falls between two official national holidays. They justify it as a holiday because the emperor was a big fan of plants and green things and Nature...or something like that. But, for most Japanese, and fortunate foreigners who happen to be in Japan like me, it's an excuse to take a week off from work during the best part of spring. For most the week, a French colleague and I went to Tokyo (his first time). We spent one day doing what I like to call the whirlwind tour of Tokyo, seeing a number of temples and shrines (including the infamous Yasukuni Shrine, that gets the Chinese and Koreans up in arms every time it's mentioned, pictured here), a view from the Shinjuku Metropolitan Towers which lets one see pretty much all of Tokyo and then some, and finally stops in Harajuku and Shibuya, the fashion and pop-culture capitals of Tokyo (at least weird gothic fashion and club-hopping, yellow haired pop-culture, anyway). Having spent a year in Tokyo just recently, I left the sight seeing at that and spent the rest of the week visiting various friends and generally relaxing while my friend spent everyday in a different place (Odaiba, Akihabara, Ueno, etc.) trying to cram all the possible variations of Tokyo into his 5 day journey. He did a pretty good job too, by all counts.
So, anyway, that's all till July, when you can read the next installment, adventures in Cost Management!
Journal Entry #2 - May 7, 2007:
Okay, so, if you read my long-winded intro in the first entry, you have some idea of where I
came from and at least a vague idea of where I am presently. As I said, I'm in the backwoods
of Nara Prefecture in south-western Japan about 45 minutes to an hour outside of Osaka.
First, the internship itself. I've actually been on this internship for almost 7 weeks as of the time of this writing, having started back around February 20th. Let me get you up to speed.
When I first got here, I was placed in the Strategic Planning Department
of the Steering division at the Nara Plant of JTEKT. I work in an essentially Japanese-only
office where my immediate superior doesn't speak English beyond the requisite ability to introduce
himself (which is approximately what your average Japanese person is capable of saying). The
first week or so I was here, my boss took me on tours of the production lines around the plant and
the R&D center next door where I got to see some of the newest steering products JTEKT is
working on, along with room after room of testing equipment and things I probably can't
mention due to confidentiality agreements. He supplemented this with some reading materials
about the various aspects of power steering systems, which while difficult, was of immense help in
teaching me the technical vocabulary necessary to understand most of the conversations going around
me (No, we didn't study automotive vocabulary during my stint at Waseda). Once I had a grasp
of what goes on at the plant and R&D centers, he and I dialogued about what was
going to happen during the my time here. The internship is divided up into three
segments, the beginning and end spent in the Strategic Planning office, and two 6 week
segments in the middle spent in the Overseas Subsidiary Management Office and Cost Management
Department respectively.
Before I go any further, I need to note one thing. JTEKT is the result of a merger between two other companies, Koyo Seiko Co. and Toyoda Machine Works that completed their union in the beginning of 2006. Even now, the effects of the merger and the integration yet to be done are visible even now.
During the first three weeks, my boss gave me the project of writing the
rough draft of a comprehensive HR policy standard that would layout how JTEKT treats with
expatriates that come from JTEKT's overseas subsidiaries for assignments at Steering division
plants in Japan. This meant referencing the policies of the two former entities, Koyo and
Toyoda, to see how they dealt with their expatriate employees, studying JTEKT's policies on
Japanese expats going overseas, and looking at the individual programs used for dealing with
current foreigners at plants here in Japan. It also involved a lot of independent research
and thinking on my part, trying to determine all of the areas that needed to be covered so the
policy would be a complete guide for both JTEKT HR and to the sending organizations around the
world. A lot of the things we studied in Dr. Kostova's international management classes came
to bear as I was writing the standard. Over the course of the three weeks, I dialogued
with a variety of HR people from different levels of the organization, researched, wrote, re-wrote,
and then edited the proposed standard, in English, and then later moving completely to
Japanese. My boss has since submitted it to division HR for final consideration and should be
implemented some time in the next few months.
I also had a couple of smaller assignments. One was to update a market analysis document of the current state of four of JTEKT's biggest competitors with regards to one of our major product lines, updating work done by my predecessor from the year before. Another was to digest an instructional document on the different forms types of processing using in manufacturing to produce parts for machines (welding, machining, grinding, casting, etc.). It was kind of funny when I looked up the English definition of some of the terms, I got words that I had never encountered before, much less any clue what they meant (e.g. sintering).
Okay, so now, a little on life in the Japanese hinterlands. I live in a company dorm about 25 minutes by train from the plant. As is common in Japan, JTEKT has a dorm for single, male employees, generally under the age of 30. It's not unlike a typical college dorm for guys, though everyone has their own room. We have a cafeteria, hall bathrooms, smoking areas, a big communal bath room (think a big shower room at a gym, with a big hot tub and individual showerheads along the wall to clean off in before getting into the hot tub), and laundry facilities. For the most part, the Japanese guys pretty much leave me and each other alone with the exception of the couple that are in my department. Living next door to somebody is not necessarily a reason to talk to them here. The dorm is located in a town even smaller than the one where the plant is, with big, jagged hills all around and farms spread out around the train tracks. To tell you how far removed I am from civilization, there's not a single coffee shop in town. There are some nice bakeries and decent restaurants, but none of the ubiquitous Starbucks or it's many Japanese competitors in the small town hub surrounding the train station. Even without a coffee shop, the town itself is quite nice, and I enjoy being here after the endless concrete jungle of Tokyo for the past 12 months.
The Japanese spoken here is a different variety than what you hear in
Tokyo too. Even though all of Japan traditionally has spoken regional dialects, over the past
century or so, and especially since the advent of the media saturation that has spread throughout
Japan, the dialects have been slowly disappearing and lead to the standardization of
Japanese. The Japanese of Tokyo is "Standard Japanese", which is what you hear on most
television shows or the radio, and what's taught in schools, etc. Everyone here of course
understands and speaks the national dialect but Osaka and the surrounding areas (collectively
called Kansai, or Kinki) are renowned throughout Japan for refusing to bow to the pressure from
Tokyo to surrender their unique regional dialect, "Kansai-ben" as it's collectively known (there
are even differences between the different areas of Kansai, but these have faded much faster than
the more collective dialect of the region) and continue speaking it proudly today. It's been
popularized by an Osakan brand of stand-up comedy called "manzai" that is nationally known and
frequently seen on national television. Given that, pretty much anyone in Japan will
recognize Kansai-flavored Japanese the moment they hear it, with differing reactions depending on
who you talk to. You can think of it kind of like the Southern accent in America. As
part of my cultural education, I've taken it upon myself to learn this slightly different flavor of
Japanese and it never fails to amuse and bring up conversation wherever I go, given the
double-kicker of 1) a white person who can speak semi-functional (but by no means fluent or
grammatically correct) Japanese, and 2) a white person who speaks a well known, non-standard
Japanese dialect. My coworkers are endlessly amused and due their best to further the
ingraining of this new way of speaking in me, with varying degrees of success. The only worry
is, will I ever be able to turn it off and talk "normally" again if the situation calls for
it? I think so, but only time will tell.
Next time, I'll fill you in on the second department I transferred to and more on the trials and adventures of being a small town white guy in small town Japan.
Journal Entry #1 - April 7, 2007:
In the spirit of some previous journals, I'll start out with a little background on me. There’s not a lot to tell other than I’m a born and bred Southerner from Greenville, South Carolina. I’ve lived in the state my whole life. I did my undergraduate studies here as well. Then, I figured I might as well not ruin a good thing and decided on graduate school here too, hence Moore.
Fast-forward a year and I was settling into my apartment in north Tokyo
for a year of language study at Waseda University. That was incredible experience that gave
this small town boy a pretty wide perspective on things, living for a year in one of the
fastest-paced cities on earth, attending classes at the Japanese equivalent of Yale or Harvard, and
studying with students from every inhabited continent. Whether it's riding the sardine-can
they call a train to and from school everyday with the masses of suited-salary men and uniformed
high school students, soaking in the neon-lights of the everlit Tokyo night-sky, the constant
background roar of every kind of announcement telling you to "watch out for a truck turning
right" or pleading with you to "step in and try the latest variant on curry" or to "please come out
and vote for your local Communist Party representative in the upcoming election", sipping
perhaps the world's most overpriced coffee at any one of a million Starbucks with other customers
whispering around you, or just being mesmerized by a 4'11" grandpa in a yukata playing his flute on
a park bench under the sakura trees in the local park, there's nothing quite like Tokyo.
But I digress.
Which brings us to the internship. While Japanese companies don't
traditionally do internships, JTEKT does have an internship program of sorts which I was placed
into due mainly to personal connections between USC and the company. Therefore, I didn't go
through the traditional internship search that many of my classmates did, but was rather steered to
the internship I now have by professors at USC.
JTEKT is a large Japanese manufacturing company with four main product lines: steering systems, driveline products, bearings, and machine tools. For my internship, I was placed in the strategic planning and general coordination office of the steering systems division at a plant in a sleepy little town called Kashihara in Nara Prefecture, Japan, about a 45 minute train-ride from Osaka, Japan's second largest city. Steering systems pertains mainly to the power-steering systems found in cars today. JTEKT is a major supplier of power steering systems to Toyota, and numerous other automobile manufacturers.
Strategic Planning and General Coordination covers a host of activities from planning the details of how the Steering Division is going to meet the broad goals set by upper management to playing liaison between corporate HR and plant management on how to deal with incoming expats from JTEKT's overseas facilities. We have HR people, big picture strategists, translators, secretaries, market analysts, and me, among the staff here. The basic mission of the department is to facilitate communications between the head office and the division and direct the activities, both present and future, of the steering division.
This went a tad longer than I'd intended so I'll close here. Next time, I'll try and
give you an idea of the day to day of the internship and life as a foreigner in an Japanese company
in the boonies of Japan.