Anon,

My first job at age 15 was at a Honda motorcycle dealer. I had a work permit, and spent long hours in the shop after school as a mechanic's apprentice scraping gaskets and cleaning parts.

One day, something strange happened. Parked inside the shop were three of the very first tiny aircooled two cylinder Honda Z600 and AN600 coupes and sedans. Just sitting there, unannounced, unloaded off the convoy truck that morning.

These were the very first (for the US market) Honda automobiles, arriving just in time before the Arab oil embargo, which created huge lines and gas rationing in the early seventies.

People clamored over to buy these new cars which got over 40 mpg, while most of the American manufacturers were still building these huge, wallowing highway absurdities that barely mustered 10 mpg.

I got sent to American Honda for training on the first Civics, and then the Accords, and had an opportunity to go to Japan after receiving a service citation to see first hand this Japanese corporate culture you mentioned.

Company dormotories and housing. Day care for the employee's kids, Morning exercises and regular work breaks. Clean, spacious, and bright factories with plants placed near all of the workstations to break up the otherwise stark rows of machine tools and assembly lines.

Employees were regularly reassigned different tasks to lessen the monotony of the repetitive work, and to learn other aspects of the vehicle's manufacture.

Everyone wore the same uniform, from company head to assembly technician.

High morale, almost zero-percent non-attendance, and a skilled, well paid and efficient workforce building a precision, reliable product in huge numbers. Quite an achievement.

This is the model that US automakers and many others in the manufacturing sector are using to build better products now.

But we've been quite busy outsourcing that.

The Germans, Japanese, and Koreans have invested billions of dollars in new US manufacturing plants which have created jobs for hundreds of thousands of Americans in places around the country where there's very little else for them to do.

Jobs for factory workers, all the way down to the lot attendants washing cars at the dealerships.

I know this because that Honda motorcycle dealership had a job for me 35 years ago.