"Made in Japan" has been plagued by fraud scandals in recent years. Is Nissan still okay?

Recently, Takata Corporation of Japan, which has attracted widespread attention due to the hidden dangers of its airbags, was exposed for tampering with test data, becoming another Japanese manufacturing fraud scandal after Mitsubishi and other Japanese automakers tampered with fuel efficiency data.

Whether it is the automobile industry, which is a pillar industry in Japan, the home appliance industry that once led the world, or the power industries such as construction and steel that boost the country's economic development, Japan's manufacturing sector has frequently encountered various violations, fraud scandals or defects in recent years.

Airbag field

Takata recall continues to expand

As of now, the number of cars recalled worldwide due to Takata airbags has reached an all-time high, and the scope of impact is the widest.

The incident originated in 2008. Honda Motor of Japan was the first automaker to recall vehicles equipped with Takata airbags. The number of vehicles recalled in the first round was only about 4,000. Just half a year after the recall, an 18-year-old American girl died in an accident because the metal fragments burst out after the airbag was deployed and slashed her carotid artery, which attracted global attention. Since then, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the United States has received similar reports. In response, Honda

It announced that the recall would be expanded to more than 500,000 vehicles, marking the beginning of the automobile recall incident.

Takata is the largest airbag manufacturer in Japan, with almost all Japanese automakers as its customers. In addition, it supplies airbags to international brands such as GM and BMW through its branch in Germany, and Takata's airbag market share in the world is as high as 20%. This has also led to the continued fermentation of car recalls worldwide caused by Takata's defective airbags, with the recall markets including Japan, North America, Europe and China, and the scale of the recall is also expanding.

Falsifying data to get ideal reports

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that by 2019, Takata will recall nearly 70 million defective airbags in the U.S. market, which is the largest and most complex automobile safety recall in U.S. history.

On July 19, the third-party "Joint Investigation Team on Problem Airbags" released the results of an investigation showing that Takata airbags had data manipulation and tampering problems during testing. In the quality monitoring phase, Takata engineers

Some test data were intentionally removed to obtain an "ideal" test report.

Japanese automakers such as Toyota and Honda cannot abandon Takata in the short term due to technical issues, but many European and American brands have already switched to other brands of airbags. Under heavy pressure, Takata suffered huge losses. According to the financial report, Takata's net loss in the 2015 fiscal year ending in March this year reached 13.1 billion yen (about 120 million US dollars), which is the third time the company has suffered losses in the past four fiscal years.

Home appliances

Toshiba's poor performance was compensated by fraud

After three presidents, eight years of financial fraud - this is not what a brand with 140 years of history would do. But in fact, this is exactly the shocking scandal that Japan's Toshiba Group brought to the global manufacturing industry in 2015.

The Japanese home appliance industry, along with other industries such as the automobile industry, once led the Japanese economy out of post-war decline and became one of the world's economic powers. However, with the rise of home appliance manufacturing industries in countries and regions such as China and South Korea, Japanese home appliance companies have been losing market share in the world and their performance has been declining. Coupled with problems such as their own investment or wrong development path choices, it is becoming increasingly difficult for Japanese home appliance companies to maintain their former pride.

In July last year, an independent third-party investigation committee released a report stating that as of March 2014,

In the past five years, Toshiba has falsely reported profits of 151.8 billion yen (about 1.43 billion U.S. dollars). Affected by the financial fraud scandal, Toshiba's net loss in fiscal 2014 was as high as 37.8 billion yen (about 360 million U.S. dollars).

However, Toshiba is not the only Japanese home appliance company to have major financial fraud. Four years before the Toshiba incident, Olympus, a Japanese manufacturer of medical equipment and digital cameras, also suffered a financial fraud scandal. The company announced at the end of 2011 that it had been covering up investment losses totaling $1.3 billion over the previous 20 years by falsifying accounts.

Taking Toshiba as an example, some experts pointed out that its board of supervisors has been "internalized", making it difficult to perform its audit and supervision functions, and the excessive concentration of power can easily lead to individual control of the company.

Automotive

Mitsubishi Suzuki cheats on fuel efficiency

Fuel efficiency is a major selling point for Japanese cars. However, in recent months, Mitsubishi, Suzuki and other Japanese automakers have been accused of falsifying fuel efficiency data.

On April 20, Mitsubishi Motors President Tetsuro Aikawa held a press conference and admitted that there were irregularities in the fuel efficiency tests of four light vehicles in order to beautify the emission levels, involving more than 600,000 vehicles.

According to media reports, in order to achieve higher fuel efficiency, Mitsubishi is suspected of cheating when setting tire load values ​​to obtain relevant fuel efficiency certification. If cars with illegal operations are subject to formal testing, fuel consumption is expected to increase by 5% to 10% compared to current levels.

On May 18, Suzuki Motor, Japan's second largest light vehicle manufacturer, also admitted that its domestic sales

Fuel efficiency data of 16 models were falsified, involving a total of more than 2.1 million vehicles.

As early as 2000 and 2004, Mitsubishi was exposed twice for concealing vehicle defect records and customer complaints. For decades, Mitsubishi did not report automobile safety hazards to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of Japan, resulting in many casualties. However, Mitsubishi did not learn its lesson and has been hit by scandals again and again, and is now on the verge of bankruptcy.

Analysts believe that the low fuel consumption and low price strategy has intensified competition in Japan's light vehicle market, forcing many automobile companies to take risks on fuel efficiency data and testing methods, which eventually turned into a battle for market share that ignored consumers. This is the fundamental reason for the above-mentioned data falsification scandal.

Other fields

Scandals broke out in many leading companies

In June this year, Kobe Steel, Japan's third-largest steel company, announced that its subsidiary Kobe Steel Stainless Steel Wire Co., Ltd. had tampered with the tensile strength test data of stainless steel wire for more than nine years in order to reduce the number of defective products, and shipped unqualified products as qualified products.

In 2008, this large Japanese steel company was also involved in a violation scandal because one of its subsidiaries failed to conduct relevant tests required by Japanese industrial standards before shipping steel.

Not only that, the Japanese construction industry also broke out the biggest scandal in recent years last year. In October 2015, an apartment building in Tsuzuki District, Yokohama City, sold by Japan's Mitsui Fudosan Group, tilted. After investigation, it was found that at least 8 of the piles supporting the building were not driven deep enough into the stable stratum. As a downstream contractor of the project, responsible for driving the piles,

Asahi Kasei Building Materials Co., Ltd., a leading Japanese construction company, cut corners during construction and even tampered with data such as the amount of concrete used for fixed piles and the strength of the site before construction.

Asahi Kasei is a well-known company in the Japanese construction industry. It has participated in the construction of apartment buildings, commercial buildings, hospitals and other buildings all over Japan. After the scandal was exposed, even its president Maeda Tomihiro did not dare to guarantee that there was no data fraud in other projects, which shows that there are huge loopholes in the supervision of Japan's real estate industry. The exposure of the scandal also collapsed the myth of Japan's construction industry.

The collective decline of Japan's manufacturing industry reflects the embarrassment of the Japanese manufacturing industry in its current transition period and its helplessness in trying to "rise again". In the cracks, the once glorious Japanese brands are eager to achieve success or cover up their declining performance, which is the root cause of the continuous scandals in the Japanese manufacturing industry in recent years.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.