Business Week, April 7, 1973, interview with Katsuji Kawamata, president of Nissan Mo

[GrandPrixGreen]

Kawamata stated that he "regretted that his company did not imprint its corporate name on cars"

Ultimately, in 1981 the decision was made to stop using the brand name Datsun worldwide, in order to strengthen the company name Nissan.

Ultimately :bulb: a costly rebranding was necessary..

I am very interested in this story - believe there is someone (hopefully here on this forum) who could give us some insight.

Datsun Heritage is strong - am I wrong? How strong? Are you willing to talk about the American Datsun Dream and rankled Nissan executives.

I do believe this was a hot topic in the US already with the success of the very first Z-car

[Mike B]

Why don't you post a scan of the article instead of just one quote. It might help to get a better understanding of the context.

-Mike

[Carl Beck]

Hello GrandPrixGreen:

Mr. Kawamata and I had at least one thing in common in 1973 - we both smoked "Kent Cigarettes".

I believe that Mr. Kawamata's remarks were honestly made. I think that when he was looking back though the eyes of a Banker, all he could see was the additional expense of supporting the advertising expense of maintaining two Brand Identities.

On top of that however is Kawamata's reportedly huge ego. He was reportedly upset that people in the US didn't treat him like the President of GM, FORD or Chrysler, nor recognize his importance to the same extent as the President of Toyota.

After all that effort to bring everything under a single Brand Name - - one has to wonder why Nissan would launch the "Infiniti Brand" to stand alone from the Nissan Brand. Or we have to wonder when they will change that Brand Name back to Nissan?

[GrandPrixGreen]

Why don't you post a scan of the article instead of just one quote. It might help to get a better understanding of the context.

-Mike

Sorry I dont´t have this article. But would like to get a better understanding of the context.

My idea is that this quote and the "later" Nissan/Datsun "re-branding" could be communicated and understood by people interested in Nissan/Datsun if we look in the rearview mirror. Check the Compass - I do read between the lines in retrospective (minding the understatement of japanese nature), and get a feeling of a great conflict of business and characters.

[GrandPrixGreen]

A Word on the Inauguration of "COMPASS" by Masataka Okuma Managing Director

§"Customer-Oriented Marketing Planning and Strategy System"

Some quotes:

"We can not really expect expansion to continue at present rate for much longer. A second factor is the adverse influence of the current instability in the international monetary situation.

This gathering storm finds Nissan Motor Co. in a position of strength"

"Our share of Japan´s total automotive production jumped from 26.9% last year to 30.3% this year"

"Another area we have singled out for improvement is management itself. When sales volume was small, we could make do with less sophisticated management methods, relying mainly on human insight."

"The next horizon - From the marketing standpoint, the 1970´s promise to be a decade of considerable confusion"

"Against this background, Nissan´s marketing policies will focus on the building of a "brand-name" that has the complete confidence of society and the building of dynamic management system capable of coping with the needs of this critical decade. To realize these objectives will entail the evolution of a completely new marketing strategy"

The Approach to Scientific Marketing:

From "One-man show" to Team effort

[Mike B]

Carl,

Have you seen this brochure before - "The Company Behind the Car"? It was published in 8/71 and seems aimed at US customers to give them some background on both Nissan Motor Co Ltd and Nissan Motor Corp USA.

-Mike

[HS30-H]

On top of that however is Kawamata's reportedly huge ego. He was reportedly upset that people in the US didn't treat him like the President of GM, FORD or Chrysler, nor recognize his importance to the same extent as the President of Toyota.

It's a bit rich to accuse Kawamata of having a "huge ego" and not mention the fairly large size of Yutaka Katayama's. And if you want to snipe at Kawamata's 'eyes of a Banker', it would be just as fair to point at Katayama's 'eyes of an advertising man'.

Kawamata had grounds to accuse characters like Katayama of failing to salute the rank rather than the man. If Katayama had been a soldier he would have been put on a charge of insubordination. Why shouldn't Kawamata have been treated with the respect due to a man of his position?

You won't find many people that are fans of Kawamata, but when all is said and done he was the company president. Katayama seemed to be running NMC USA as though he was a King Arthur in his own personal Camelot, and it should be no surprise that this ruffled feathers back in Japan. The view from Ginza was that he was getting a bit too big for his boots. They had a point. The mess that came out of all this still reverberates today.

After all that effort to bring everything under a single Brand Name - - one has to wonder why Nissan would launch the "Infiniti Brand" to stand alone from the Nissan Brand. Or we have to wonder when they will change that Brand Name back to Nissan?

I think that the situation with 'Infiniti' is quite different than that with 'Datsun' and 'Nissan'. In export markets, Nissan found itself in the curious position where many of their customers believed - erroneously - that 'Datsun' was responsible for designing, engineering and manufacturing the cars. If Nissan want 'Infiniti' to be regarded - even erroneously - as being responsible for design, engineering and manufacturing, then it is part of the marketing plan for that marque. So 'Infiniti' in this respect is the opposite of 'Datsun' for Nissan.

Alan T.

Edited October 21, 2009 by HS30-H
typo

[HS30-H]

Have you seen this brochure before - "The Company Behind the Car"?

Mike,

I really enjoyed the short period when you were using part of that brochure as your avatar. Thanks for posting images of the brochure here.

I guess the very fact that this brochure was published at all shows that there was some kind of 'issue' that needed to be addressed. What do you think?

Alan T.

[Walter Moore]

Mike,

I really enjoyed the short period when you were using part of that brochure as your avatar. Thanks for posting images of the brochure here.

I guess the very fact that this brochure was published at all shows that there was some kind of 'issue' that needed to be addressed. What do you think?

Alan T.

I think that the issue was only a perception within Nissan. I am willing to bet that for most of the past 30 years most Americans wouldn't have been able to correctly name the six different "makes" of cars and trucks that were built by General Motors. (Who never used the actual company name on anything except trucks, sort of... Today the trucks are just GMC, no name, just initials.)

I guess Daimler sells trucks by that name in Europe, but they have never renamed the Mercedes Benz cars to the company name. (At least not in this market.)

Oh, and Nissan has never been as large, either in global market share or total capitalization as Toyota, so why should their president be treated the same way?

[Carl Beck]

..... I do read between the lines in retrospective (minding the understatement of japanese nature), and get a feeling of a great conflict of business and characters.

Hello GrandPrixGreen:

If you haven't already done so - I would highly recommend that you buy a copy of "THE RECKONING" by David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Mr. Halberstam walks you though both Ford Motor Company and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd post WW-II; and gives you an insight into the people who ran the companies, their strategies and inside corporate politics. The book is out of print now - but you can order a used copy from Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Reckoning-David-Halberstam/dp/B000LBFPTE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256053481&sr=1-1

From Halberstam's "THE RECKONING"

Writing about how Kawamata came to be assigned to Nissan in 1947 and a little about the character of the man:

"The Banker was a 42 year old man named Katsuji Kawamata, and he knew nothing about cars, not even, it was said, how to drive one. He knew even less about production and manufacturing. But he knew about money; he was a man of the bank."

and

"Kawamata, the banker from IBJ {Industrial Bank of Japan} was an immensely ambitious man, but few of his contemporaries at the IBJ had perceived the full measure of that ambition. On the surface he had not seemed that driven. By the standards of Tokyo's bankers, some of whom were exceedingly sophisticated and polished, men who either were from the upper class or were imitating it, he was a bit primitive - almost, it sometimes seemed, deliberately so. He had appeared a little too rough, too blunt, for a successful career at the bank and in 1947 he had been shunted off to Nissan, so urgently in need of financial help. The news of his transfer had not pleased Kawamata either. He was somewhat angered by the rebuff implicit in his being moved around. Indeed there were old colleagues of Kawamata's who thought that he had been somewhat lazy at the IBJ, and that it was only when the bank scorned him and placed him outside that he became ambitious, af if to prove that the IBJ had been wrong.

Immediately after the war, fresh out of the army, Kawamata had returned to the bank as assistant manager in the loans department in Tokyo. He was resentful and irascible, his attention rarely focused. Like so many Japanese at the time, he was overwhelmed by a personal defeat as well. The Japan he had been a part of had failed completely; lost in that collapse were all his hopes. He was not sure how much point there was to postwar life. ("Not just the cities but the hearts of the people have been burned out"; Edwin Reischauer wrote of that period). At the office he tried all day to edge nearer a small electric stove, with an old army overcoat over his head as a kind of cape to keep him warm. Some superiors urged him to work harder, but he did as little as he could."

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David Halberstam writes of Katayama:

"Katayama's privileged childhood had made him different than other Japanese. For one thing it had given him a desire for a higher level of independence. For another it had made him an absolute car nut. He had grown up with classic cars in his family. His Father had owned two very sporty cars, an Erskine and a Star Durant. In the post war years when everyone else was preoccupied with finding a place to live and something to eat, Katayama was obsessed with finding a vintage car to drive and a place where the roads were not so bad that they would destroy it. He organized the first post war auto sports club in Japan. Its members were Japanese with found memories of other days and a handful of American Officers; their cars were a few treasured MG's and some prewar roadsters lovingly reconstructed. It was his love of cars that had brought him to Nissan. His fellow workers saw Nissan as a big company likely to expand. Katayama chose Nissan because it was about cars, and he was about cars, and he not only wanted to build them, he wanted to drive them. At one point in the early 50's, frustrated with the politics of Nissan, he tried to start his own company. He and a friend tried to design their own car, an ultralight car for people in a poor country where gas was expensive. The Flying Feather, Katayama named it. They built a prototype in the second story of a Tokyo office building, then found they could not get the car out the door. Finally it was taken out though the window. He was, he decided an insufficiently practical man to run his own company.

That did not diminish his love of cars. When he was not working at Nissan, he was out driving a car as fast as he could. In a nation filled with laws and restrictions and inhibitions, racing around in a sports car was to him the highest form of personal expression. Years later when he became the Head of Nissan on the the American West Coast and purchased a house at Palos Verdes, California, he continued to speed. It was said of Katayama that he had more speeding tickets than anyone else in town. At first he passed himself off to the local traffic cops as a simple Japanese Businessman who knew no English, but the cops soon caught on. One of them would chase after him, catch up with his car, and say, "Good morning how are you today, Mr. Katayama. And by the way here is your ticket. By the end of his tour he had a chauffeur, since if he had gotten another ticket he would have lost his license." - - - end quotes - - - -

I believe it would be very hard for anyone outside of America, that did not have a "Katayama" in charge of Nissan's Operations in their countries - to fully comprehend just how good his Leadership and Management Skills were, nor just how great it was to be a Datsun Dealer, Datsun Customer or Datsun Enthusiast during his stewardship of Nissan Motors USA.

With Katayama at the head of the organization, Datsun along with its Dealers, Customers and Enthusiasts went from being the underdog in the market, to being Top Dog, both in sales and on the competition tracks of America. That success was worked for, and fully shared by, everyone involved. I guess that is the basis for the Datsun Heritage in America. I suppose that is to a very great extent, is also why so many of us resented the fact that Nissan Motor Co. Ltd was so set on its destruction.

FWIW,

Carl B.

Edited October 21, 2009 by Carl Beck

[HS30-H]

I think that the issue was only a perception within Nissan.

Walter, you're confusing me. With respect, exactly who do you think should have decided what was best for Nissan if not, er, Nissan themselves? This is a large, multinational business concern we are talking about here.

Do you think that - somehow - they were not in a position to plan their own strategies? I can't see how you and I, or anybody else on the 'outside' would have the right to any say in the matter.

Oh, and Nissan has never been as large, either in global market share or total capitalization as Toyota, so why should their president be treated the same way?

Nissan's size as a company - especially when you are comparing it to Toyota - depends on what parts of it you take into account. For much of its history, Nissan has been much more diversified than Toyota. In the period we are talking about here, the sum total of Nissan's operations were much larger than that of Toyota.

So how exactly would you qualify your belief that Katsuji Kawamata should not have been treated with the same amount of respect as the president of Toyota? Can it be refined down to percentages? Would you give him only 70% of the respect that you'd give to Toyota's president, or maybe only 50%? How exactly would you express this? I don't see it.

If I had been in a situation where I was introduced to Kawamata, I'd like to think I'd be just as respectful to him as I would if I had been introduced to Fukio Nakagawa or Eiji Toyoda of Toyota. I'd primarily be respecting the rank, rather than the man. That rank represented and signfied all the people working within the organisation that it headed, so - for me at least - that's good enough reason to be respectful.

If you don't think that Kawamata deserved the same respect as other company presidents, then I wonder how much respect you think Yutaka Katayama should have commanded in the same period? More than the president of the company he was employed by, or less.......?

Alan T.

[HS30-H]

Kawamata = Bad Guy' date=' Katayama = Good Guy[/quote']

That's basically what it comes down to with Halberstam, isn't it? Able to look into the souls of those he had never met.

J.K. Galbraith wrote that "Modern industrial success derives not from individuals, but from organisation - from bureaucracy. It is the quality of this that must be assessed." On the kind of scale we are talking about here, it's no longer about individuals.

Halberstam all but assassinates Kawamata and all but deifies Katayama, but it isn't - and never was - all about them as men. All this good guy / bad guy stuff is great for plotlines in B movies, but it doesn't go anywhere near to telling us the full behind-the-scenes story. If anyone really thinks that Kawamata was making big decisions all on his own like some 1930s dictator, then they need their head examined.

I believe it would be very hard for anyone outside of America, that did not have a "Katayama" in charge of Nissan's Operations in their countries - to fully comprehend just how good his Leadership and Management Skills were, nor just how great it was to be a Datsun Dealer, Datsun Customer or Datsun Enthusiast during his stewardship of Nissan Motors USA.

With Katayama at the head of the organization, Datsun along with its Dealers, Customers and Enthusiasts went from being the underdog in the market, to being Top Dog, both in sales and on the competition tracks of America. That success was worked for, and fully shared by, everyone involved. I guess that is the basis for the Datsun Heritage in America. I suppose that is to a very great extent, is also why so many of us resented the fact that Nissan Motor Co. Ltd was so set on its destruction.

Carl, whilst I can relate to the emotional investment you - and people like you - had in the 'Datsun' brand, I also think you were kidding yourselves. Somehow it seems that you were all but brainwashed into thinking that 'Datsun' was an entity quite separate from Nissan Motor Co.

Of course, it wasn't. The way you speak about Yutaka Katayama ( yes, a great man ) is symptomatic of the problem that Nissan faced. One would think that Katayama was the architect of everything involved in creating the successes that you feel you were a part of. It's almost as though the huge organisation back in Japan - planning and building plants and facilities, designing, engineering and building the products to sell, as well as the logistics of transporting and selling them - was all down to Katayama. It demotes the huge organisation that was supplying the product Katayama was selling - and the very many souls involved - to some faceless factory staffed by "bankers".

The fact is that Katayama, just as much as his oft-acknowledged skills and inspiration, was lucky. Lucky to have been in the position he was in during a golden age that we will probably never see the like of again. Just a little earlier, or a little later, and his very task would have been completely different, let alone his level of success. The success with which he was associated was unsustainable, and yet people are quite ready to attribute Datsun / Nissan's subsequent troubles to Katayama's absence, and blame that absence on some story of 'revenge'. The truth is actually a lot more complicated than that, and it's certainly not all about egos and bloodletting like some Shakespearean drama.

Alan T.