Seeing Germany’s factories | Kazuo Kumabe | May, 1936

The author, Kazuo Kumabe was a classmate of Kiichiro Toyoda at Tokyo Imperial University and a researcher on car engines, who was involved with R&D for Toyota from 1936 to the early 1950s. The German influence on Toyota’s product technology and design can be traced to him.

In 1936, he was instrumental in bringing a DKW car to Japan and disassembling it. Today, the DKW brand lives on as Audi. In 1947, Kumabe we the was the chief designer of the SA, Toyota’s first post-war model, inspired by the Volkswagen Beetle several years before high-volume production actually started on the beetle. Kumabe wrote this article for the Machine and Electricity magazine (Kikai oyobi Denki, 機械及び電気) in May, 1936 as a summary of a tour of German factories in late 1935.

It’s brief and does not go into any of the details of what he learned. It does not even give the dates of this trip.

Translating the article was a challenge. The US Library of Congress provided a slightly blurry scan, in which Adobe Acrobat was able to recognize most but not all characters. In fact, enough characters were misread for Google translate to produce output that looked like bad lip reading. In addition, the Japanese script has been simplified in the past 80 years and I had to look up characters for many words that have been converted to phonetic spelling, including “Germany” and “Berlin.” The translation that follows is my best try. A professor Aoki appears in the two photographs in the article but no explanation is given as to who he was. I have broken it down into sections and added my comments for each section.

Kumabe was an engineer looking for what he could learn from German factories. Either he was apolitical or didn’t feel free to make any comments on Germany’s politics in a professional magazine. Whatever his feelings were towards the Nazi regime, we can’t tell from his report. His remarks, however, are infused with the sexism and the nationalism of the society he lived in. We can’t blame him for it. His forte was internal combustion engines and he was interested in machine tools. Both Japan and Germany were on track for the disasters that occurred a few years later but he doesn’t show that he had any inkling of it.

General economic conditions

Kazuo Kumabe: “Germany has long had manufacturing as its main industry and, as is well known, is making very good products. However, as international relations became complicated, the export of industrial products and the importation of materials became much more difficult than before, the amount of German trade is gradually declining. It seems it is getting more difficult to sell industrial products and buy raw materials and food from foreign countries.”

Prominence of manufacturing

Kazuo Kumabe: “Talking about agriculture, in early October, there was a Harvest Festival (Erntedankfest) where farmers’ enthusiastic participation inspired their national representatives. However, the northern part of Germany has poor soil and a latitude close to Sakhalin’s, so rather than using agriculture as the main economic activity, they focus on manufacturing for the future.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Kumabe’s comment about the Harvest Festival suggests his visit took place in the fall of 1935. His main point in bringing it up is that Germany’s economy is centered on manufacturing, not agriculture. Even in 1936, it was a fact you could find out without traveling half-way around the world. As pointed out in Manufacturing Today, By The Numbers, it is still true in Germany today that manufacturing accounts for more of the per capita GDP and employment than in other advanced economies.

As of 2018, harvest festivals still occur in Germany, as harmless pageantry, about as controversial as the Pasadena Rose Parade. In 1935, however, it was more sinister.

Geographical spread of factories

Kazuo Kumabe: “I saw various things when observing German industry through the eyes of a Japanese engineer. One of them is that factories are not concentrated in one place. For example, even the well-known Benz factories are spread through 45 locations.

Although you can say that not concentrating in one location is a characteristic of Germany across industries, in the industrial sector in Japan today, I find it very interesting that we are also heirs to the decentralization of rice production.

As I imagine, since, until recently Germany was divided into small states, there was a small town as a capital for each, that was a center for export and business as well as politics. With the exception of the Ruhr area for coal production, I don’t think that the main reasons for the geographical dispersion of the factories is the availability of cheap power or ore.”

Family businesses

Kazuo Kumabe: “I also noticed that factories are often named after the inventors of the machines or instruments that motivated their creation, or after their location. There are in particular plenty of factories named after an inventor or designer with a history of almost 100 years. It is profoundly meaningful that many founders’ families had retained control of the business through many twists and turns over many years.

Where factories are dispersed in special cities or industrial zones, when there is trouble as a result of having no factory and they need to reserve one for the future, they locate it where they can most easily find the land.”

A factory with greenery

Kazuo Kumabe: “There is a famous polishing machine factory called Lindner in the outskirts of Berlin. They make many products in buildings set in a huge garden with modern glass windows. In the garden there is a beautiful lawn, a flower bed, carefully tended by a specialist. This is what they think of as a factory. In order to make good precision machines, it is necessary to keep up the spirit of the workers by refreshing and resting their eyes with greenery. They made the garden for this purpose. No one ever said it was unwise.

It is truly fantastic but not possible in Tokyo or Osaka. To the extent we don’t worry about the transportation of materials inside Japan, how about thoughtfully locating the precision machinery industry amid the fields of Morioka or Aomori? Will no one take a look?”

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Lindner doesn’t make polishing machines anymore but you can buy a used one in India for Rs 11,500. According to a site on the history of Berlin’s Wittenau district the Herbert Lindner factory was designed by architects Martin Punitzer and Hans Simon  and built in 1932-33, before the Nazi era.

By the time of Kumabe’s visit, Punitzer, a Jew, was a refugee in Chile. The Lindner plant is now officially protected as a Berlin landmark and featured in the architecture museum at the Technical University. Kumabe’s picture is from the small structure in the center of the Google earth view of the plant below. Many of the other structures appear to be later additions.

To say the least, this factory has not started a trend and few factory designers have focussed on allowing workers to rest their eyes with greenery. Most shop floors are windowless and artificially lit.

Müller milling machines, Leipzig

Kazuo Kumabe: “There is a small factory that makes Müller milling machines in Leipzig, a city famous for its publishing business and trade fair. While it is tiny, the owner, Mr. Müller, seemed an intrepid German who, after giving us a friendly tour of the factory, beckoned a tall girl wearing a pale, dirty overall in the corner of the office and said “Unfortunately, I do not have a male heir.” While it is truly regrettable, he can still leave the work to his descendants as this girl works wonders with a lathe or a drill.

Her hands looked like a man’s, which did not impress me with the factory’s equipment. I thought it was great that she would not stay away from the work. Somehow, when compared with Japanese, this daughter’s German spirit is relaxed while her hands are being pummeled by the factory’s equipment.”

Drafting offices

Kazuo Kumabe: “As far as I could see, the drafting office looks very different from Japan. The drawing board is freely adjustable and the drafters work sitting. The Japanese drafters are all young. People over 50 think that there is no such thing as drawing a garden over reading glasses.

In other countries’ drafting rooms, the perception is that, while old men draw slowly, you can get good results when they work in a team with young people, as they more or less complement each other.

It is hard to say whether, in Japan, it is a matter of technology alone. People who can stamp papers or use an abacus are cheap. Is it better to build an industry with craftsmen or with engineers who start and end with technology. I think that society should respect the many years of technical experience and allow engineers and craftsmen to contribute in their later years.”