COMMENTARY : ‘GUNG HO’ ROLLS OUT THE DISTORTIONS

An American auto worker, trying to meet a unreasonable speed-up of the assembly line imposed by his Japanese managers, mangles his hands in a set of grinding gears. His fellow workers rush about, desperately looking for a Japanese manager to shut down the line.

This scene from “Gung Ho,” Ron Howard’s new comedy about the Japanese stewardship of an American auto plant, suggests a systemically cruel indifference of the Japanese managers toward their American charges. In fact, all of the Japanese auto plants in this country give their workers the right and the ability to shut down the assembly line--something unheard of in most American auto factories.

It’s the kind of inaccuracy and distortion that plagues “Gung Ho.” Comedies don’t necessarily need to be precise; they usually benefit from exaggerations of the truth. But “Gung Ho” squeezes laughs from contemporary Japanese stereotypes as wildly inaccurate as those buck-toothed Zero pilots from our World War II propaganda films.

“Gung Ho” tells about a Japanese company (the illustrious Assan Motors) trying to resurrect a shuttered plant in dirt-poor Hadleyville, Penn. The story revolves around the conflict between Assan’s managers--portrayed as rigid samurai disciplinarians--and the anarchic American blue-collar workers who refuse to march in lock step to the company tune.

This could have been a rich cross-cultural satire. But it’s based on a faulty premise: that the Japanese are successful because their workers toil like drones in tatami sweatshops, and their managers act like Imperial Army drill sergeants. In one early scene, for instance, an executive in training (Gedde Watanabe) pays for a series of mistakes with a slap in the face and a karate chop to the gut delivered by one of the company’s fierce trainers.

Unfortunately, this skewed vision may account for the film’s popularity with American audiences. It is apparently comforting for many Americans to believe that Japanese industrial might is based on Oriental obedience and a kind of corporate militarism that offends our democratic values.

The truth would have revealed a more disturbing--and potentially more comic--reality: the real-life Japanese plants in this country succeed--not because they terrorize their workers--but because they treat these workers better than their former American employers.

In “Gung Ho,” workers bristle at the discipline of the new regime; in real life, Americans respond quite effectively to Japanese management.

Douglas Fraser, president emeritus of the United Auto Workers Union, has called the transformation in the Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif., since GM’s stewardship “spectacular.” Among the reasons: quality circles (employee involvement groups that solve production problems), job flexibility and superior inventory control.

A typical “Gung Ho” distortion has Assan’s stern taskmaster Saito alienating veteran auto worker George Wendt by issuing rigid commands on the one correct way to apply rust-proofing paint. Though some Japanese managers can be fanatical about work procedures, the real Japanese system is based on the idea of listening to production ideas coming up from the shop floor. This “bottom-up management” runs counter to the dominant “top-down” strain of American managerial culture. In most American companies, managers do the thinking and workers do what they are told.

In “Gung Ho,” Assan’s imported plant manager is under constant pressure from his Tokyo office to produce instant profits. In fact, most business observers credit the success of the Japanese with their willingness--aided by the structure of their banking laws--to sacrifice quick profits in favor of long-range growth. From “In Search of Excellence” to “The Zero Sum Solution,” it is the general consensus that America’s obsession with next quarter’s bottom line is causing us to lose our economic competition with Japan. (Fraser again: “The main headquarters of Toyota in Japan says that the Fremont plant has five years to make a profit. Now can anybody imagine an American company taking the same approach?”)

Not all of “Gung Ho” is so ill-observed. The most telling sequence--and one of the funniest--is a baseball game between the Japanese managers and their American blue-collar employes. The Americans swing for the fences every time, while the Japanese lay down perfectly executed bunts in front of a portly third baseman.

These different approaches can be dove-tailed into their traditional approaches to car making. Detroit’s philosophy--as exemplified by Ford’s huge River Rouge works, where coal went in one end and cars came out the other--was to “get the metal out the door.” The idea was to go for the long ball--quantity. If the team struck out a lot--that is, if they had defect rates as high as 10%--they could always put more runs across the plate later.

The Japanese prefer to bunt their way through the production line by emphasizing quality. Before turning up the speed of the line, they dissect all the operational flaws. Contrary to the brutal taskmasters in “Gung Ho,” who flog their managers-in-training for every mistake, real-life managers believe that “a defect is a treasure,” because it allows them a chance to study production problems. The result: Japanese defect rates far lower than ours.

The “Gung Ho” satire works at its best when it lampoons the true dark side of Japan’s economic miracle. The cultural arrogance of Assan’s managers, the subservience of their wives, and the clubby group baths of the Japanese executives in the local Pennsylvania river all carry the sting of exaggerated truth. When Watanabe rails against his blind obedience to his boss and the workaholism that is destroying his family life, he touches on the very human cost of the Japanese system: corporate conformity that forces too many people to sacrifice too much of their humanity for the good of their companies.

The moral of “Gung Ho”--and it’s not a bad one--is that Americans need to recapture their old work ethic and the Japanese need to spend less time slaving on the assembly line and more time enjoying themselves.

A real-life irony is that the Japanese government fully supports “Gung Ho’s” final conclusion: to stem Japan’s rising trade surplus with the United States, the Japanese government is considering draconian measures to force its citizens to stop working so hard, to spend more money and to take longer vacations.

Now that’s funny.