Japan’s Consumer Warriors Fight Complacency

They are warriors in a country with more compliant consumers than consumer complaints.

Fumio Matsuda, a former auto engineer, is a stinging critic of the Japanese auto industry’s safety performance.

Katsuko Nomura, a 79-year-old grandmother, single-handedly introduced a U.S.-style consumer movement to Japan.

They are anomalies here, where social harmony is revered and consumers’ interests have been subordinated to the welfare of Japanese corporations.

But both have made their mark.

Nomura lobbied for local freedom of information laws, now enacted in 32 of Japan’s 47 prefectures (state) and about 130 cities and towns, and is working to get a national law on the books. She believes access to information about such things as chemicals in food will galvanize interest in consumers’ rights.

Matsuda operates a volunteer network of scientists and moles at Japan’s largest auto companies. His 20-year-old Japan Automobile Consumers Union has uncovered defects in cars and shifted the spotlight of responsibility onto car makers, contributing to a recent unprecedented number of recalls.

Matsuda, 63, charges that Japanese auto makers have been feeding their export success by skimping on safety in domestic models while the government sets safety standards that are often too low and fails to enforce others.

He claims that several car makers have substituted specially-built cars in crash tests of new models for the U.S. and Japanese markets. But, he adds, the models later sold to consumers probably would have failed the tests.

Matsuda uses the information he gets from scientists conducting chemical analyses of engine parts and employees at auto companies to help consumers claim damages from allegedly defective cars.

Japan has no product liability laws, and the lack of legal precedent increases the burden on consumers to prove fault by auto makers.

“I never get discouraged because I know we’re right and that our information is correct,” said Matsuda, a former engineer at the Nissan Motor Co.

He keeps secret the identities of the 25 members of what he calls his “brain” to protect their jobs and his group’s information-gathering ability. They never go to his office, and rarely call. Sometimes their wives meet to pass information.

He bristles at the suggestion that his network is spying.

“They are acting according to their consciences, and everybody is very proud of what we do.”

Spokesmen for Japan’s major auto makers deny Matsuda’s charges and say they do not think their recall records are a problem.

Bret Anderson, a Honda spokesman, said the company “deals within the industry’s regulations and standards, or tries to improve on them.”

A statement by Toyota Motor Corp. said, “Mr. Matsuda, like any other so-called advocate, owes it to the consumers he supposedly represents to be responsible. Unfortunately, his track record to date does not say much for the sincerity of his implied intentions.”

That track record includes a conviction for blackmail stemming from charges brought by a group of Japan’s largest auto makers in 1971. They accused Matsuda of threatening to publicize information about defects in their cars unless they paid him. He was sentenced to four years of probation.

Matsuda maintains he was negotiating for a group of car owners who suffered damages from defects and said he is appealing the conviction.

Although some of Japan’s major media regard Matsuda as an agitator, the national daily Asahi Shimbun has used his research as the basis for many newspaper stories, including an award-winning 1987 series on sudden acceleration in Audi imports. The Audis were recalled later in Japan and in the United States.

Matsuda lives an austere life. On week nights, he sleeps on a cot in his Tokyo office, bulging with files and littered with greasy auto parts. He sees his wife and two daughters at the family’s seaside home south of Tokyo on weekends.

He and his wife came from affluent families in which charity and compassion were taught at an early age.

Nomura recalled that when she was studying at Kyoto’s prestigious Doshisha University in 1931, “agricultural families were so poor they were selling their daughters while I was being taught how to say, ‘So nice to meet you,’ in English class.”

Sensitive to the gap between the real world and the privileged one of her birth, she ignored English, read books on Marxism and social injustice, and married a like-minded classmate.

Soon afterward she launched a 59-year career of consumer advocacy that has included organizing labor unions and bringing news of consumer movements to Japan.

“The Japanese people just don’t get mad at manufacturers,” she said. “They’re not concerned with their rights. So I get angry for them.”