The lead editorial in the Nikkei today carries the headline “Response from Toyota [that] will determine trust in Japanese products.” It’s about, of course, the recent spate of accidents, attendant recalls, and public questioning of what the hell Toyota thinks it’s doing:

In the background of the quality issues are changes in the structure of the industry. In the last ten years, the globalization of automobile production and parts procurement has expanded greatly. Toyota itself has more than doubled the number of units it produces overseas, from 1.75 million in 2000 to a peak of 4.30 million in 2007. Hasn’t quality assurance been neglected in the process of this rapid expansion? Rethinking and inspections will be indispensable.

Additionally, there’s the increased level of technology. Even in the world of automobiles, which were products of mechanical engineering, the relative importance of electronic controls that employ IT (information technology) and software technology has increased recently.

The issue of recurring complaints related to brakes, which affects the Prius hybrid car that’s become Toyota’s representative line, had origins that lay in electronic control systems. It won’t do to be smug about past successes; it’s necessary to have new quality-assurance mechanisms that fit the electronic age.

The company’s capacity for crisis management has further been severely questioned. The trigger for this string of problems was a Lexus accident in which all four members of a California family were killed last summer, but Kindness itself would be hard-pressed to call Toyota’s response rapid.

While one issue smolders, the next pops up, and the situation gradually worsens. If a full stop isn’t quickly put to this negative cycle, the pulling away from Toyota by consumers will gain ground globally.

In the United States, the epicenter* for the issues, a midterm election will be held this fall, and portents that protectionism could raise its head have emerged. There’s also a possibility that a pushback against foreign manufacturers could gain in power.

Correspondingly, Toyota should respond to consumer unease and criticism of the company head-on, by swiftly adopting response policies with the CEO and other top managers at the lead. A clear and powerful message about the company’s path forward from here on must also go out to Toyota employees and shareholders.

Toyota is an enterprise that represents Japan, and the possibility cannot be discounted that its vacillating could lead to a lost of trust in the Japan brand as a whole. Additionally, there are environmental shifts common to many Japanese enterprises, such as globalization of production, and we’d like to see others also take the current situation as a lesson and channel their capabilities into quality and safety assurance.

Yes, we would, wouldn’t we? But consumer-product safety has been a thorny issue since the Japan, Inc., era, and the only reason it’s caught so many people by surprise in the West is that previous scandals have involved makers that don’t sell outside Japan (except for Bridgestone and, to a lesser extent, Mitsubishi Motors). On the one hand, the Japanese thrive on competition and are detail-oriented. On the other, the Japanese don’t have a culture of individual responsibility, and there’s a pervasive, if nearly always unspoken, belief that if no one noticed you doing it, it didn’t happen. (I believe that shame culture has many qualities that recommend it over guilt culture, but that isn’t one of them.) Hence the super-scary revelations in the ’90s and early ’00s about lax enforcement of safety procedures at nuclear facilities, hence the dumping by hospitals of indigent patients whose social insurance has run out, and hence the years that the Hidetsugu Aneha (along with others) was able to palm off bogus structural calculations for buildings that didn’t meet earthquake codes on government agencies.

It’s hard to know what the source of the problem here is. Electronics and cars are highly complex and sometimes have defects even when those who designed and manufactured them knew what they were doing and were working in good faith. But what starts with an honest mistake can end up being a dishonest cover-up when it’s handled with blame-shifting and stonewalling. Toyota is not alone among Japanese organizations in favoring blame-shifting and stonewalling as a response to accusations of bad work, and while its international reach means the organization is more sensitive to the expectations of non-Japanese audiences, it’s not surprising that it began by taking the usual approach of issuing vague statements about “unfortunate occurrences” and the like. We’ll see whether Toyota deals with the immediate problem and renames a few divisions or, if there turn out to be deep organizational problems at work, actually roots them out.

* Fellow Japanese geeks: don’t bother telling me that 震央, not 震源, means “epicenter.” I know. In English, we don’t talk about the “focus” of a crisis. Well, we do, but we mean something else by it.

Added later: An argument that the problems with quality control are more complicated than just complacency and slacking off (via Instapundit and Kausfiles):

Obviously, we need to know a lot more about the specifics of Toyota’s recent quality woes before we can establish causal links between the rise of lean product design in the 1990s and the current rash of bad news. The fact that Denso-built pedals do not appear to suffer from the same problem as CTS-supplied pedals indicates that this might be a supplier-specific problem, rather than the result of a systemic de-emphasis on quality at Toyota. Still, the Toyota practice of working closely with suppliers in the development process indicates that there’s more than enough blame to go around.

The real extent of this cost-cutting, decontenting and “design leaning” won’t be easy to quantify, but the fact that it’s been taking place since the early nineties and is only now yielding negative effects suggests that it’s been relatively well-managed. But Toyota’s reputation was built on those “fat” products of the mid-80s to early-90s, and it won’t be returning to the old practices that created them anytime soon due to their competitive disadvantages. This seems to suggest that, once damaged, Toyota is unlikely to ever recover its former quality halo.

Ann Althouse cites this piece by John B. Judis in TNR, which in turn takes the writer of this WaPo article to task for getting his facts about President Obama wrong. What I find really interesting is the way Judis catalogues the numerous reasons to believe that Obama grew up with a sense of entitlement and flitted from occupation to occupation in exactly the way shallow people obsessed with power and prestige do…then, out of nowhere, finishes like this:

Barack Obama is, by any fair measure, a great American, and he could turn out to be a great president. But he is not yet a great politician. He has not been able to transcend the political limits of his own social background. And that has been one of his problems as he attempts to extricate America from the mess he inherited.

But the limits aren’t just political; they’re experiential as well. Judis is at pains to argue that Obama “clearly was not obsessed with making money, but with performing a public service,” but he (Judis) seems to have no comprehension whatever of the degree to which a lot of actual working-class people tend to perceive “public service” positions like his (Obama’s) as out-of-touch condescension, geared less toward helping the disadvantaged to clear a path toward achieving their own goals than toward making the public servant feel good about his own magnanimity. It’s the modern version of the manor-house-ladies-visiting-food-and-moral-hectoring-on-the-cottage-dwellers routine.

Perhaps Obama did doubt that he was “accomplishing much” as a community organizer, in the sense of serving people in need. Or perhaps, like seemingly thousands of other Ivy grads each year, he decided that what he was doing wasn’t fast-track enough and, as a humanities/social-science major, that his best shot at giving himself a grad-degree boost was law school. And when I say “fast-track,” I’m not just talking about money; power, influence, and image figure into a lot of people’s calculations of self-worth as much as money does. (Judis does recognize that.) New York is chock-a-block with cutthroat lawyers who imagine they’re more moral and civic-minded than the bankers downtown—just because, as nearly as I’ve ever been able to tell, they don’t work for banks.

There are two major problems in perceiving these things clearly, I think. One is that there’s a serious class divide in America based on expectations. Obama grew up, it appears, among people who saw going to a hoity-toity college and then bossing people around for a living as the natural progression of things. Working-class people do not. (I say this as the son of a steelworker and a high-school dropout who later got a GED and a data-operations certification. My parents and their friends were optimistic and happy, but the idea of wanting to devote your working life to lording it over people would have been very foreign to them.) I’m sure Obama had times when he had to struggle—difficult exams and all that—but he was following the same path as his peers, and one that his elders were presumably easing him along. That doesn’t diminish his actual accomplishments, but I suspect it does make it pretty much impossible for him to imagine what life is like for people who have succeeded by working their way up.

The other problem is that Obama has a fundamentally performative personality, as we would have put it back when I was majoring in comparative literature. Oratory suits him. Earthy spontaneity doesn’t suit him, and it shows. Perhaps that means he’s uncomfortable in his own skin as a human being, or perhaps it means that he’s growing into himself as a politician. My sense is that, like a lot of people who’ve been able to dodge failure their entire adult lives, he’s skittish about doing anything obviously risky, and it’s that skittishness that makes him seem withdrawn. (Say what you will about W’s plummy background—by his own estimation, he’d crashed and burned as an alcoholic and sinner, and he’d gained in gravitas by pushing through that.)

I very frequently agree with Althouse, but when she says of Obama’s disconnect with the middle-class, “[I]t is a struggle to figure this out when you are getting your facts so wrong,” I think she’s a little off the point. Background matters, but sensibility matters more. I knew I was going to live in New York from the time I was a small boy. It never occurred to me in high school that I wouldn’t be applying to Ivies like my more comfortably-off friends. (I have my parents to thank for that, BTW. They would have been perfectly justified in informing me that it was my responsibility to work my way through college. Instead, they took out parent loans so I could spend four years daydreaming about Japanese literature for a Penn degree.) I go back to my hometown, and much as I love spending time with my parents and other relatives, I’m an outsider there.

In a way, it breaks my heart. We all want to feel close to our origins, and I’m far more distant from mine than the two-hour drive might suggest. In another way, though, this is the richness of America: you the individual do not have to be what others assume you were born to be. Though I won’t pretend I don’t like money, I don’t value the way I live because I make more than my father does; I value it because it suits my personality. Happily, I’m not a politician, so I don’t have to go back to Allentown and pretend unconvincingly to be sunk in and at home there. If President Obama wants to succeed more with regular folks, maybe he could stop trying to act like one of them (seriously, man—no…just, no) and be frank about being an outsider and politician. If he adopted the posture of a public servant who wanted to know their reality, and then started really listening to them tell him about it, he might realize that Washington knows too little about it to micromanage it. And then it would matter a lot less whether So-and-so at the WaPo got the chronology of his life story straight.

Added on 7 February: Thanks to Eric for the link; while I’m sorry to have gotten him worked into a froth, the post that resulted is a good one as always. There’s one statement Eric made that, while perfectly accurate, might benefit from some elaboration:

Sean sees Obama as an insecure poseur, and thinks that he should try being honest about his background.

I think one of the big problems is the labels themselves. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard Obama describe himself as explicitly “working-class,” and I don’t have the two books of his I forced myself to read (see? I’m a true child of the working class living a life of struggle!) in front of me, but I don’t remember that being the tack taken there, either. The media like to stress the “humbleness” of his beginnings, but there are plenty of anonymous solidly middle-class folks, too.

The point I was trying to make was more that Obama depicts his life as one of overcoming obstacles, and in the sense that we usually mean it when talking about a politician’s life story, I don’t think that’s really true. Obama’s not from an insider family the way, say, Harold Ford, Jr., is, but he had a lot more than his own determination and our open society helping him on the way from Punahoe to Occidental to Columbia to Harvard. His family was full of educated people who knew the system.

All of which is to say, I don’t think that President Obama is being dishonest in the sense of covering things up. I just think that his background says less, in and of itself, about how much grit and determination he needed to get where he is than the media and the rest of his claque seem to think.

Via Instapundit, this collection of headlines about the NHS in the UK. I’m not sure what they’re supposed to show about how worried we Yanks should be, though. Take this one: “Did hospital pull plug on mother to save cash?”

Please.

Everyone knows that President Obama only promised not to “pull the plug on Grandma.” Who’s worried about Mother? That old bag can fend for herself—she’s still feisty.

Frank Rich uses his NYT perch to make the complaint, common among cultural as well as political commentators, that equates “Americans are not united behind my coterie’s political wish list” with “Americans are not united in any meaningful way, and that’s dangerous.” Naturally, we need a big, strong man to show us who’s boss.

[O]ur union is not strong. It is paralyzed. Many Americans were more eagerly anticipating Steve Jobs’s address in San Francisco on Wednesday morning than the president’s that night because they have far more confidence in Apple than Washington to produce concrete change. One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward.

Well, yes, plenty of Americans would like to inflict some body blows on the legislative branch—just not everyone in the way Rich means it.

The thing is, that’s not a problem that a strong president can make go away. Disagreement, on deep-rooted principles, is part of the fabric of American society and will always have to be factored into political prescriptions. It doesn’t represent “paralysis” unless you conceive of most problems as lying in the political realm and being the business of the United States Congress. Sometimes it really is necessary for the federal government to steamroll over possible objections. (Congress has the explicit power to declare war; we don’t take a plebiscite.)

But on many issues, the option of allowing for differences among states and municipalities enables individuals to vote with their feet and make the trade-offs they prefer. Insisting that Washington legislate them, by contrast, foists the same trade-offs on everyone from on high. Well, everyone but the insiders and lobbyists who come out with most of the pork and gravy. If Americans aren’t behind the mammoth new health-care or jobs program or eager to hear the president disgorge more of his trademark orotundities about it, that may be because many of them suspect, based on precedent, that it won’t work as promised. At least Steve Jobs was going to tell them something useful. And if their representatives in congress have picked up on their mood and are spooked, so much the better.

Added after coffee: That original first sentence was unnecessarily obnoxious, so I took out the nastier parts.

Added on 3 February: When I compared Frank Rich to Chief Wiggum, I thought I sounded like a jerk (which is why I deleted that part). When Eric does it, he sounds charmingly prankish. He manages to work in a doughnut reference, too, which is always welcome.