For Ailing Japan, A Prescription Made in China
This country is discovering that a key to easing its economic travails may lie across the sea, in the giant factory floor known as China. A tailor named Koichi Nakanishi is pointing the way.
One reason economic growth in Japan has been stalled around 1% for more than a decade is that many Japanese businesses have refused to move production abroad to locations with lower overhead and labor costs.
Mr. Nakanishi also might have been content to continue producing pricey handmade suits here. But when cheap, mass-produced suits flooded into Japan from China in the early 1990s, prices collapsed throughout the business, even in his custom-tailoring shop. So he hooked up with Japanese partners who helped train and equip Chinese workers to make higher-quality garments that were still cheaper than Japan's. He sold the suits through his Only Corp. chain of retail outlets and saw sales double even as Japan's suit market declined.
Japan needs a lot more Nakanishis. A few cutting-edge companies, such as Sony Corp. and Honda Motor Co., have factories world-wide. But these large companies account for just 10% of Japanese jobs and about 17% of gross domestic product, according to a 2000 report by McKinsey & Co. The remaining 90% of jobs and 83% of GDP come from a vast B-team of companies in sectors such as food, small manufacturing, retail and construction. Approximately the same proportions apply today, McKinsey says.
Many of these B-team companies have scant inducement to move abroad. They benefit from Japan's tradition -- sustained by powerful lobbies -- of protecting inefficient domestic industries, which sometimes includes sheltering them from the competition of cheaper Chinese imports. One result of this coddling is that productivity at such companies is less than two-thirds of U.S. levels.
Besides the worry over cheaper Chinese imports, there is concern in Japan that setting up Chinese manufacturing operations might help the big neighbor overtake Japan economically. China's GDP has grown more than 7% a year for the past decade, so it would eventually surpass Japan anyway if current trends continue.
But some economists say that Japan can maintain its lead -- its economy, at about $4 trillion, is more than three times the size of China's -- if it keeps making the transition into new, more-advanced industries. They say Japan could gain from China the way the U.S. has benefited from Mexico in recent decades. Lower-cost imported products from China could allow Japan to shift workers and capital to sectors where it is more competitive, and lead to more jobs in Japan in other industries such as retail.
"Anything that we lose in manufacturing is more than offset in services," says James Kondo, author of the McKinsey report.
Food is one area where some of Japan's B-team companies have pushed into China successfully. Katokichi Co., a large producer of frozen foods, has generated steady revenue growth by building an average of one new factory a year in China since 1993. Pickle maker Bingo Tsukemono Co. started importing fresh radishes from China in 1998 and began pickling radishes there in 2000. It now imports 600,000 pickled radishes from its Chinese factories each month. The company's latest China project is salted plums. It set up a factory in China to produce these in 2001 and has been importing them into Japan since last year.
Eyeglass chain Zoff "wasn't doing much, or making much money" until it decided in 2000 to use China as a production base for frames, says Takeshi Ueno, an executive of Zoff owner Intermestic Inc. The following year it started selling for just $45 glasses that used to go for about $165. Sales doubled in 2002 and are expected to double again this year. Zoff, which is privately owned and won't disclose revenue, has 14 stores and plans to open five or six more by year's end.
The story of Mr. Nakanishi's Chinese suits began in 1989, when the giant Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co. started working with a company called Beijing Shunmei Garment Co. The big trading houses have served for over a century as go-betweens for the international dealings of Japanese companies.
During the first year of the alliance, Liu Yukai, the head of Shunmei, made a sobering visit to a Japanese client. One of the client's executives told Mr. Liu to identify the suits made by Shunmei.
"The minute I walked into the warehouse, I could tell which ones were ours," Mr. Liu recalls. "Whichever ones were wrinkled all over."
He decided to study and use Japanese management techniques. Then in 1997, Mitsui brought in yet more Japanese influence by linking up with a new Shunmei affiliate, China Beijing Fanmei Garments Co. With Fanmei, Mitsui functioned as chief customer, technical adviser and quality-control expert.
Mitsui installed specialized garment-production equipment mainly from Japan, Germany and Italy. It sent three technical experts to the Beijing factory to provide feedback on quality. Fanmei workers typically used a strip of fabric with glue to hold two pieces of fabric together before stitching a seam. This made the sewing easier, but the leftover strip of fabric with hardened glue made the jacket less comfortable. Mitsui told them to stop, so workers learned how to sew seams without a glue strip.
"We have learned from the Japanese to care about tiny details," says Zhang Yurong, who heads Fanmei's factory operations.
Minoru Harada, one of Mitsui's technical experts, pulls out two seemingly identical gray wool jackets. On one, the buttonhole in the left lapel is handmade. It is shapely and lies flat. The machine-made buttonhole on the other suit is thicker and fuzzier -- "like a caterpillar," Mr. Harada says dismissively.
On Fanmei's factory floor, hundreds of workers lean over machines or hand-sew suit parts on two production lines. Their average age is 27 and they earn about $132 a month, working 10-hour days and taking two to four days off a month. Mr. Harada says the average age at his former garment plant in Japan was about 50 and workers earned $1,700 to $2,100 a month. Japanese handmade suits cost five or six times as much as Chinese ones, Mr. Harada estimates.
In China, "the quality has reached Japanese standards, while the cost is still low," he says. "In this factory, we can do what we cannot do in Japan anymore."
One big beneficiary would be Mr. Nakanishi. Three years after opening his first tailor's shop in 1970, he began spending several months a year in Italy studying with a former Armani designer. He learned that Italians ironed a suit throughout its construction, creating better curves than on Japanese suits, which his tailors ironed after they had finished the sewing. Mr. Nakanishi passed on these techniques to his two dozen employees in Japan.
In 1976 he founded Only Corp., and as Japan's economy boomed he branched out with other clothing stores in the Kyoto area. But when Japan's bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, the suit industry unraveled with everything else. By 2000 the market had declined by half from its 1992 peak of about $6.94 billion in yen at current exchange rates.
Mr. Nakanishi had considered manufacturing in China in 1990, but the quality wasn't there yet. When he looked again in 1998 and found it was, he decided to develop retail outlets in Japan that would sell suits made in China from good-quality Italian fabric.
The stores sell handmade suits at just two prices -- about $160 and $230 -- compared with about $830 for his bespoke suits made in Japan. Mr. Nakanishi approached trading companies, including Mitsui, that would source the suits from Chinese companies such as Fanmei.
When the first Super Suits Store opened in central Tokyo in 1999, a crowd of men wearing only their underwear lined up outside. As a promotional gimmick, Only Corp. had promised a free suit to 50 people who turned up so attired.
For simplicity, Super Suits stores divide their wares into 15 sizes, according to height and build. The concept has gone over well because it makes suits "really easy to buy," says Yuzuru Kiyosu, a 50-year-old customer. "The prices are low, but the quality and fit are better than other low-priced stores." The 33 Super Suits Stores in Japan sell a combined 15,000 to 30,000 suits a month. Only Corp.'s revenue rose to $46.8 million in the year ended last Aug. 31, from about $20 million in fiscal 1999. Of the 360,000 suits Fanmei produces annually, about a quarter go to Only Corp.
Expansion in Japan is limited, though. Economists expect growth to be slow for at least another few years, and the suit market is continuing to shrink. The number of Super Suits stores is expected to increase to 50 in the next couple of years, but many of the new stores will be smaller. After four years of strong growth, Only Corp. expects revenues to creep up to only $48 million yen in its current fiscal year.
Faced with such a tough market, Only Corp. and Fanmei are beginning to see their futures diverge. Mr. Nakanishi wants to use China as a factory to expand through other routes -- in particular, the way Japan's most successful companies grew in the past: sell overseas. Only Corp. also has begun to sell made-to-order suits on the Internet and may open a Super Suits Store in Manhattan.
In Beijing, Fanmei is considering branching out, too. The Japan market is currently the destination for half of all men's suits made in China, Mr. Liu estimates. But that will change. Before last year, Japanese companies bought up all of Fanmei's production, and Mitsui was its biggest client. Now Japanese demand has dropped, and currently 15% of Fanmei's merchandise goes to the U.S. and Europe.
中国或是日本经济的一剂良药
当90年代初期，廉价、批量制作的服装开始从中国涌入日本市场的时候，仲西光一(Koichi Nakanishi)看到了他那昂贵的手工制衣面临的威胁。但他很快找到了解决方案：他与日本的合作伙伴联系，帮助中国工人培训，为他们提供设备，生产质量更高但价格仍比日本市场低的服装。他通过自己创办的Only Corp.的零售渠道来销售这些衣服。虽然日本服装市场一直处于衰退状态，但这家公司的销售额却增长了一倍。
日本需要更多的仲西光一。十多年来，日本的经济增长一直在1%左右徘徊，原因之一就是日本许多企业拒绝通过把生产迁往海外来降低成本，尽管国外许多地方支出水平更低，劳动力成本更小。
少数走在前沿的公司，比如索尼(Sony Corp., 又名: 新力公司)和本田汽车(Honda Motor Co.)，都在全球有制造工厂。但根据麦肯锡公司(McKinsey & Co.)在2000年所做的一份报告，这些大型公司提供的就业机会仅占日本的10%，贡献的国内生产总值(GDP)的比例也仅为17%。其余90%的就业机会和83%的国内生产总值都来自遍布食品、小型制造、零售和建筑等行业的广大的中小企业。麦肯锡的报告称，如今仍然差不多是这个比例。
这些中小企业大多数很少有移往国外的念头。日本保护国内孱弱工业的传统令他们受益匪浅，强大的国会游说团也支持这种传统。这样，这些企业就在政府的庇护下免受成本更低的中国进口产品的竞争。这种贸易保护的结果之一就是：这些企业的生产率不及美国同等水平企业的三分之二。
除了对廉价的中国进口产品的担心之外，日本也有人担心把制造业向中国转移可能会帮助中国在经济上赶超日本。在过去的十年中，中国的国内生产总值每年增长7%以上，因此如果这种势头持续下去，中国超越日本将是水到渠成的事。
但经济学家认为，如果日本继续向科技含量更高的新经济转型，日本可以保持自己的领先地位（日本目前的经济规模大约为4万亿美元，是中国的3倍多）。经济学家表示，日本可以从中国身上获益，就像最近几十年美国在墨西哥身上获益的方式一样。来自中国的低成本的进口产品可以让日本把劳动力和资本转向更具竞争力的行业，从而在日本的其他行业形成更多的就业机会，比如零售业。
麦肯锡报告的作者詹姆斯?孔多(James Kondo)表示，日本在制造业中的任何损失都可以从服务业中得到更多的补偿。
食品行业就是让一些二流日本公司成功地打入中国市场的行业之一。在食品行业中，冷冻食品的大型生产商加卜吉(Katokichi Co.)自从1993年以来平均每年在中国建造一座工厂，目前该公司的收入已经开始稳定增长。酱菜制造商Bingo Tsukemono Co.于1998年开始从中国进口新鲜萝卜，从2000年开始在中国腌制萝卜。如今，该公司每个月把在中国生产的60万根腌萝卜进口到日本。该公司最新在中国开展的项目是腌咸梅，从2001年开始在中国建厂生产这种产品，去年已经把产品进口到日本了。
眼镜连锁店Zoff的母公司Intermestic Inc.的管理人士上野武(Takeshi Ueno)表示，Zoff的经营并不怎么成功，直到公司在2000年决定把中国作为眼镜架的生产基地后情况才改观。Zoff翌年开始销售价格仅为45美元的眼镜，而过去其产品的价格约为165美元。2002年公司的销售额增长一倍，预计今年仍将增长一倍。Zoff是一家私人控股公司，不愿意透露其收入，它旗下有14家商店，计划到年底前再开5到6家新店。
日本的大型贸易公司一个多世纪以来一直为日本公司的国际贸易充当中间人，但现在他们率先开始挖掘中国巨大的劳动力市场。1989年，三井(Mitsui & Co.)与一家名为北京顺美服装有限公司(Beijing Shunmei Garment Co.)的企业开始合作，在双方建立联盟后的第一年，北京顺美的总经理刘玉凯(Liu Yukai)访问了一家日本客户。客户的一位管理人士让刘玉凯确认顺美生产的服装。
刘玉凯回忆说，当时他一走进仓库就能立即分辨出哪些是顺美的产品，因为那些衣服上全都是皱褶。
刘玉凯下决心学习和使用日本的管理技术。于是，1997年，他们成立了一家新的顺美子公司--北京泛美服装有限公司(China Beijing Fanmei Garments Co.)--使日本制造商进一步渗透到中国的制衣行业。泛美最大的客户三井帮助安装了专业化的制衣设备，这些设备主要进口自日本、德国和意大利。
三井向北京的工厂派遣了3位技术专家，提供质量方面的反馈。以前，泛美的工人通常在给衣服缝边之前会用一个沾满胶水的布条把两片布粘合起来，然后再缝，这样虽然缝制更容易，但胶水变硬以后会让衣服变得穿起来很不舒服。三井的专家让工人们停止这样做，并让工人学会了怎样不用涂胶水的布条而完成缝边。
泛美的业务主管张玉蓉(Zhang Yurong, 音译)表示，他们从日本人那里学会了注意一些微不足道的细节。
三井的技术专家之一原田丰(Minoru Harada)拿出了看上去完全一样的两件灰色羊毛上衣。一件衣服左侧翻领的纽扣眼是手工制作的，很好看也很平整，而另一件机器制作的纽扣眼则更粗笨，更凌乱。原田丰不满意地说，那就像毛毛虫。
在泛美工厂的车间里，上百名工人正围坐在两条生产线旁，或者在机器旁边埋头工作，或者在手工缝制。他们的平均年龄是27岁，每月大约挣132美元，每天工作10小时，每月休息2-4天。原田丰说，他原先在日本工作的那家服装厂工人的平均年龄大约是50岁，每月的工资是1700美元到2100美元。据原田丰估计，在日本一件手工制作的衣服的成本大约是中国手工制衣成本的5到6倍。
原田丰表示，在中国，手工制衣的质量已经达到了日本的标准，但成本仍然很低。在中国的这家工厂里，他们能完成在日本不能完成的目标。
仲西光一对于改进服装质量有浓厚的兴趣。在1970年开办了第一家裁缝店又过了3年后，仲西光一开始每年花几个月的时间在意大利向一位前阿玛尼(Armani)的设计师学习。他了解到，意大利人在整个衣服制作的过程中都会熨烫，衣服形成的曲线比日本的衣服更好，因为日本裁缝只是在完成缝制后才熨烫。于是，仲西光一把这项技术传授给了他在日本的数十名雇员。
在1976年，仲西光一创立了Only Corp.，随著日本经济的繁荣，他又在京都地区开办了其他服装分店。但在90年代初期日本经济泡沫破碎的时候，服装行业也未能幸免。到2000年，服装行业的市场价值较1992年顶峰时期的8,150亿日圆（按照目前的汇率相当于69.4亿美元）下降了一半。
仲西光一在1990年曾经考虑在中国制造衣服，但那时候质量还达不到要求。在1998年他重新考虑这个问题的时候，他被别人劝服而接受了一种复合型的企业模式：选用意大利的优质面料，在中国制造后拿到日本销售。 仲西光一的连锁店仅以两种不同的价格销售手工制衣--大约160美元和230美元，而在日本生产的定制服装大约售价830美元。仲西光一还与一些贸易公司建立了联系，包括三井，这能帮助他们从泛美等中国公司手里获得服装来源。
当1999年第一家Super Suits商店在日本东京中部地区开业的时候，有一群人仅仅穿著内衣站在商店外面。这是促销的一个噱头， Only Corp.曾经承诺向50名这样穿著的人免费赠送一件服装。
为了方便销售，Super Suits商店根据身高和体型把他们的产品分为15个型号。这个想法颇受欢迎，一位50岁的顾客Yuzuru Kiyosu说，这让购买衣服变得很容易。他说，这些衣服的价格很低，但质量和贴身程度比其他廉价商店的衣服要好。目前在日本有33家Super Suits商店，每月的总销售量为15,000到30,000件。截至8月31日的财政年度，Only Corp.的收入增长到55亿日圆，高于1999财政年度的24亿日圆。在泛美每年生产的36万件衣服中，大约有四分之一运往Only Corp.。
但Only Corp.在日本的拓展空间仍然有限。经济学家预计，增长缓慢的局面将至少持续几年的时间。服装市场将继续萎缩。预计Super Suits商店的数量在未来几年内将增加到50家，但大多数新商店将规模更小。在经历了4年的迅速增长后，Only Corp.预计在当前这个财政年度收入将仅增长到56亿日圆。
在如此严峻的市场状况下，Only Corp.和泛美对未来的看法产生了分歧。仲西光一希望继续把中国当作工厂，而通过其他途径来扩张，特别是效仿日本最成功的企业过去进行扩张的方法：向海外销售产品。Only Corp.也开始在互联网上销售按订单制作的服装，并且可能会在曼哈顿开设分店。
而北京的泛美也在考虑开设分店。刘玉凯估计，目前所有在中国制造的男装有一半的销售地是日本市场。但这种情况将会有所改变。在去年之前，日本企业购买了泛美的所有产品，其中三井是最大的客户。现在日本市场的需求有所下降，泛美目前有15%的产品是面向美国和欧洲市场。
刘玉凯预计从现在起3年内，美国和欧洲市场将占泛美销量的三分之一。公司也将生产供应国内市场的服装。
刘玉凯表示，日本仍将是泛美重要的市场。他们与日方的合作是长期的，战略性的。但他也表示，日本市场在今后发展的过程中存在著很多问题。
