Taking Toyoda’s side

Watching on TV the Toyota "prince" CEO crying in front of the Toyota dealers, I felt like witnessing something very Japanese.
In the western countries, showing tears is considered as a sign of weakness. Leaders should be cool, collected, relaxed enough to say a joke or two even when s/he is grilled over. S/he should never get emotional.
However in Japan it is not always regarded as the evidence of wimpiness but sometimes a proof of a warmhearted leader who can relate to the weak.
Here we can see a cultural difference, which does not stop here. The US automakers have been sticking to the idea "cars will break anyway", which made them develop quick and across-the-board repair service systems, with less focus on the reliability of their cars. The US government adapted to the cars-break-anyway policy and adopted rather strict "recall" law. On the other hand, Japanese makers have held the policy not to allow any cars to break, minimizing the failure probability by introducing severest quality control in the world, which brought about the legendary reputation about reliability. To Japanese car makers "recall" is nothing but a stigma. The Japanese government, knowing this situation, trusted the automakers and enforced a rather loose law that demands the makers to recall only the cars that have intrinsic and dangerous defects. How to cope with other defects such as a rotten muffler or faulty power windows is all up to the makers without necessarily reporting to the government. So far so good within Japan although there was Mitsubishi Motors issue in the past for which the company got more than enough share of social sanction then.
When you look at the Toyota recall issue in the US, you can see that two of the three problems; sticky floor mat and braking characteristics would not have constituted recall cases in Japan. Only the gas pedal problem might have deserved recall, the cause of which turned out to be the use of a part made by an American auto-parts maker CTS (the floor mat problem is caused by the out-of-standard floor mat used by dealers, for that matter.) Of course Toyota is responsible for not really realizing the American culture and the recall system, and using the faulty American made parts. At any rate you can say the problem somewhat stems from the difference in the way they treat recall and, in a broader sense, the cultural gap.
However, this may not be the real cause of the problem. American 3 major car makers are suffering. The US government decided to spend huge amount of money to help GM recover. Car manufacturing is one of the major industries in the US which supports several million people. To the workers in the industry, Toyota is not so much a rival as an enemy. It's not surprising if they took advantage of the minor problems of Toyota cars and blew them up into a scandalous and serious problem. Some politicians are quick enough to exploit the "buy American" sentiment to get their face on the television. The public hearing with the Toyota CEO assumed an atmosphere of a witch-hunt.
In all the adverse wind, I think Toyota's strategy was not bad at all. He assumed the total responsibilities of leading Toyota astray. He did not create excuses for the incidents that had happened and can never be undone, he did not redirect the blame elsewhere, he promised to do their best to the owners of the recalled cars that bear his family name and most important of all, he was not there to beg for help. It was a sheer contrast to every other corporate executives who sat there in the past year, who fabricated excuses for their failures justifying the ludicrously high bonus they had received for the failure, and while begging the government to put people's hard-earned tax dollars into aid.
Incidentally it was also good the prince did not speak English. Though he studied in Hawaii at a college preparatory school, later studied business administration at Babson college in the US to get MBA, and served as vice president of NUMMI; the joint company between Toyota North America and GM, his English is far from the level to convey his thought without giving any misunderstanding, to impress the TV audience across the US, and to win the debate with the battle-harden politicians, as far as I heard him speak English. He represents the Japanese in this respect, too.