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Courage and Change: The Life of Kiichiro Toyoda. By Kazuo Wada and Tsunehiko Yui, translated by Edmund R. Skrzypczak. Tokyo: Toyota Motor Corporation, 2002. xiii + 330 pp. Photographs, illustrations, appendix, notes. Cloth. ISBN: 4-990-10301-7.
The Toyota Motor Corporation authorized this thoroughly researched and well-written biography of its founder, Kiichiro Toyoda (1894-1952). The authors are both eminent Japanese business historians. Tsunehiko Yui wrote the first two chapters, which focus on the inventive genius Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1930), the father of both Kiichiro Toyoda and Japan's power-loom industry. The next six chapters and the epilogue, written by Kazuo Wada, explore Kiichiro Toyoda's long and difficult struggle to advance the power-loom business and then, in the 19305 and 1940s, to create and develop the Toyota automobile industry. The work's title, Courage and Change, captures the authors' overarching thesis: Toyoda recognized that the nascent automobile industry represented an extraordinary domestic business opportunity, and though he was aware of the immense challenges inherent in starting up an automobile company in Japan in the 19305, he threw himself into the enterprise. While Yui and Wada write in measured tones throughout, they demonstrate that Kiichiro Toyoda's success, like that of American founding auto giants Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler, is the stuff of legends.
Kiichiro Toyoda was, perhaps, more like an Alfred Sloan than a Henry Ford or a Walter Chrysler. While Sakichi Toyoda was a selftaught inventor who made the extraordinary leap from rural village life to industrial leadership (shades of Henry Ford), his son, after some family debate, was raised to take a place in a rapidly modernizing and industrializing Japan. Kiichiro's path was by no means an easy one. His mother left his...