Word: mazda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scene was not Detroit or any other American factory town. Instead, the unlikely site of Daniel's work and play was Hofu (pop. 120,000), a city 56 miles southwest of Hiroshima in Japan. Daniel, along with 47 other Americans who work for the U.S. subsidiary of Mazda, the third largest Japanese automaker, was finishing up a four-week stint at the firm's Hofu assembly plant. Their goal: to learn how to build cars the Japanese way. Said Daniel, a Michigan native whose father and grandfather worked for General Motors: "I'm the first member of my family...
...Mazda will be bringing hundreds of American workers, most of them supervisors, to Hofu in preparation for next September's opening of its first U.S. factory, an assembly plant in Flat Rock, Mich. Much like the fictional Assan Motors in the recent Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho, Mazda bought a closed-down factory from Ford, which owns 25% of the Japanese company, and is building a new $450 million facility on the site. It is Mazda's largest single investment ever, and the Japanese are sparing no effort to ensure the factory's success...
...Hiroshima has long been bulldozed away, the dead cremated, the air blown clean. Today on streets over which the Bomb's cloud rose like a red-purple flower are coffeehouses where Mozart is played, gilded hotels with blazing chandeliers, COKE IS IT signs and the headquarters of the Mazda corporation. Everything faces forward, except that the name of the city can never be mentioned without invoking a past to which everyone is attached, and an immediate private silence. Hiroshima survives in the mind, which broods, denies, forgets and eventually must deal with what...
...union's leadership recognized, however, that GM needed something like the proposed contract to compete against a host of Japanese invaders. In addition to Nissan's Tennessee factory, a Honda auto plant is already operating in Marysville, Ohio. Mazda intends to build a factory in Michigan by 1987, and last week Toyota announced that it too would set up a U.S. plant within three years...
...such, the pair have only to jump on the Internet or call a local number to reserve one of several vehicles parked in their neighborhood. They can choose between a Honda, a Lexus, a minivan for carting equipment or, for a jaunty weekend outing, a silver Mazda Miata. They can enter the car any time of night or day with a security-coded electronic card, get charged by the hour thanks to an in-car transmitter, and receive the bill at the end of the month. "We're ecstatic," says...