Quality of Japanese Products

Mr. Toyoda of Toyota Motors had a hard time in US Congress to talk about faults in Toyota cars. I don't know all the problems, but grasped the case of brakes in Prius from Web information.

I think that the faulty design in this case can happen very easily. It must be stopped by the quality assuarance tests. But the trouble can occur only when ABS has worked. ABS works only in a rare occasion. A professional test driver will involuntarily compensate insufficient braking effect by pushing the brake pedal harder, and will feel no problem. A layman driver will only very rarely experience ABS. It is therefore understandable that the fault was not detected until a large number of cars were shipped and used by layman drivers.

During our cruises, my Canon Zoom Lens broke. A fellow passenger also had his Canon camera broken. I don't know yet what has happened in my lens, but probably an inner screw dropped off because of faulty workmanship. Since it is not necessarily a mass-produced lens, it must be assembled by hand by a worker outside Japan. It can happen.

I can understand the troubles above can easily happen. But the high-quality of Japanese products must be accomplished only by overcoming those difficulties.

トヨタ車の品質が問われています。全部を洞察した訳ではありませんが、Priusのブレーキの件は充分理解したつもりで、問題が起こっても仕方ないかなという技術者としての同情もあります。

私のCanon Zoom Lensが壊れてしまいました。多分日本以外で組み立てた時のネジの締め具合だと思います。

どちらも仕方ない気もしますが、そういう困難を乗り越えてこその日本製品の高品質のはずです。

On travelling in Latin America, I was impressed by advanced cultures in Central and South America. I learned when I was a highschool boy that the Central and South America cultures began in 13th or 14th century. It is now known that they date back to the era 10 thousand years ago and roughly correspond to how the culture in Japan evolved over the millenniums.

It was surprising to me that there were letters at latest by 850 AD and that "zero" was invented there independently from India by the same time. Inca Empire built up very rapidly in the 15th century just as Oda Nobudaga in Japan did around the same time, but lasted only for a century, as Spaniards invaded.

It was also impressive how their cultures had been lost on Spanish invasion, in contrast to what happened in Austraria, India, Africa etc. In Peru, almost everybody is mulatto, the mixed blood. This level of change has not happened elsewhere.

I pondered what caused these differences. Maybe that the centuries of invasion were different, that invaders were different, and that populations of the native people were different. But I think that culture levels were not one of the causes.

中南米の文化が意外に昔から進んでいて、中国文化の影響を受けた日本と比べて遜色がないことを知りました。しかしスペイン人の侵攻ですっかり文化が滅び、混血が進んだことは他国と比べて特徴的です。

New Faithful Notebook

I was pondering and pondering whether to buy a new notebook as I discribed on this page two months ago. Finally I purchased one after all. It was Dynabook SS RX2, the most expensive but the lightest with a Silicon disk and the highest capability notebook with Windows 7. Needless to say, I am now very much satisfied.

Before being satisfied, however, I had trouble with the keyboard. During input from the keyboard, the cursor jumped to seemingly arbitrary locations. I thought it was caused by chattering of the keyboard and thought of requesting replacement.

Then I found that parts of my palms were touching the touch pad while typing, and that the pad was interpreting it as patting. After killing patting function, the strange cursor movement stopped occurring. Windows 7 is not as slow as Windows Vista. I am now satisfied.

迷いに迷った挙句、遂にDynabook SS RX2を買ってしまいました。高かったけど高機能で軽くて良いですよ。半導体Diskが本能的に心配で、すぐ磁気DiskにBackupしましたが。