Enter Diawa. Early Japanese Success Formula: Copy and Make it Better

I recall watching a movie at an Air Force base near Bethel, Alaska in the early sixites. I was not but about eight years old and I feel sure the movie was old by the time I saw it. I think it was a Jerry Lewis movie, but only inretrospect. I did not know who Jerry Lewis was then. We lived in an isolated part of the world and got no media--except old movies such as these. It was not that long after WWII and the old war sentiments left over from that very tragic era still showed a not of American animous toward Japan.

As I remember it now, there in black and white, likely a low-budget movie to begin with, this comedian, maybe Jerry Lewis, was protraying a Japanese saxaphonist as a buck-toothed idiot. His friend or nemesis--I don't recall the plot or much else-- threw the guy's saxaphone aside and broke it. The Japanese sax player spoke through his goofy fake buck-teeth appliance, with a heavy fake wannabe Japanese accent.

"Why you broke my saxaphone ?"

The friend or nemesis replied, speaking of the guy's broken saxaphone.

"Made in Japan. No good!"

The base theatre crowd, made up mostly of GI's unfortunate to have been shipped to an Air Force Base in the wilds of Alaska's West Coast and a handful of us kids from yet another, though much smaller government base for the FAA six miles closer to the village, cackled at the lousy personification of the Jap (as we freely called people from Japan). Our FAA bunch was volunteer exiles; Dad loved the hunting and fishing.We loved it too. Alaska is, was, most kid's dream come true--at least back then.

You see the glaring similarities of the Diawa design on the right to the Abu Garcia 170.

My point is that for a long time, this was my unfortunate impression of Japanese products. No good. I make no apologies for Americans for this. Japan's imperialistic government and military did an unforgivable and egregious thing by attacking Pearl Harbor and drawing the United States into the war in the Pacific. It does not matter that this may have been inevitable, it was a cowardly chicken poop thing to do. No amount of historical revision nor backward-looking analysis can ever justify Japan's aggression. Not even the US dropping the bomb can set things right. American's had understandable hatred toward the Japanese during this time. However the impression of such characterizations as was common in the movie I saw was not correct.

Johnson had several models from which the Diawa borrowed features. The styling and color of the bell is not just accidentally similar to this Johnson model that was popular during the same time that the Diawa first emerged fully styled like Johnson and Abu Garcia models.

The Johnson Commander 150 also served as a model from which Diawa borrowed styling features.

Owing greatly to the governing and nation-building skills of General Douglas MacArthur and a vast amount of American wealth poured into rebuilding Japan, Japanese industrial might was set on track toward world domination that their armies had not attained in war. For a decade and a half following WWII Japanese entrepreneurs endowed with various production incentives from the full coffers of the United States government as well as from private business interests produced silly toys and useless products from wherever discards they could obtain. This junk was exported to the Untied States where a growing number of baby-boomer kids were buying it up with their sudden post-war plenty.

I recall tearing up a poorly made little toy car and discovering the underside of the tin labeled with the mostly red Prince Albert tobacco can that had been used to make the car. My brother had to explain the significance to me. So was it true? Made in Japan, no good! Maybe for a while. Somewhere around that time, something changed. It was not noticed much at first. It had begun with a few popular consumer items such as cameras. Several Japanese companies had long excelled at optics and making lenses and camera prior to the war that were less expensive than the Germans and the Americans who had previously dominated the market.

The Johnson 80 was a so-called side-winder style spin-cast reel that preceded the Johnson Century. One of the features that is evident in the Johnson Model 80 is an early version of the star-type drag that is most often associated with the early Abu Garcia spin-cast reels. Clearly, Johnson used this type of drag before any other spin-cast reel manufacturer did. They merely did not use it on the first Johnson Century 100 style models until later.

These cameras and an increasing array of other products made in Japan were often blatant copies of other successful designs developed in the West. They were virtual replicas. I suppose International laws did not recognize patents held by the original companies. Or maybe there were just too many violations to contest. The quality of these products was not nearly as good as were the legitimate products that served as patterns for them--but they were good enough. Good enough to do the job for undiscerning Americans who had increasingly expendable incomes, but to whom the better quality products carefully made in the West were not required.

The term over-engineered was coined to describe those products that were engineered well enough to last forever as opposed to a mere decade or so. The market for the really good products dwindled while the market for the good enough products increased exponentially. While American automobile makers were building bigger and more-powerful gas guzzling monsters that we so loved to indulge our voracious appetites for excess--an American by the name of Deming took his intelligent mass-production methods to Japan. He had presented them to the car makers in Detroit, but they had scoffed at his methods. Detroit was having way too much fun making huge and inefficient muscle cars to satisfy the abundance of dollars they and other organized American labor was increasingly demanded for their increasingly slipshod factory work. It seemed that the gold vein would never end.

Meanwhile, using Deming's new factory methods embraced by Japanese manufactures, the quality of their copies got better, while the prices remained reasonable. These better products were suddenly found everywhere the American consumers turned. Faced with good or sometimes better products than could be had as made by Western Companies for less money, the choice was easy. Japan, prepared and set on a success track by American post-war rebuilding dollars and superior manufacturing methods proposed by an American manufacturing genius, was copying successful Western designs helter-skelter. Same old formula as was used with cameras; determine the most successful Western product designs, figure out more efficient and less expensive ways to make them, pay less for labor, and make them in vast numbers.

Deming was an assistant to General Douglas MacArthur during the reconstruction after WWII. W. Edward Deming taught a quality control in manufacturing production methods that was rejected by American manufacturers due to the culture at the time, mostly because post WWII found the world clamoring for American products--no matter what. This was unfortunate to the overall welfare of American manufacturing in the long run. Statistical methods used in quality control were common and in demand prior to and immediately after the war, but they fell by the wayside as being not so importatant for a few decades in the West after the war.

Japanese manufacturers, because of the timing of Deming's methods, meshed nicely with Japanese culture of the time right after the war and during Japan's reconstruction. This apprently fated chain of events forever changed history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

http://www.leanexpertise.com/TPMONLINE/articles_on_total_productive_maintenance/management/deming14steps.htm

A little bit of profit for a whole bunch of widgets, still winds up being a whole bunch of profit, or at least plenty enuff to satisfy someone somewhere. This time it was Japan. later it would be India, or Bangladesh, or Hong Kong, or China. But Japan had arrived jus tin time to copy the best American and Swedish made fishing reels. The new spin-cast fishing reel designs had not long been invented. Johnson, Abu Garcia, Mitchell, ZEBCO, Shakespeare and several other Western companies were suddenly faced with new competitors from Japan. T

here were quite a few nameless upstarts that didn't make much of an impact on market-share. American fishermen liked their new Johnson spin-cast reels. They were simple and made of quality materials. But then a new Japanese brand of fishing reel or two began making viable new spin-cast reels that suspiciously resembled all the best features of the Western fishing Reels. These reels were solid too.

More than one Japanese company made copies of the Johnson Century reel. This Jorgensen Cub reel was made in Japan. It looks almost exactly like the Johnson Century 100, but the metal is much lighter and cheaper. When put to the test, the reel simply does not work as well as does the Johnson Century. This is a perfect example of the formula that many post WWII Japnanese companies used in their manufacturing efforts early-on.

A trade name was sometimes selected that did not have a Japanese sounding identity in order to conceal the fact that such products were made in Japan. The Japanese camera company Kwonon was Americanized as Cannon. Even Diawa initially used the name Diawa of California, although it is apparent that the Diawa company had great aspirations from the onset.

Unlike the Jorgensen Cub reel, Diawa reels were always of excellent quality. Consequently, these vintage Diawa reels perform very well even after decades--just as do the Johnson and Abu Garcia reels. This became the later model for Japanese manufacturing--to copy the best designs, but make them as good or better than the originals. This evolution in Japanese manufacturing is evident in progressively better copies of many Western products. Eventually, Diawa emerged as the clear winner and survivor of the reel wars--as they are still around as a company.

Yoshio Matsui was a Japanese engineer and designer who invented a spinning reel in Japan in 1955. He took pride in his designs and workmanship. This was the beginning of Diawa Fishing Tackle Company. Diawa expanded quickly and reached markets in Europe and in the United States. I am not sure when Diawa first mearketed a spin-cast reel in the United States, but the earliest examples that I have seen appear to be good copies of the best Western fishing reels. The first Diawa model that I ever owned was a used Diawa 9600. It looks a lot like an Abu Garcia Abumatic 170 from an earlier vintage. It also has many design features that appear to be intentionally styled like popular Johnson spin-cast reels of the era.

I acquired this Diawa Gold-Cast 120 spin-cast reel several years ago, but it is older that that. I bought it used. Current Diawa models are just like it or very similar. I consider these and the Diawa Silver-Cast models to be among the best spin-cast reels ever made. I do not think they are as durable as the best vintage sixties and seventies vintage Johnson and Abu Garcia spin-cast reels, nor even the vintage Diawa spin-cast reels such as the black Model 9600 pictured with the reels above, but they cast well and reel smoothly. I have long considered Diawa open-faced spinning reels to be among the best. Diawa also makes excellent bait-cast reels, although I have never owned one.

Points of interest in the design of this reel is that it employs many of the features invented by the original Johnson Reel Company. The drag is located on top precisely where the original Johnson Century 100 drag was located and actually works much like the drag on the Century did.

Even though Johnson had experimented with the star-drag located on the crank as seen on their earlier model 80 above, that became a standard among some later Johnson reels and as often found on early Abumatic and other popular spin-cast reels of the same era--they chose to use a drag design found on the top of the reel, likely because they favored the simplest and most direct design. As it turned out, the Johnson 100 drag was not the strongest point of the reel design and subsequently underwent several improvements.

The picture below shows an interestingly similar design of the feature Johnson marketed as Accu-cast. It first appeared on the Johnson Commander Model 150 and the Guide models 155, 160, and 170 models as well as other Johnson reels of the same approximate vintage. This feature was intended to neutralize the competitive advantage of bait-cast reels with their open spools that were sometimes perceived to be more accurate because of the casters ability to thumb the spool to a stop.

In practice, the whole bait-cast spool-thumbing notion was greatly exaggerated, in my opinion. Being accurate with a bait-casting reel requires both the ability to judge distances accurately and the ability to apply the correct amount of thumb pressure to the spinning spool to stop it on target. Furthermore, accurately adjusting a bait-casting reel for a given lure weight requires a higher degree of user skill. This said, I don't believe that the accu-cast feature shown here, or those pioneered by Johnson back in the day, were so great either. I am actually surprised to see this feature is still being added to spin-cast reels. The one place that this feature may be useful is when casting a very heavy weight such as live bait and a bell-sinker. If I am missing something about the utility of this feature, I hope someone will enlighten me.

If a lure is not of sufficient weight, pressing the line-release button the second time will just stop the lure abruptly rather than gradually slowing it. Virtually any spin-cast reel will do this without the concave inside spool nut, as will simply grabbing the line and squeezing it against the rod with the non-casting hand--which is what I am more prone to do in the case of a lure over-traveling toward a tree branch or overhand.

My thought has always been that the Accu-cast feature was mostly an effort to counter fluff marketing arguments that were exaggerated by competing bait-cast reel makers in an effort to attract the burgeoning professional bass fisherman of the same vintage as was the advent of this feature. Regardless, Diawa did a great job of borrowing designs from other companies and making work as good or better than the originals. The testimony of their effectiveness at this is that Diawa survive to this day while the originals do not.

It was common for Japanese manufacturers of consumer products sold to Western markets to conceal their Japanese names because of the unfavorable connotations with Japan, especially in the USA. This changed over time. Today, it is common to use blatantly Japanese names and words for their reel models such as Samurai.

Daiwa does not sound very Western. But Diawa of California mediated Diawa's marketing efforts within the United States during the sixties and seventies. I am not sure when the first quality Diawa fishing reels came to market. I did not buy one then. I did not need one because my Johnson and Abu Garcia reels would last a lifetime. But someone was buying Diawa spin-cast reels. I don't know which model number came first. I have seen model 9300's and 9600's that I speculate came to market around the late sixties. These reels were made mostly of metal--even at a time when some American reels were turning to less-expensive plastics. The quality control folks responsible for making these Japanese Diawa fishing reels were sticking to their guns. They were not skimping on anything. These Diawa spin-cast reels were finely-crafted instruments.

Diawa reels performed as well or better than any reels then being made by Western fishing reel manufacturers. Diawa would become a leading manufacturer of fishing reels before they were done. In fact, Diawa is still not done. Their methods may have changed some by now, but Diawa fishing reels and other products are among the best reels made today. I have to say that Diawa's spin-cast reels made during the Golden Age of Spin-cast Reels, such as the model 9600, are still among the best ever made.

New Diawa spin-cast reels are relatively expensive, as one might expect for quality fishing gear.

I have several Diawa spin-cast reels beginning with a vintage black model 9600. They are all essentially that same original copy. Whether or not this oxymoron works, the Diawa reels did and still do work very well. If for some reason I had to recommend a brand new spinning reel for someone to purchase it would probably be one of these. I haven't looked at one of these new in a while. I have heard that they are quite pricey. Why buy one of these new tough when you can buy a vintage model for a few bucks? Maybe immediate availability would be a reason. Okay--it would be a Diawa in such an event.

Diawa is now said to be the largest fishing reel manufacturer in the world.

Sianara.