The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Robots in Japan

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ROBERT MacNEIL [voice-over]: It is Monday morning at a factory in Kobe, Japan. Workers do their exercises and so do their robot colleagues. We are witnessing the dawn of a new industrial age.

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MacNEIL: Good evening. When General Motors decided to get into the robot business this year, it turned to a Japanese company, Fujitsu Fanuc, Ltc., as a partner. Other American industrial giants such as IBM and GE have also been seeking out robot technology from Japan. The industrial robot is an American invention, but its use has been pioneered by the Japanese. Two-thirds of all the world's robots are at work in Japan. Tonight, through Japanese eyes, we're going to show you how the Japanese look at their robot revolution. Japan is a country that faces a shortage of some 800,000 skilled workers.Many companies, particularly smaller ones, have a hard time finding blue-collar workers. So, in contrast to the United States and Europe, where workers fear losing their jobs to robots, Japanese workers, at least so far, have welcomed the robots into the factory. Since the robots do the unpleasant and dangerous work, they often lead to an upgrading of factory jobs. The assembly-line worker becomes a supervisor of a team of robots. A Japanese psychologist offers another reason for such easy acceptance of robots, with roots in Buddhist values. "We give them names," he says, "We respond to them not as machines, but as close to human beings." This documentary look at robots in Japan was produced and narrated by a leading Japanese broadcasting company, NHK.

NARRATOR [voice-over]: A total of 211 robots are in operation at this factory in Hiroshima, which is one of the largest automobile factories in Japan. The factory turns out 1,200,000 automobiles ayear, one every 30 seconds. The welding position is never out by more than half a millimeter. Here, 30 robots work together to weld 425 spots in a mere 26 seconds. Seven years ago this factory employed 37,000 workers. Today there are just 27,000. Despite reducing the work force by 10,000, the factory has increased its output by half a million cars a year.

Some people in foreign countries blame robots as the culprits in causing trade friction, claiming robots are manufacturing automobiles in Japan.

MARGARET THATCHER, British Prime Minister: Japan has nearly 6,000 robots but only 2.4% unemployment. Germany has 1,250 robots and 4% unemployment. Sweden has 1,200 robots and 2.5% unemployment. We have only 370 robots, and I don't need to tell you what the level of unemployment is here. Is the message clear? If we want the jobs, we have to be in the latest technology and the very latest applications. I'm told, and indeed I've seen, that the Japanese workers complain to their management if their companies don't automate. They realize that if you don't keep up you close down. They realize that robots create wealth, not redundancies.

NARRATOR [voice-over]: The British Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher, the Iron Lady, uses every opportunity to insist upon the adoption of robots, pointing to Japan as an example.

Monday morning at an oil-pressure machinery factory in the city of Kobe. After each weekend the week begins with exercise for both the workers and the robots. This exercise is important for the robots to warm up, too. Who would ever have imagined machines and human beings taking exercise together? An entirely new age in which human beings and robots co-exist has been launched in Japanese factories.

Mr. Noboru Iwasaki is 31. He has been with the company for 12 years, half of which have been spent with robots working alongside human workers as colleagues. Apparently simple work like carrying lumps of iron, each weighing as much as 20 kilograms, used to be very tiring for men. In this stage of the manufacture of processing component parts, a robot effortlessly allots work to six machine tools as it moves back and forth over a distance of 15 meters. In the old days, eight men were assigned to the same work. Mr. Iwasaki's job has undergone a complete change since robots joined the work force. What he does now consists of teaching the robots how to execute their assignments while he himself carries out the finishing processes. Meanwhile, three of his former colleagues have been transferred to other sections. Mr. Iwasaki and his colleagues work in two shifts of eight hours each, while the robots work for 16 hours a day without rest. The robots are now Mr. Iwasaki's faithful subordinates.

Japan's high-class robots are world leaders.We have brought some of the latest models into the studio.We will take a look at the robots in the studio using a TV camera mounted on the end of a robot. A small robot for carrying materials to the processing machines: it costs about $16,000. A welding robot: it costs some $45,000. This is a robot used for assembly work; it is not yet on the market. Carrying things accurately to a specified place, that is the robot's basic function. This one cost about $27,000. The drift in loation is only about half a millimeter. This amazing precision has been made possible by combining the high-performance motor for driving the robot with a microcomputer. The motor's thrust, under the perfect control of the computer, is transmitted to the high-precision mechanism resulting in accuracy to within a millimeter.

Here, engine parts are being tempered. Working exposed to a temperature of 50 degrees Centigrade is really punishing. When robots take over this work their contribution is immense. It takes as much as five year's training and practice for a worker to become a skilled arc welder, but a robot becomes a skilled welder with just two hours of instruction. It's estimated that Japan needs as many as 30,000 additional skilled welders. In particular, small and medium enterprises unable to recruit enough workers are bent on adopting robots capable of arc welding.

This is an assembly robot, the type that is expected to become the most important sort of robot in the near future. It was developed with the object of copying the human arm; its size, form and movements are made as close to those of human beings as possible. So far it has been functioning as a right arm, but it becomes a left arm when it is reversed at the shoulder. Two of these robots can do the same work as the two arms of a person.

There are more than 76,700 robots in Japan today. Of this total, nearly a half are used in automobile factories. The definition of a robot in various countries is not uniform. Even when only top-quality robots are taken into account, Japan far surpasses other countries in the number it uses. From top to bottom, the chart shows the USA, West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan. Why was it that only Japanese factories started adopting robots on such a scale? In 1980, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry began to take positive measures to spread robots more widely. Industrial circles named it the first robot year, but industrial circles in Japan had a deed interest in robots even before then. Let's get a robot to play a videocassette showing the record of the development of robots.

VIDEO NARRATOR [voice-over]: The prototype industrial robot was developed in America in 1959. Eight years later, in November of 1967, Japan's first industrial robot arrived from America. That was just 15 years ago. At that time newspapers reported, "A robot capable of manufacturing cars has been imported from America at a cost of $66,000." Car firms struggling under a chronic shortage of labor in the midst of high economic growth wasted no time in applying for robots to be imported. One of the men who made the world's first robot, Mr. Joseph Engelberger, came to Japan after failing to sell robots in Europe and America.

[interview] Japan has become the world's leading user of industrial robots. How did this come about?

JOSEPH ENGELBERGER, robot pioneer: Well, the reason behind Japan having such success starts right at the beginning of robotics. When we had our first products in the United States going, I was invited to Japan to speak, and at the very first meeting there were 600 people came to the first meeting. This was when it was very hard in the United States to get people interested. That was the beginning. And then the interest built very fast, and the concept was accepted by Japanese executives much faster than by U.S. or European executives.

REPORTER: Is it because of the differences in management styles?

Mr. ENGELBERGER: Unquestionably that is a prime factor. Many times in the United States people say, "Well, the robots are not being used very fast because of labor," and I say no, the big problem is management.

NARRATOR [voice-over]: In a mountain village at the foot of the Abukuma Range in Fukushima Prefecture to the northeast of Tokyo is a factory where radio and cassette tape recorder parts are coated. It employs 22 workers. In 1980, a coating robot was acquired on lease. The factory owner, who was amazed at its high efficiency, decided to use a second robot in June, 1981. Before, it took 10 workers a day to coat 10,000 radio cases, but now that the robots are in full operation, it takes just three men to do the same job. The company president urges his men to get the most out of the robots, as though they were trying to drive the boss. So he nicknamed the two robots after himself and his wife. Mr. Saito says, "I have been using it for only six months, but looking at the robot at rest when I finish work and leave the factory, I feel like telling it that I really appreciate its work. The robot works hard as long as you clean it and wipe the oil off it at the end of each day." Mrs. Kanno says, "We were, of course, interested, since we wondered how it would work -- the question of personnel costs inevitably comes up in accounting, and we felt that the robot would work obediently without any complaints." President Kanno says, "Well, a robot will work in silence, you see. Then there's the stabilization of quality. We won't get many orders unless we supply good products at low cost."

The factory of one of the world's leading semiconductor makers is located in the suburbs of Komoro in the Gana Prefecture in central Japan. Despite the large size of the factory, there aren't many people arriving at work around 8 o'clock in the morning, and most of them are young men. It started out in 1967 as a transistor factory. In those days the electronics industry was spreading through the provinces in search of women workers. At this factory, too, as many as 900 transistor assembly girls were employed around 1970 when production was at its peak. The main work here today is the assembly of integrated circuits or IC. In this room, one worker keeps watch over eight assembly machines. Work continues around the clock in three shifts. This is a fully automated IC assembly machine. It's the first time it's ever been seen on television. It is an astonishing robot capable of finishing in only 30 minutes a process that a human worker used to take two days to complete. IC bonding consists of stretching 16 gold threads over an IC which is two millimeters square. The robot's ability to do such elaborate work at so great a speed is indeed far beyond the bounds of human capability. One robot can bond 1,300 pieces in an hour.

An unattended factory using the new production system came into being in December of 1980, near Lake Yaminaka at the foot of Mount Fuji. The eyes of the industrial circles of the whole world are now intently focused on this factory, which is regarded as an experimental project paving the way to a new industrial revolution. A factory where robots are making robots has at last made its debut in Japan. This news spread like wildfire all over the world. This spacious factory has a floor space of 20,000 square meters. It would normally require 500 workers; however, only 100 workers are on duty during the day. This factory is scheduled to produce 50 robots and 200 machine tools a month -- an output valued at $6.8 million. All shapes and sizes of material are used for processing into the bodies of robots, bodies of machines and so forth. These materials are automatically conveyed to a computer-controlled machine tool known as a machining center. This machine is equipped with 60 different tools, which automatically change under command of the computer, shaving steel and boring holes. No human hand whatever is required in this process. A total of 29 computer-controlled machine tools are used in this factory. The computer can even handle the processing of things of different shapes; moreover, error is limited to a fiftieth of a millimeter. When each stage of the job is completed, the tools are automatically exchanged to prepare the machine for the next stage.

President of Fujitsu Fanuc, Inaba, says, "We built this plant in the hope of achieving an unmanned machine factory. I'd only give it about 65 marks out of 100 at present. In short, it would barely get a passing mark. This is because intelligent robots needed for the assembly process have not yet been perfected. We expect to perfect intelligent robots capable of simple machine parts assembly in five years. And then, in another five-year period, we plan to perfect intelligent robots capable of undertaking the complex assembly of machine parts. So I think I'll see my dream of perfectly unmanned factories come true eventually in the 1990s."

Nighttime operation is unattended except for a single watchman, and the productivity of this factory is amazingly high: output per worker each year reportedly tops $450,000 in value. In the deserted factory in the middle of night, massive lumps of iron weighing 500 kilograms are automatically taken out of storage, and, having been loaded on an automatic carrier vehicle, they are taken to the correct machine tools for processing. The whole work process, right down to the boring of a single screw hole, is minutely controlled by the computer. The whole factory forms a gigantic integrated installation. In the dark of night the robots tirelessly continue to work.

MacNEIL: That documentary was produced by NHK, Japan. There are signs that the honeymoon may be ending. A recent poll by a Japanese business magazine revealed that 97% of in-house unions and 79% of management think that robotization will lead to increased unemployment. An official of Japan's metalworkers union says, "I can feel a silent uneasiness growing among workers." That's all for tonight. We will be back on Monday night. I'm Robert MacNeil. Good night.