One Heroine out of Toyota
There was one young female office worker in the home office of Toyota Motors in Aichi Prefecture.
It was immediately after WWII. Though Toyota was in a kind of boom during WWII, it lost many business connections and chances since the Empire of Japan lost the war against the US.
So, she was not so much thrilled in her work, though she was assigned to a job to copy various reports, letters, documents, etc. As there were no modern copying machines at the time, she had to make a fair copy of every sheet in handwriting using carbon paper.
While doing this carbon copy work, she was drawn to contents of those papers. At the time the labor union was fiercely fighting the corporate management. Japan was in recession, so that the company wanted to fire redundant workers. On the other hand, workers without much to do in workshops were indulged in endless discussions and meetings to build a strategy for negotiations for a wage increase.
She enjoyed vivid exchanges of words between the management and the union recorded in minute books. And she also learnt what clever persons would say and what foolish ones would discuss.
As time went by, the Korean War erupted in 1950. The US Army passed a huge amount of orders to Toyota, though they mostly wanted to buy trucks from Toyota. Anyway, she observed how a corporation, namely Toyota, recovered from the state of a slump after WWII, riding on a special procurement boom triggered by the Korean War.
So, one day, she abruptly went into a room of an executive who was responsible for human affairs of whole Toyota, as her desk was close to the director corner. The executive was surprised to see her coming into his room for some talk without reservation or without following hierarchical protocol; she should have first talked to the manager who supervised her section. But as she asked him to help her transfer to the branch office in Tokyo (since she was originally born and raised in Tokyo), he understood her. And after asking some questions of her, finally he said to her to wait for one more year.
And, one year passed. She almost forgot what she asked of the executive. But one day suddenly an assistant manager of the personnel department called her working at her desk, saying dryly by phone, "In a week, you are going to be transferred to the Tokyo office. Get prepared."
Then she moved to Tokyo and worked in the Tokyo branch office of Toyota. She became the first female Toyota employee who got transferred.
In a few years since she came to Tokyo, she became a part time reporter and writer for some magazines in the social issue field.
It was because she happened to join a circle of Tokyo intellectuals and professors in the societal issue field and she presented to them her diary where she had mainly written daily incidents in the Toyota headquarters busy in handling the labor union, since she was asked to show them whatever she had ever written. Though she had written the diary without any intention but for herself, it was highly praised by then leading figures in the literary arena and the academic world in Tokyo when it was actually published in a certain periodical.
As time further went by, she quit Toyota and grew to be an independent writer in the documentary-style work field. She succeeded so much to even make frequent TV appearances. The ex-Toyota female office clerk became one of top female journalists in Japan after WWII.
And finally she died in April 2009, leaving many interesting books she wrote based on direct interviews with various persons and hard work to collect and analyze material.
Fuyuko Kamisaka (June 10, 1930 – April 14, 2009) was a Japanese non-fiction author.
Kamisaka was born as Yoshiko Niwa in Tokyo on June 10, 1930. Her first work, Shokuba-no gunzo (People at a Place of Work), based on her experiences as a worker for Toyota, was published in 1959 and won a prize for works by new authors.
Her best known work is ""Keishu Nazare-en" about a facility for Japanese widows of South Koreans. [1]
Other works dealt with Sugamo Prison, the Battle of Iwo Jima and vivisection experiments conducted by the Japanese on prisoners of war.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuyuko_Kamisaka
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Mar 11:22 And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.