The Silence of Toshiba
1
For the first days back after the New Year, there was not much to do in the open office.
A piece of orange peel left on the windowsill from before the holiday had dried out and curled at the edges, and nobody had thrown it away. On someone's desk the calendar was still on the first of January and nobody had turned it over. When I called suppliers to chase materials, most of them had not properly started up again; they picked up, coughed twice, and said politely to wait two days, until the workers were all back and they could schedule.
After five years and more, the work in my hands was thoroughly familiar.
Chase materials, chase orders, check arrivals, tap confirm in the system — none of it needed thinking; my fingers moved on their own. I heard the screen plant's first sentence and knew what nonsense its second would be. I could find which report lived in which column of Oracle with my eyes shut.
My hands were busy and my head was empty.
Every morning I took the shuttle into the plant, swiped in, changed into antistatic shoes, sat at that desk. Nine o'clock, delivery dates. Before half past four, the exception report. So many shipments in transit, so many materials short, expected recovery on such a date. Then close the computer, pack up, go to the gate and wait for the shuttle. That was the day done.
The tables rolled monthly. Opened once this month, opened again the same way next month. For the annual purchasing plan at the start of the year I pulled up last year's file, changed the date, and submitted it, and nobody looked closely. Back at the rented room in Xiasha I ate a bowl of noodles and watched two episodes of an American show. For those years I went through Friends over and over for two or three years, then switched to Prison Break, and to a series about a plane crash on a mysterious island, Lost — the plot was wild, and two episodes after work and the day was over. The next morning, the same shuttle, the same seat.
The days were flat as standing water. And sitting in that seat, there were times when the day seemed to stretch away without an edge to it.
When the cup was empty I drifted over to the pantry and filled it, came back and refreshed the mailbox twice: clean. Once I stared at the clock in the bottom corner of the screen and watched the numbers go from half past four to four thirty-one before I reached out to shut the machine down.
And in that day-after-day numbness, some of the plant's rules quietly changed their taste.
2
In my first years there, what made me proudest was the seriousness with which this Japanese company treated its rules.
In the early days we had a section member whose whole job was invoices: chase the suppliers to issue them. The moment the end of the month came and the warehouse had checked the goods and counted them, the invoice clerk was on the supplier's tail, pressing them to issue, terrified that one day's delay would hold up payment early the next month.
At the time I thought: a big plant is a big plant. Outside, some private Chinese companies — and later some Western factories I dealt with — found every way to put off issuing invoices and put off paying. A supplier had to pester purchasing half to death, beg and plead, for its money, and purchasing had to go and beg Finance to release it.
To be a buyer in a Japanese plant that chased its suppliers to issue invoices the moment the goods arrived, and paid like clockwork, was to walk out with your back straight. The few of us young ones in the smoking room felt that this tight, seamless decency and regularity was the professional dignity of working for a foreign company.
But at some point I could not name, this rule that had stood for years quietly pulled the floor out from under itself.
On an afternoon in mid-February Zhang Zheng walked slowly past my desk. He was carrying a warm tea cup, did not stop, did not turn his head, and his voice fell lightly into the air.
"This quarter's numbers, the top is squeezing hard. Think of something on your side. Hold it down for now."
Zhang Zheng was the team leader. He spoke with reserve, enough and no more, and something dropped in my chest: I understood him. The goods were already received into the warehouse, but the invoice entry in the system — hold it back. Don't issue it. Let the quarter pass first.
The plant was not yet at the point of the outside world's malicious non-payment. But holding back the invoices on goods already received was in itself breaking the rule.
That afternoon, several buyers' screens sat on the same pending-invoice list.
I went through my own records: two large materials already received, one keyboard order, one power adaptor. The warehouse had long since signed them off, and I had left the invoice number field stubbornly empty.
The goods were lying in the warehouse, real. But with no invoice entered, Finance had no payable on the books. And so the quarter's book cost shrank by a large notch out of thin air.
The price of the notebooks sold was fixed. Push the input cost down on the books and the book profit rose out of thin air.
As to why the top needed that notch of profit manufactured in that particular quarter, nobody explained it to me and I did not dare ask. At the time I was still naive and could not remotely work out why a Japanese giant that prided itself on rigour had suddenly started playing this kind of hole-in-the-corner game. Only many years later, when the enormous scandal broke, did I properly understand what lay behind that order.
But on that afternoon, the worst of it was me.
There was no way to face the supplier. Their salesmen had run around for a whole month, and their performance was assessed monthly, their commission monthly. You take delivery of their goods and then hold the invoice back, and the salesman's month is wiped out, the commission gone, and next month it drags on again.
3
Besides the held invoices, the mood in the open room grew heavier by the day.
The new manager, Watanabe, not only put his hand into everything, he was muddled. He did not know Hangzhou's actual conditions, and he insisted on managing everything, driving the whole plant to produce beautiful exception reports, nitpicking punctuation, splitting hairs over format and wording.
Privately we complained endlessly, and nobody dared confront him to his face.
Yang Jingxia was the only one who cursed him behind his back where he could not hear.
Once in the pantry, cup in hand, Yang Jingxia shook her head at the few planners under her in MBK, her big voice pressed low and still carrying fire. "This Watanabe, he really thinks he's an imperial commissioner sent from the head office. He can't get the business straight and he sticks his foot into everything. Doesn't understand a thing and still wants to give orders. Apart from blocking the format of reports all day, what does he do? Sick of him."
The young planners under her could only smile bitterly. Not one dared take it up.
Nobody expected that before long Yang Jingxia would leave more suddenly than anyone.
No argument, no announcement, no farewell dinner. One morning the team leader's seat by the window in MBK was simply empty.
The computer on the desk was locked, the drawer stood open and inside it was cleared out clean. That high, sharp, door-slamming voice that used to ring through the open room was gone completely.
Later I heard it in pieces. She could not stand Watanabe's meddling, and went straight to another Japanese company. What exactly she did there, nobody asked.
After she left, the room was quieter still. When someone mentioned her in the canteen there were two sighs and then the talk turned to mortgages and prices.
It was only more than a decade later, when none of us were in that plant any more and WeChat had gathered us from all over, that I got talking to an old colleague from MBK and Yang Jingxia came up. He had been one of hers in MBK, and later started his own outsourced trading company, supplying car seat covers and interior items to supermarkets in Japan; the business was steady.
He told me the Japanese company she went to had also pulled out. She had come back to Hangzhou, two or three years short of retirement age, too senior to start again and too young to stop, sitting at home with nothing to do. So the old colleague brought his old boss into his own company to help with day-to-day odds and ends.
He sent me a photograph from a company barbecue.
I opened it and looked at the screen for a long while.
Yang Jingxia's skin was still fair, but she had aged badly. She had put on weight, her hair was white at both temples, and her smile was faint. The woman who had rolled up her sleeve in the Xiasha open room and, with one glare, silenced half a big office, was at last worn smooth and ordinary by the years, not a trace left of that edge.
4
After Yang Jingxia left, a few more old colleagues went, one after another.
The new models were discontinued and scrapped, the old ones were gradually transferred away, and hiring was shut off completely. The work of whoever left was spread evenly over those who stayed. I had handled screens and keyboards; then several hundred part numbers left behind by two departed colleagues were all dumped into my account.
The work doubled, and overtime was strictly capped. Watanabe sent out an official notice: any overtime beyond one hour required the manager's personal signature, in the name of "strictly controlling the operating hours of the Hangzhou plant".
At half past five, with work still piled on the desk, you had to swipe out and go. What could not be finished you copied onto the notebook and took back to the rented room.
Even then I sensed, faintly, that the gears of this plant, which had once run like clockwork, had begun to rust.
I posted my résumé on a recruitment site, one in Chinese, one in English, and refreshed it every few days.
One day in early August a local Hangzhou number called. It was a yacht manufacturer in Fuyang; they had found my résumé on the site and asked whether I was interested in talking.
The company's background was in fact deep. The parent company had built kayaks to number one in the world and had a loud name in the trade. The Fuyang plant was a newly established Chinese-foreign joint venture making high-specification luxury catamarans for export, and it urgently needed a purchasing manager who could build a purchasing and materials system from nothing.
The title was manager, but there was no one above the purchasing function, so in practice it was the purchasing manager's load: to build an entire international supply chain from zero.
That was exactly what I wanted. More than five years in a big plant, the processes known through and through, and a ceiling permanently overhead.
The next day I asked the section for half a day's personal leave.
Getting to Fuyang was no trouble. From Longxiangqiao on Yan'an Road there was a No. 514 bus that had been running for decades, straight through Zhuantang to Fuyang, and the fare was five yuan. It swayed along for most of the afternoon and pulled up outside the gate of the yacht plant on the Fuchun River.
The interview was brisk. The site was big and the workshops already stood; one very tall empty workshop had been kept vacant and set aside to be converted for yachts. The interview was in their imposing office building and the terms were good. The general manager saw me in his office, and I went through the Japanese plant's bonded-zone import and export, the Oracle system, international purchasing terms and subcontractor management from beginning to end, and we took to each other.
By the time I left, it was more or less settled.
On the No. 514 going back, the Fuchun River rolled away east outside the window. I leaned back in the seat and watched the sun set over the water. There was no swell in me. I only thought: it is time to change places.
5
The morning after I got back to the company I submitted my resignation into the system.
The resignation flow needed three levels of sign-off in Oracle. Murakami's box sat half a day and was approved in the afternoon. Watanabe's box was approved very fast, not a minute wasted, the comment field empty, not even a stock phrase.
The reason for leaving was a required field. I sat in front of the screen for a long while and typed four characters: personal development.
No one tried to keep me, and no one asked much. In an open room of two hundred-odd people, an old employee leaving was as unremarkable as a part number struck off in the system.
The one who took over from me was a fresh graduate just hired out of university. He sat beside me and looked at the dense interface in complete bewilderment.
"Qi-san, so many part numbers. If a supplier chases me for materials and I don't know how to answer, what do I do?"
I copied him the manual I had put together. "There are screenshots in the shared directory. Follow the process, one step at a time. Anything you don't understand, call the supplier. They're more anxious than you are. They'll teach you what to do."
What Chen Minxia had said to me at handover came back out of my mouth unchanged, and was handed on to the next young one.
On the last afternoon I cleared my desk.
There was pathetically little: a few English manuals read to pieces, an old ceramic mug, a few boxes of unused business cards.
I took the badge holder off from around my neck and looked at it. It was the hard plastic holder issued when I joined in the summer of 2002, worn round my neck every day, the edges long since rubbed yellow and furry, the metal clip on the back gone loose. The plant had issued new badges several times; I had kept wearing this old holder, five years and more.
I pulled the badge out and returned it to General Affairs. The old holder I did not throw away. I put it in my bag.
At four in the afternoon I went to Murakami's desk for the last time.
Murakami heard the footsteps, put down his ballpoint, and stood up slowly.
That odd face of his, which resembled no country in particular, still showed nothing. He looked at me and bowed half a bow, with great seriousness.
"Qi-san... from now on, genki de."
I bowed properly to him in return. "Section Chief Murakami. Thank you for everything."
Turning to walk out of the open room, I looked back once.
At the far end the pale fluorescent tubes still burned in their neat row, two hundred-odd notebooks clicked softly, and Watanabe still sat high at the front. Murakami was still standing by his desk, watching me from a distance. When he saw me turn, he raised a hand. I raised mine, pushed the door, and went out.
Outside it was raining, an August rain, close and hot with a cool edge through it.
The high wire fence and the customs checkpoint of the Xiasha bonded zone stood quietly in the rain mist, and container trucks still queued through the gate.
From the poor student who ran to that interview through the summer heat in 2002 to the man who walked out with a bag on his shoulder today: five years and eight months.
I had thought I would stay in that big plant and work: ten years, twenty, to retirement. In the end I walked out of that gate alone.
6
In the summer of 2015, I had been away from Toshiba for many years.
At lunch one day I was on my phone and saw a piece of financial news. The parent group's name was in the headline: over seven years, three presidents implicated, 150 billion yen of profit systematically inflated, the biggest corporate accounting scandal in postwar Japan.
The report quoted a few lines from the third-party investigation committee: inside Toshiba there existed a corporate culture in which a superior's wishes could not be defied, and under targets ratcheted up layer by layer, the whole organisation took part.
Looking at those few lines on the screen, much of what I remembered from those years had already gone a little blurred.
The days and nights in the Xiasha open room, reconciling, chasing, filling in exception reports, along with that seven-thousand-row sheet and the Watanabe with his raised chair, had all gone fuzzy, like something seen through frosted glass.
Only now and then I still thought of Zhang Zheng.
The plant changed hands several times afterwards and ended up with Taiwanese owners. To clear out the old staff the new owners found every way to wear people down. Zhang Zheng, the best-tempered, the most fluent in Japanese, a lifetime of standing respectfully and keeping safe, was moved to a do-nothing post at fifty and never made it to retirement.
The waves wash the sand away.
Those young people who had eaten waxberries together in that open room and sung Stefanie Sun at the KTV had all scattered in the end.