This most welcome study is a translation of Ihara Ryoji's Toyota no rōdō genba (Tokyo: Sakurai Shoten, 2003), originally published in Japanese. Ihara is a professor at Gifu University who spent three and a half months in 2001 employed as what he calls a “casual” worker at a Toyota assembly plant in the Nagoya region. He thus replicated the participant observation methodology of journalist Kamata Satoshi's 1973 exposé of working conditions in Toyota's “model” factories, which was translated and published in English in 1982 as Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider's Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory (New York: Pantheon, 1982)—but with one key difference. Kamata was a muckraker who was out to expose the social costs behind Toyota's success story (he also spent a full six months in the factory); Ihara, on the other hand, is an academic whose goal in investigating conditions on the factory floor is to test the considerable body of theory concerning work and production in Japan's automobile industry that has developed in the three decades since Kamata's pioneering work. Herein lies the real value of this volume. For readers who are conversant with Japanese academic debates on factory work, Ihara's book gives a timely update, and for those who are new to the literature (which is almost entirely published in Japanese), the book provides a welcome introduction.

Ihara focuses on the key issues of workers' skill and workers' autonomy in the modern factory. His conclusions are nuanced, but he generally finds that corporate (and in many cases union) claims about the development of workers' skills and the promotion of autonomy are exaggerated. Kaizen improvement campaigns, he finds, do not really improve things very much (p. 91). Ihara's workplace, where he was a “casual” worker, hired for a limited period, is an intense, exhausting place, both physically and mentally. In narrating the factory experience, he provides extended quotes from his own diary and very usefully integrates the personal stories of several of his workmates. His conclusions are hardly startling, but they are quite nuanced and keyed to the academic debates in Japan, led by Koike Kazuo and others. Ihara's book will be welcomed by experts in the fields of labor management, labor relations, and worker productivity.

Understanding the work experience of temporary workers in Japan is important because employment practices gradually have moved away from the “lifetime” employment model established after the great strikes of the first postwar decade (in the automobile industry, at Toyota in 1949–50, and at Nissan in 1953) that resulted in a hard-won consensus between unions and managers. Although “permanent” workers have since enjoyed a high degree of job security, by the 1960s, new shops and factories began to employ increasing numbers of “outside contract” or short-term workers who were not union members and whose benefits were limited. Toyota, in particular, was famous for relying on short-term (or seasonal) workers, which was the employment status of Kamata Satoshi when he wrote his pioneering study. Ihara was also employed as a seasonal worker, and his study may mark the high tide of interest in this class of factory workers.

What has changed in the half decade since 2003, when Ihara's study was published in Japanese, is the sudden increase in employment of “dispatched” (haken) workers, previously a phenomenon restricted to service industries but since 2004 permitted in manufacturing. Unlike Toyota's seasonal workers, who at least enjoyed a measure of employment security, dispatched workers have no job security whatsoever; they were terminated quite suddenly and in large numbers this past winter as Japan's manufacturing economy began to feel the impact of the current worldwide economic crisis. Ihara's does not discuss these workers because they were not important in automobile manufacturing at the time he did his study, but his carefully nuanced discussion of the differences in experience between various classes of workers lays the foundation for future research on this new phenomenon.

The translation by Hugh Clarke reads very smoothly (Clarke modestly credits Ihara's own readable style), and the production by Trans Pacific Press is virtually error free, as far as this reviewer can discern. All in all, this is a most welcome offering that should attract a broad readership as we seek to work our way out of the current economic crisis.