Education and the right training
At Toyota and Denso special LCA training centres called ‘karakuri dosho’ are set up, in which workers and engineers study traditional karakuri engineering to be used in their own specific cells.
Karakuri is an automation mechanism developed during the Edo era in Japan and based on technology imported from Holland in the 17th and 18th centuries. Karakuri was used in devices like kabuki revolving stages, walking dolls, automatic musicians, dolls dancing on portable shrines, secret passages in samurai palaces and secret tools and weapons of the ninja.
In such LCA training, mechanical dolls are put together from kits, and the elements of the mechanism are learned.
Here is an extract from an internal instructional leaflet of a Japanese enterprise:
‘The in-house ability to construct LCA is a key precondition for the competitive success of any productive enterprise. Every good enterprise tries to develop new LCA internally and to keep the related technologies to itself. You can buy the cleverest robots, machine parks or CNC machines, but so can your competitors.’
