Bridgestone Boss Has Toughness, But Is That What Crisis Demands?
                    September 12, 2000

                    By TODD ZAUN, PHRED DVORAK, NORIHIKO SHIROUZU AND PETER
                    LANDERS
                    Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

                    TOKYO -- In March last year, a 58-year-old employee at a unit of
                    Bridgestone Corp. called upon company chief executive Yoichiro Kaizaki
                    to complain of having been demoted in a cost-cutting drive. Then, the
                    worker killed himself by plunging a long knife into his stomach.

                                         Japanese tabloids dubbed it the "restructuring
                                         seppuku," after the old samurai practice of ritual
                                         suicide. They portrayed Mr. Kaizaki as a symbol
                                         of a cold new cost-cutting ethic sweeping Japan.

                    Mr. Kaizaki's response? Silence. Only four months later did he speak
                    about the tragedy in public, and he was defiant.

                    "I've reduced the number of workers, cut the number of directors ...
                    and cut the dividend," the beefy executive said at an earnings briefing
                    for reporters last summer. "Because of this, Bridgestone has come this
                    far. I don't think that what I've done was a mistake."

                    A year later, the 67-year-old Mr. Kaizaki is again at the center of a
                    firestorm. This time, the future of Bridgestone, one of Japan's most
                    revered businesses, is at stake. The company's U.S. unit,
                    Bridgestone/Firestone Inc., last month recalled 6.5 million
                    Firestone-brand tires after consumer complaints and lawsuits linked
                    them to fatal accidents, primarily involving Ford Motor Co. Explorer
                    sport-utility vehicles.

                    Once again, Mr. Kaizaki maintained a stoic silence,
                    even as public outrage mounted in the U.S. and
                    Bridgestone's value in the Japanese stock market
                    dropped by half.

                    Monday, Mr. Kaizaki finally broke that silence during
                    a packed 90-minute news conference at the Tokyo
                    headquarters of the Keidanren, Japan's big
                    business lobby -- and he came out swinging.
                    Though he expressed regret over the controversy,
                    he sought to deflect attempts by Ford to pin the
                    blame on his company. In his deep baritone, the
                    executive forcefully denied Bridgestone had sought
                    to hide information about the affair from U.S.
                    authorities.

                    "There are worries about the future of Firestone," Mr. Kaizaki conceded,
                    "but we promise to support the Firestone brand with the total strength
                    of the Bridgestone group."

                    Mr. Kaizaki is a rare breed in corporate Japan, where conformity and
                    consensus-building are the norm. He is a cost-cutter with the drive, and
                    nerve, to restructure an old-line industrial company. He has made a
                    career of weathering controversy, as he did in the mid-1990s, when he
                    brushed off sharp criticism from President Clinton over
                    Bridgestone/Firestone's efforts to break a strike at some of its U.S.
                    plants.

                    "Even if 80% of people resist me, I don't care," he said in late 1994, at
                    the height of the bitter labor dispute, which many observers concluded
                    hurt both the company and workers. "I'm not a politician, so I don't
                    need to be elected based on popularity."

                                         But today, with Firestone tires possibly linked to
                                         88 deaths in America and 47 in Venezuela, Mr.
                                         Kaizaki and Bridgestone risk being undone by
                                         the stubborn combativeness that fueled his
                                         ascent. He now faces two key questions: Does
                                         he possess the public-relations skills that will
                                         buy him enough time to get to the bottom of
                                         what happened at Bridgestone/Firestone? And,
                    if he does, will he have the candor and courage to fix what he finds?

                    The furthest Mr. Kaizaki would go Monday in signaling this kind of
                    boldness was his comment that he wished Bridgestone had exercised
                    more control over its U.S. operations and done more to ensure that
                    Firestone divisions met the parent company's standards. "We should
                    have applied our standards to things like technology and quality
                    assurance," he said. But he stopped short of saying specifically that
                    lower standards contributed to any problems with Firestone tires.

                    The controversy marks a huge personal setback for Mr. Kaizaki, an
                    executive who made his name in the early 1990s by leading
                    Bridgestone's original effort to turn around Firestone, which the
                    Japanese purchased in 1988 after an eerily similar recall scandal had
                    hobbled the American firm. Mr. Kaizaki said at his news conference he
                    himself hadn't heard of reports that Firestone tires were linked to an
                    unusually high number of accidents involving Ford Explorer vehicles until
                    May, which is when the affair first began attracting widespread
                    attention.

                    Since Bridgestone/Firestone announced its recall
                    on Aug. 9, documents have surfaced indicating
                    that the tire company and Ford knew about
                    problems with Firestone-equipped Explorers in
                    the late 1990s but didn't bring them to the attention of American
                    consumers or safety regulators. The tire models recalled were 15-inch
                    ATX, ATX II and Wilderness AT.

                    In what may prove to be a miscalculation, Mr. Kaizaki left the initial
                    public-relations effort to Bridgestone/Firestone's president, Masatoshi
                    Ono. Mr. Ono, who shares his boss's weak grasp of English but lacks
                    Mr. Kaizaki's gruff charisma, came across as tentative and
                    unforthcoming in the U.S. media glare.

                    Bridgestone executives say that Mr. Kaizaki did remain directly involved,
                    leading a team of about 20 senior people that met daily in Tokyo to
                    handle the mounting crisis. Monday, Mr. Kaizaki disclosed that he had
                    made a secret trip to the U.S. to assess the situation, but he and his
                    spokesmen refused to elaborate on the mission. A senior Ford
                    spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Kaizaki's remarks.

                    Within Bridgestone, the need for Mr. Kaizaki to take a more public role
                    became clear last Wednesday, according to company executives. On
                    that day, Mr. Ono and Ford's chief executive, Jacques Nasser, were
                    summoned to testify before the U.S. Congress in Washington. In
                    Tokyo, Mr. Kaizaki and his crisis-management team gathered at
                    Bridgestone headquarters to watch the proceedings on a large screen,
                    according to one of the team members.

                    From 11 p.m. Tokyo time until noon the next day, the executive team,
                    fortified only by coffee, mineral water, cookies and rice crackers,
                    watched as American lawmakers grilled Mr. Ono and others. Many of the
                    executives, Mr. Kaizaki included, couldn't grasp the finer points because
                    of limited English skills, according to the team member. But by the end
                    of the marathon session, one thing was clear: Mr. Ono, himself wearing
                    an earphone to hear a Japanese translation of the hearing, was failing to
                    get the company's message across.

                    Monday, Mr. Kaizaki did bat back at Ford, which has blamed its tire
                    supplier for the entire Firestone fiasco. He said he was struck that
                    accident rates were much higher for Explorers fitted with Firestones
                    than for other vehicles that used the brand. The ATX and ATX II were
                    also sold as original equipment on the Nissan Motor Co. 4-by-4 and
                    Mazda Motor Co. Navajo pickups, respectively. The chief executive also
                    repeated, in passing, Bridgestone's argument that low tire pressure
                    may have played a role in some of the Firestone failures.

                    Mr. Kaizaki strongly rejected suggestions that Bridgestone deliberately
                    concealed from U.S. regulators reports of accidents involving Firestone
                    tires in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela dating back to 1997. "There has
                    been some talk of a coverup, but I want to emphasize that there was
                    no such thing," he said.

                    Indeed, the cause of the accidents, which involve the rubber tire tread
                    peeling off on the road, remains a mystery. It still isn't clear whether the
                    fault lies with Firestone's tires, Ford's vehicles, driving conditions,
                    consumer behavior or some combination of these elements.

                    Mr. Kaizaki also betrayed, briefly, signs of emotional strain. He recalled
                    the days a decade ago when he was in America struggling to turn the
                    then-troubled subsidiary around. "I am very aware that we have
                    suffered a nearly fatal blow," he told reporters. "But we came back from
                    the same place 10 years ago, and it's not impossible to do so again," he
                    said, his voice trailing off to a whisper. He paused to compose himself,
                    then said, "I think I can do it."

                    This scene marked a low point in the history of Bridgestone. The
                    business was founded in 1931 by Shojiro Ishibashi, whose family name
                    means "stone bridge," hence the use of the English word for the
                    company name. "Bridgestone" also evoked the venerable Firestone,
                    which had been founded in 1900 in Akron, Ohio.

                    Mr. Ishibashi amassed a huge personal fortune, built three art museums
                    and married a daughter into a powerful clan of Japanese politicians.
                    Company lore has it that he and his son, Kanichiro, treated workers like
                    part of an extended family.

                    Mr. Kaizaki, the scion of a well-to-do soy-sauce brewing family, earned a
                    degree in economics from the elite Kyoto University, but rather than
                    take over the family business, he first went to work for a local bank.
                    Despite his comfortable upbringing, his tastes were those of a typical
                    salaryman, including playing mahjongg and golf. At the age of 28, he
                    left banking for Bridgestone.

                    It was 1962, and this was a bold move in a society in which job-hopping
                    was rare. A hard-charging outsider at Bridgestone, Mr. Kaizaki carved
                    out a career in management jobs far afield from the company's main tire
                    business. Running little fiefs producing such things as conveyor belts
                    and golf balls, he learned how to oversee entire businesses, say current
                    and former Bridgestone executives.

                    He also developed a talent that would one day take him to the top:
                    turning around troubled manufacturing operations. "There are all these
                    product types, so there's always something or other that's in the red,"
                    he recalled in a 1999 interview with a local magazine. "So you're always
                    having to return to the black a company ... or a product line that's in
                    trouble."

                    In normal times, Mr. Kaizaki's rough edges and lack of experience in the
                    core tire business might have capped his rise at Bridgestone. But in
                    1988, after much agonizing, the company took an uncharacteristic risk,
                    acquiring the ailing Firestone. Bridgestone soon discovered that
                    Firestone had never fully recovered from a 1978 recall of about 13
                    million tires. In 1991, Firestone was losing $1 million a day.

                    Early in 1991, Bridgestone President Akira Yeiri asked Mr. Kaizaki to take
                    the helm at Firestone. Mr. Kaizaki, in the Japanese magazine interview,
                    said he at first declined. He had no experience in tires. Then, Kanichiro
                    Ishibashi, former president and son of Bridgestone's founder, told him,
                    "This is the order of the company," Mr. Kaizaki recalled in the interview.
                    "Take care of it."

                    And so, Bridgestone, now one of the biggest foreign owners of a
                    manufacturing operation in the U.S., dispatched to Ohio an executive
                    who spoke barely a word of English.

                    Mr. Kaizaki wasted no time making clear who was boss. He admitted to
                    his staff that he knew little about tires, but he impressed them by
                    rolling up his sleeves, according to Bridgestone/Firestone executives. He
                    reorganized the company and gave each division chief clearer
                    responsibilities, as well as placards saying, "The Buck Stops Here."

                    He also laid off employees and cut costs relentlessly. Sunil Kumar, then
                    in charge of sales at Bridgestone/Firestone, recalls that Mr. Kaizaki once
                    asked for a tape measure so he could personally check the proportions
                    of a new building in Nashville. Underlings had said the facility had to be
                    expanded to accommodate manufacturing equipment. The boss proved
                    them wrong. There was no expansion, and the company saved millions
                    of dollars, says Mr. Kumar, who now works in the chemicals industry.

                    In 1993, for the first time since the acquisition, the
                    Bridgestone/Firestone unit swung into the black, with a $6 million profit.
                    That year, Mr. Kaizaki got his reward, the presidency of the parent
                    company, and returned to Japan to set about belt-tightening there. He
                    stunned the home office by slashing the company's head count to
                    12,600 in 1998 from 16,000 five years earlier.

                    But Bridgestone/Firestone remained a top priority. He continued to try
                    to boost productivity, in part by targeting the company's labor contract
                    with the United Rubber Workers union. Mr. Kaizaki later recalled in the
                    1999 Japanese magazine interview how he was stunned by the
                    thickness of the manual that spelled out the labor pact, including minute
                    rules on working hours. "Work that should be done in five hours, they
                    schedule for eight," he grumbled. "I decided I had to fix that."

                    The Bridgestone CEO got his first dose of an American-style
                    public-relations disaster in October 1993, when a worker at a Firestone
                    plant in Oklahoma City died after his head was crushed in a tire-making
                    machine. This and another accident drew stinging criticism from
                    then-U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who in April 1994 levied a $7.5
                    million fine against Bridgestone/Firestone for alleged safety violations.
                    Accompanied by police, Mr. Reich personally arrived at the factory to
                    deliver the fine notice.

                    Then in July, about 4,200 United Rubber Workers members went on
                    strike at five Firestone facilities. Their contract had expired, and the
                    company had offered them a deal that paid less than one Goodyear Tire
                    & Rubber Co. had given its workers. Tension soon erupted along ethnic
                    lines, as picketing American workers carried signs such as "WW II Part II
                    -- Japan's Bridgestone Attack on American Economy" and "Nuke 'Em."
                    In an interview at the time, Mr. Kaizaki said Bridgestone was losing $10
                    million a month at the striking plants, but he refused to budge. "Ending
                    the strike is not necessary for the company if we are forced to set
                    working conditions that kill the company," he said.

                    Mr. Kaizaki stepped up the battle by threatening to permanently replace
                    the workers who had struck. In January, President Clinton blasted
                    Bridgestone/Firestone for "flagrantly turning its back on our tradition of
                    peaceful collective bargaining."

                    In Japan, meanwhile, Mr. Kaizaki was dealing with the worst recession to
                    hit the island nation since the oil crises of the 1970s. But by 1998, his
                    personnel reductions at the parent company had contributed to annual
                    profits hitting a record $799 million, at a time when many Japanese
                    manufacturers were suffering huge losses.

                    The austerity push bred resentment, and among those who felt the
                    pinch was Masaharu Nonaka, the man who took his life in Mr. Kaizaki's
                    office. When Mr. Nonaka, a career-long Bridgestone manager, found out
                    the company was nudging him into early retirement, he wrote a list of
                    demands, including a revision of the harsh new personnel policies, and
                    marched in to present them to the company CEO. Mr. Kaizaki refused to
                    give in, according to Bridgestone, and the confrontation took its bloody
                    turn.

                    Bridgestone denied forcing Mr. Nonaka to quit, but Mr. Kaizaki drew
                    criticism from the Japanese press and public for having strayed from its
                    paternalist tradition. He rode out that storm, too.

                    Monday, he vowed to bounce back once more, saying, "I believe the way
                    to take responsibility is to accept the challenge to try again."