AOTS Journal 2018 SPRING No.12 (ENGLISH)

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3No. 12 SPRING 2018needed as Japanese corporations might be easily ignored compared with Chinese or European exhibitors with the full support of their respective home governments. At that occasion, I asked the Japanese-speaking team leader of Indian assistants to introduce me to someone in Gujarat with a command of Japanese. He replied to me that he knew only one person and introduced me to a woman whose father is currently a board member of our local afliate, Rajikumar Devichand Oswal. Mr. Oswal previously helped one of the Japanese rms to start up its Indian operations and has been familiar with both positive and negative sides of people from Japan. Mr. Kenichiro Toyofuku, a person called ‘the closest Japanese to PM Modi today,’ was at the ‘Japan Desk’ for liaison with Japanese corporations in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry at that time, referred to him as ‘the most dependable and helpful person I met during my seven years stay here.’At our rst meeting, Mr. Oswal and I could understand each other and within the day I asked him ‘to help our business to contribute to the progress of India as a Japanese corporation.’ Then, with strong support from him, everything went so smoothly including nancing, legal registration in April 2013, purchasing of land for the plant in 2014 and rst recruitment. Construction of our plant started in 2015 and we could hold the inauguration cere-mony of TOYOTA FORMS INDIA PVT. LTD on January 25, 2016, just fty years after the foundation of our original company in Japan. Mr. Oswal still tracts our Indian business with me as a director. We are bonded by a strong reliance on each other.How do you assess human resource development in India by using the AOTS schemes? I remember I heard about the AOTS schemes rst time when a staff member of JETRO introduced them to me. At our local afliate corporation, as we wanted to nurture better personnel who could manage both production and marketing and become future executive candidates. We chose four people among those locally recruited for six-month technical training and another one for one-year technical training by the AOTS training in Japan scheme including general orientation by AOTS for thir-teen weeks. Among them, three people were fresh graduates from local colleges and were intro-duced in front of their entire schools as they were selected to visit Japan for training and this was extremely unusual at the place, I heard.Those trainees had been unable to speak Japanese at all but they became surprisingly good at Japanese, much better than expected, after joining in J13W training by AOTS and this helped us greatly to orga-nize technical training at our place very smoothly. Technical training at our workshops has to use more tech-nical terms and both sides of trainees and instructors had a lot of trouble. However, our trainees had a good chance to get familiar with working machinery and our products by a hands-on approach. They were quite enthusiastic and I noticed they were motivated to absorb everything. Our original purpose to nurture personnel as central players in the future, I believe, was fullled; for the corporation and themselves, that training became very meaningful. Back in India, no one left their job and they keep working for us.In scal 2017, we dispatched our seasoned technical staff who were instructors for the technical training, a total of three persons, to the local afliate by using the AOTS expert dispatching scheme. Concrete forms are diversied in shape and size according to usage and it calls for machining, welding, and assembly work to meet the needs of respective products. However, there still is a shortage in technical skills and knowledge of better production of forms among local technical staff. Our expert dispatching could utilize the Carbon Reduction Technology Promotion Program*. By enhancing work efciency in welding and fabrication of cement forms and by reducing working time, we are trying to achieve our target of energy efciency with reduction in power consumption of working machinery as well as establishment of more efcient production scenes.With these two schemes, our local human resources are growing conspicuously and I got their feedback such ‘changed working attitude of locally hired personnel,’ and ‘effect of easier diffusion of instruction of experts and way of thinking for Japanese-style monodzukuri.’*Carbon Reduction Technology Promotion (CRTP) Program: The program aims to facilitate the reduction of CO2 emissions and the promotion of Japanese companies’ overseas business expansion, through supporting the development of human resources engaging in operation, maintenance and management of energy infrastruc-tures, and involved in energy saving in the manufacturing process at overseas factories. Aside from developing countries, target coun-tries include those in Europe, Middle East, and the USA.Tell us your view on human resource development that you pursue with a focus on nurturing of ‘mind.’Decision making on our entry into India called for courage. However, since I found myself thinking about how to create our future, almost all anxiety of managing just disappeared. The present is a result of our own thinking of the past while the future can be materialized by what you are thinking and imaging. In front of the local afliate corporation