The Shogun Behind Toyota

I am at the top of Toyota and drive cards myself. I was also born with this name.

- Ong Xiang Hong

The great grandson of the father of the Japanese industrial revolution, Akio Toyoda, was born on 3 May 1956 in Nagoya, near Toyota city, the capital of Aichi prefecture. He graduated from Keio University in 1979 with a degree in law. Later, Akio pursued a master’s degree in business administration at Babson College in the United States and graduated in 1982.

In January 2000, he returned to Japan and was named to Toyota’s Board of Directors in June. In that capacity, he took on the creation and supervision of gazoo.com, a website that contains dozens of virtual shops for consumer goods and services and also provides information about new and used vehicles. During this time, he also supervised domestic marketing operations in the Americas and production management consulting.

Akio’s career pathway brought him to taste every posting in every phase of automotive operations. This included the production, marketing and product development, both in and out of his birth country. He was nicknamed by the Japanese media ‘the prince’ when he took over Toyota.

The period since 2000, when Akio was at the age of 44, he was elected as a director, and January 2009 when he became CEO, have been among the most volatile and punishing in Toyota’s 75 years of history.

Toyota was wracked by internal quality setbacks, external and internal market breakdowns, a historically high yen, and fierce competitive rivalry from Korea and Germany. Hence the situation of Toyota under Akio might be compared to the situation in which Tokugawa Ieyasu found himself during Japan’s ‘warring states’ period (Sengaku Jidai) and out of which he emerged triumphant.