28-05-2025
Go From Wake Up to Wind Down With This Japanese Truck Factory Worker
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When I was a kid, my elementary school had a program that let students shadow adults at their job for a day. The idea was to show us what working as, say, an architect was like. 'Japanese assembly plant worker' wasn't one of the options available, but a video posted on YouTube fills that void. It documents a day in the life of someone who works in a huge Isuzu factory that assembles about 500 trucks per day.
The video follows a 27-year-old man named Shun who lives in an apartment owned by Isuzu. This practice is fairly common in Japan: About 41% of Japanese companies offer some type of housing, according to the narrator. After getting ready, Shun walks 25 minutes to the Isuzu plant in Fujisawa, makes a quick stop at a 7-Eleven for breakfast, clocks in, and starts his shift as a manufacturing department captain.
Beyond shedding light on the daily routine of a Japanese factory worker, the video gives us a fascinating and rarely seen glimpse at what an Isuzu plant looks like from the inside. About 6,000 people work in the Fujisawa plant, and it's so big that employees rely on shuttles to get around. And yet, every section of the factory that's shown in the video is stunningly clean. The narrator explains that this cleanliness is rooted in the Japanese concept of 'sort, set in order, and shine.' The idea is that a well-organized work environment increases productivity.
Another thing that stands out in the video is the number of humans working on the assembly line. Isuzu builds commercial vehicles, not niche, small-batch supercars, so payload capacity and maintenance costs are more important to buyers than old-school craftsmanship. However, human workers remain essential because there are so many different variations of Isuzu's trucks all built under the same roof. The company notably sells different models, several variants of each model, as well as gasoline- and diesel-powered trucks. Workers like Shun keep the line moving smoothly and ensure that Isuzu can build a complete truck from start to finish in approximately 150 minutes.
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