Zoho's Sridhar Vembu meets 80-year-old Saito-san, impressed by leading Japanese car designer's 'humble workshop'

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu recently reflected on his encounter with 80-year-old Morihiro Saito-san – Japan’s leading automotive designer. In a social media post, he expressed his admiration for grassroots engineering skills and emphasized the importance of grassroots innovation for long-term economic growth.

Sridhar Vembu wrote: “Last week I had the good fortune to visit the workshop (the Tamil word pattarai বত্টারাযায়্যা) of the world’s leading engine designer Morihiro Saito-san,” as he likened the Japanese workshop to the Tamil concept of “pattarai”. Inspired by Saito’s determination to design cutting-edge engines at such an advanced age, and impressed by practical engineering at the local level, he argued that every Indian village needed such localized spaces for experimentation, production and repair to build a robust manufacturing base.

The post added: “Saito-san is 80+ and still designs advanced engines, some of the most advanced in the world. His humble looking workshop is right next door to the company that makes these engines in prototype quantities and works closely with them to produce them.”

Calling his visit an industrial “pilgrim”, he said: “With the same devotion that I go to the Thoranamalai Murugan temple at home. Seeing him at work, I was moved to touch his feet.”

Terming Saito-san, the God of Motors, noted that Japan’s culture was able to maintain its global prominence in so many basic industries, saying, “We must learn from this spirit. We must revive our ‘pattarai’ culture of building things – every village in India needs such workshops!”

At the end of the post, he wrote: “My industrial pilgrimage to Japan has given me new vigor.”

What did social media say?

A user wrote: “Loved the word ‘பத்ததை’, where creativity is born.”

Another user commented: “Germany and Japan’s greatest asset is (was?) this kind of small businessmen. They have a word for it in German: Mittelstand. We need that in India. But you know why it’s not there!”

A third comment read: “It’s nice to know how Japanese entrepreneurs achieve so much with so little. It would be interesting to understand how they stay financially healthy despite regular business adversity.”

A fourth user said, “If we can learn to be disciplined and dedicated like the Japanese, we would be at the level of ‘véré’. We have the knowledge and skills.”

A fifth user replied: “When I was studying in Japan, I passed by a small machine shop almost every day that supplied kokpans bigger than itself, and I was impressed by their behavior and the joy on their faces, even though they were doing such repetitive work day after day.”