Written by | Liu Ying

Edited by| Huang Dalu

Designed by | Zhen Youmei

On the evening of July 28, 2026, the ground in Kyushu began to shake without warning.

On the assembly line at the Miyata Plant in Fukuoka Prefecture, robotic arms hung in mid-air and suddenly stopped. Workers put down their tools and quickly evacuated the workshop along the safety aisle. Minutes later, the production lines at the Kanda and Kokura plants also came to a standstill.

This was a magnitude 7.1 earthquake.

Toyota initially thought it could resume operations quickly, but several hours later, it had to shut down three plants again. Production was scheduled to resume on July 31, but the deadline was subsequently pushed back to August 5.

The shadow of the halt quickly spread from Kyushu to Honshu. Nissan HQ initially announced "production as usual" externally, but only two days later, due to parts not arriving at the factory in time, some production lines had to stop as well. A Toyota plant in Aichi Prefecture, over 600 kilometers away, was also affected.

As of August 4, 2026, four Toyota plants in Kyushu were still scheduled to shut down until August 5, and another plant in central Japan was scheduled to halt until August 7. Two of these four plants are vehicle assembly bases.

Such scenes are not unfamiliar to the Japanese automotive industry.

In 1995, factories in Kobe were filled with cracks after the earthquake; in 2004, the shutdown of a small factory in Niigata forced all four Honda production bases to stall simultaneously; in 2007, an inconspicuous piston ring held back half of the Japanese automotive companies; in 2011, a tsunami swept away factories along the coastline, and Toyota buyers traced layer by layer along supply relationship maps, finally marking 659 damaged supply points in the ruins.

For thirty years, Japanese car companies have continuously reinforced their supply chains, but this earthquake proved again that a factory withstanding impact does not mean the production line can be restarted immediately.

The Factory Withstood the Earthquake

The aftershocks had not yet subsided, but engineers were already wearing hard hats and walking back into the workshop with inspection checklists. The light beam from flashlights swept across weld seams, and precision equipment had to be checked one by one.

Toyota did not find large-scale structural damage in the three plants, yet they did not resume work.

Just because the factory looks undamaged does not mean production conditions have been restored. After violent shaking, the processing accuracy inside precision equipment may have quietly shifted. Engineers must remeasure and calibrate parameters, then confirm quality using prototype products. Only when equipment, pipelines, energy supply, and product accuracy all meet requirements can the production line restart.

The company's statement reflected a kind of caution: "Including aftershocks and recovery work, the situation changes every day."

During this period, Mitsubishi reduced production at its Mizushima Plant in Okayama Prefecture, and Honda extended the shutdown time at its Kumamoto Plant to repair damaged facilities.

The situation encountered by semiconductor factories was even more tricky.

In Renesas Electronics' two plants in Kumamoto, ceiling blocks fell off, walls cracked with fine patterns, and accumulated water seeped from damaged pipes. Sony and TSMC also suspended operations. Engineers crawled into clean rooms to check gas lines and precision equipment for shifts one by one.

TSMC began restoring partial operations several hours after the earthquake; Renesas planned to restart the Kumamoto Plant in phases from August 5; Sony, however, would not be able to restore production lines to pre-quake levels until mid-August.

Nobuhiko Kiuchi, Chief Economist at Nomura Research Institute, gave a relatively optimistic judgment: "The negative impact on production activities and supply chains may be relatively short-term."

The damage from this earthquake to housing and infrastructure was relatively limited, and the shutdown of many factories included a component of preventive inspection. However, for the automotive industry which calculates beats by the minute, "short-term shutdown" still means the loss of output from multiple shifts.

As long as one key supplier has not recovered, assembly lines hundreds of kilometers away may continue to wait.

For thirty years, the change in the Japanese automotive industry has not been to eliminate this waiting entirely, but to strive to make it happen less frequently and end faster.

Small Parts Stop Big Factories

Early morning on January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake tore through Kobe and surrounding industrial areas. Port crane arms twisted and deformed, roads split with deep gullies, and factories and warehouses revealed collapsed corners in the morning light.

Daihatsu's two assembly plants stopped production. Mazda, due to parts shortages, was forced to suspend Hiroshima and Hofu plants, with estimated losses of about 3,000 vehicle units.

Toyota's vehicle plants themselves were not heavily damaged, but the supply of brake calipers and audio components was cut off. The company could only close all assembly facilities in Japan, with an estimated reduction of about 20,000 vehicles.

Post-event statistics showed this earthquake damaged 13 supplier production points, a number not particularly large. But some of these parts had no inventory buffer, and no alternative factories could be found to immediately step in.

Nine years later, the story repeated itself.

In October 2004, the Chuetsu earthquake in Niigata Prefecture collapsed part of the Nippon Precision Machine Nagano Factory's facilities, stopping the instrument cluster production line abruptly. Honda's Saitama and Suzuka vehicle plants, Yachiyo Industrial's Yokkaichi micro-car plant, and the Kumamoto engine plant fell into silence in succession.

Honda later disclosed that the manufacturing precision required for analog instrument pointers was extremely high, and at that time most similar products globally were produced in Niigata. The company's risk management at the time mainly targeted parts "mass-produced in only one place," relying on increased inventory to leave some buffer for supply interruptions.

In July 2007, the Chuetsu-Oki earthquake in Niigata Prefecture struck again. The walls of Riken Kashiwazaki Factory cracked, and the supply of piston rings and other parts was interrupted.

Major Japanese car companies such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Suzuki successively halted or reduced production. Honda's work stoppage area expanded from Suzuka all the way to Saitama, Yokkaichi, Hamamatsu, and Kumamoto. Whether subsequent work could resume depended entirely on when Riken could restart its machines.

Multiple car companies sent engineers, equipment maintenance personnel, and even R&D personnel to Kashiwazaki to clean the factory area, repair water and electricity with Riken employees, and check machines one by one. Honda wrote in its official history that at that time almost the entire company was mobilized, including the R&D department.

Brake calipers, instrument pointers, and piston rings are not the most expensive components on a car, but they have similar supply characteristics: concentrated production locations, limited inventory, and specialized processes that are difficult to replicate quickly.

Even if another company has the capability to produce similar parts, it must go through matching, testing, and quality confirmation. Qualified parts cannot be directly installed on another car company's production line the day after the original factory halts production.

At that time, the recovery capability of the Japanese automotive industry relied more on the tacit understanding between companies to assist each other. When the original supplier restarted determined when assembly lines hundreds of kilometers away would resume rotation.

The bigger problem was that car companies did not even fully know where their parts actually came from.

First Time Seeing the Complete Supply Network

On March 11, 2011, the ground churned violently in Japan's Tohoku region, tsunamis followed closely, and the shadow of the Fukushima nuclear accident subsequently overshadowed the whole situation.

Ports were paralyzed, roads were broken, and power and communications were interrupted on a large scale. Toyota's own production facilities were relatively limited in damage, but parts and material shortages still caused the company to suspend all vehicle production in Japan starting from March 14.

On March 15, Toyota's procurement and production teams sent out investigation teams, braving aftershocks to visit the sites of about 200 suppliers, and then tracing layer by layer along procurement relationships to continue pursuing second-tier and third-tier suppliers.

Ultimately, the company confirmed 659 supply points were damaged, procurement interruptions involved 1,260 types of parts and materials, and in the worst case might affect about 80% of global models. About 500 types of materials needed immediate repair, production transfer, or alternative development from scratch.

Honda later found during a review that many Tier 1 suppliers used products from the same damaged material factory. The company previously knew nothing about this relationship and could only temporarily unite procurement and R&D departments to use alternative materials to re-develop parts.

Renesas Electronics' Naka Plant was one of the most serious breakpoints.

The main factory building withstood the earthquake, but internal equipment, ceilings, cables, and ventilation systems suffered severe damage, and the supply of automotive microcontrollers stopped abruptly. Engineers initially estimated it would take a full six months for the factory to recover.

Dan Mahoney, then President and CEO of Renesas Electronics Americas, later recalled: "These buildings withstood the earthquake, performing quite excellently."

While the walls were saved, the facilities inside the factory, which were intertwined and precise like watch gears, still needed to be repaired and adjusted bit by bit.

At its peak, about 2,500 employees and external contractors crowded into the Naka Plant to repair day and night. Multiple car companies and suppliers sent manpower and equipment, and competitors also voluntarily postponed their orders to make space for automotive chip production.

Renesas transferred about 60% of the affected output to other factories. The Naka Plant eventually recovered partial production in three months, three months earlier than initially expected.

Toyota originally expected that all global models and production lines would not fully recover until November or December 2011. As the materials needing key processing shrunk from about 500 types at the end of March to about 30 types in May, domestic Japanese plants returned to normal first in early July, while overseas production dragged on until September to approach full recovery.

Relevant studies later found that the disruptions caused by the Great East Japan Earthquake affected not only the disaster-hit enterprises but also transmitted to their direct and indirect suppliers and customers along the trading network. This earthquake and its supply chain chain reaction caused the growth rate of Japan's actual GDP in the following year to decline by about 0.47 percentage points.

After 2011, Japanese car companies finally realized that supply chain risks do not only come from visible Tier 1 suppliers. A material or chip factory hidden deep in the network can also bring global production to a halt.

To make the supply chain more resilient, the first step is not to prepare more rescue personnel, but to first see clearly where the breakpoints are.

From Calling One by One to Finding Breakpoints According to Maps

After the Great East Japan Earthquake, Toyota established the supply chain database RESCUE, entering the production locations and upstream and downstream relationships of about 6,800 types of materials into the system, and conducting disaster drills regularly with suppliers.

From then on, procurement personnel could filter suppliers by disaster-affected areas and quickly determine which parts, models, and plants might be affected.

Honda also entered parts and actual production locations into the SCRKeeper system. In 2011, Honda still needed to call one by one to confirm supply status; later, suppliers needed to pre-register manufacturing locations and distribution routes, allowing the procurement department to see where risks were concentrated earlier.

Nissan, on the other hand, focused its efforts on the first few minutes after the earthquake occurred.

On March 11, 2011, the company established the Global Disaster Control HQ at its Yokohama HQ in just 15 minutes, immediately starting to confirm the status of employees, plants, dealers, and suppliers. Three weeks before the earthquake occurred, Nissan had just completed a related drill.

These improvements were put to the test in the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake.

On April 14 and 16, two consecutive strong earthquakes struck. Aisin Kyushu and Aisin Kyushu Casting were forced to stop production, and continuous aftershocks made inspectors hesitate to enter the building interior. Wiring, pipes, and transformer facilities inside the factory were damaged, and power was cut.

As soon as the supply of doors and engine parts produced by Aisin was cut, Toyota suspended most vehicle assembly lines in Japan starting from April 18.

This time, damaged suppliers and relevant parts could be identified relatively quickly. But knowing where the breakpoint is does not mean molds, equipment, and manufacturing processes there can be immediately replicated.

Starting from April 19, huge cranes lifted equipment and molds out of damaged factories piece by piece and slowly loaded them onto trucks.

Aisin sent 339 employees to the disaster area to shift production to affiliated enterprises in the Kyushu region and Aichi plants, with some products even urgently imported from overseas. After molds and equipment arrived at alternative bases, they still had to go through installation, debugging, trial production, and quality confirmation; every step could not be omitted.

Supply chain databases solve the "where to find" problem, but they cannot omit the physical processes required to restore manufacturing capabilities.

Progress in supply chain management is not about making these processes disappear, but about discovering problems earlier, initiating transfers earlier, and shortening shutdown times as much as possible.

Toyota Leaves Months of Inventory for Semiconductors

After the Great East Japan Earthquake, Toyota also re-examined the relationship between Just-in-Time production and inventory.

The cycle from ordering to delivery for automotive chips is long, and production is highly concentrated. According to Reuters, Toyota subsequently required suppliers in its business continuity plan to reserve two to six months of semiconductor inventory for them according to their respective delivery cycles.

This arrangement did not extend to all automotive parts. Just-in-Time and low inventory are still the basic rules for most procurement links, only microcontrollers with long production cycles, highly concentrated supply, and difficult to find temporary alternative sources, were separately included in inventory buffers.

Toyota's spokesperson spoke frankly: "For us, this is a classic lean solution."

Toyota also requires companies to master core technologies of chips used in automobiles internally and cannot hand over semiconductor capabilities completely to suppliers. Long before the launch of the Prius, Toyota began accumulating design and manufacturing capabilities for microcontrollers.

Long-accumulated technical capabilities, combined with targeted inventory reserves, meant that Toyota's impact during the initial phase of the global chip shortage in 2021 was relatively small. However, when the duration of the shortage exceeded the scope that inventory could cover, Toyota still had to adjust production.

Inventory can buy time, but cannot indefinitely offset supply interruptions.

On January 1, 2024, the Noto Peninsula earthquake struck, affecting multiple Toyota suppliers and affiliated enterprises. Before the holiday had ended, Toyota's inventory checks and damaged plant investigations had already been launched.

On January 8, the company decided to maintain the operation of Japanese vehicle plants and stated externally: "We will use parts stored outside the disaster area."

Toyota first determined the production arrangement after January 8, then step by step decided how to produce in the next stage based on aftershocks and supplier recovery progress. By January 10, the company announced that production would continue according to plan after January 15, based precisely on inventory reserves outside the disaster area and the gradual recovery of some damaged suppliers.

Off-site inventory did not replace damaged factories, but bought them a few days of breathing time.

For automotive assembly lines that calculate part inventory by the hour, these few days often determine whether the factory needs to stop immediately.

From Factory to Power, Molten Aluminum, and Data

In September 2018, the Iburi East Earthquake in Hokkaido caused widespread power outages, with darkness covering the entire industrial area.

Powertrain parts such as gearboxes produced by Toyota Motor Hokkaido Co. were subsequently cut off. Multiple Toyota vehicle plants in Japan were affected by both power restrictions and parts shortages. Motomachi, Takada, Tsutsumi, Tahara, and group company production lines could only recover in stages from September 11 to 13.

Aisin later disclosed a thrilling detail.

The Hokkaido power outage lasted for more than two days, and the company urgently gathered temporary power generation equipment from all over Japan, just to prevent the molten aluminum in the holding furnace from solidifying during the power failure.

Once high-temperature metal hardens inside the furnace, the loss is no longer just a few production shifts, but will expand to the cleaning and long-term repair of the entire set of equipment.

After this, Aisin increased its own power generation equipment and regularly conducted simulated power outage tests, determining the power supply priority order for furnace bodies, information systems, and key production facilities during power outages one by one.

The scope of disaster prevention thus expanded from walls, equipment, and pipelines to energy, work-in-progress, and even production data itself.

The way of shutdown is also becoming more refined.

On February 13, 2021, a sudden strong earthquake hit off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture. Toyota suspended 14 production lines at 9 plants in Japan. RAV4, Harrier, Land Cruiser, and multiple Lexus models were affected.

In March 2022, a strong earthquake hit off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture again. Toyota's 18 production lines at 11 plants in Japan were suspended. Crown, Mirai, RAV4, Harrier, Land Cruiser, and multiple Lexus models were affected again.

Unlike shutting down all Japanese assembly facilities together in the past, companies at this time were already able to subdivide the shutdown arrangement to specific plants, production lines, models, dates, and even shifts based on parts supply conditions.

Production lines where parts arrived normally continued to operate, and lines short of materials quietly waited for suppliers to recover. Each factory no longer had to be forced to stop and restart together at the same rhythm.

Japanese car companies will still shut down, but the probability of one supply cutoff dragging down the entire production system is decreasing.

Saving Equipment Ten Years Ago, Verifying Quality Ten Years Later

In July 2026, Aisin Kumamoto Plant once again neared the epicenter. The shaking on site was even more violent than in 2016, some water pipes burst on sound, but the factory building and major equipment did not suffer serious damage.

Aisin CFO Daisuke Kondo stated that seismic measures implemented after 2016 reduced the losses caused by this earthquake. Nearly 200 Aisin employees, customers, and partner enterprise personnel then entered the site and invested in recovery work.

Ten years ago, the starting point of recovery work was completely different.

In 2016, Aisin had to rescue molds and large equipment from damaged factories first; in 2026, major equipment was preserved, and the focus of recovery work had shifted to quality verification, logistics recovery, and supplier coordination.

The factory was still shut down, but the work content had changed. Ten years ago, the company first had to re-establish manufacturing capabilities; ten years later, major manufacturing capabilities were preserved, and on-site personnel could enter earlier for inspection, debugging, and trial production.

The reinforcement measures after 2016 did not eliminate shutdowns, but reduced direct damage and shortened the distance from the earthquake occurrence to starting production recovery.

Over the past thirty years, the first layer of change in the Japanese automotive supply chain was formed here: supply networks became more transparent, factories and equipment became more robust, key materials had more targeted inventory, and companies could also control shutdown scopes by production line rather than the entire company.

The second layer of change occurred outside Japan.

Overseas Plants Provide a Second Layer of Buffer

Domestic disaster prevention infrastructure eventually has physical limits. Faced with Japan's frequent geological disasters, in terms of macro strategy, the globalization of production capacity (such as the rise of India and Thailand bases) passively or actively became the highest level of "risk hedging".

Data from the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association shows that Japan's domestic motor vehicle production was 8.23 million units in 2024, down 8.5% year-on-year; in the same year, Japanese car companies' overseas vehicle production reached 16.48 million units, about twice the domestic production.

Overseas plants have long undertaken most of the car production for Japanese brands. In the past, these plants mainly served local markets; now, production bases in India and Thailand began to supply more models to the Japanese market, and the number of automotive reverse imports increased accordingly.

Suzuki Motor President Toshihiro Suzuki stated in January 2025 that India will become the global production base for Suzuki EVs, and the first EV, e Vitara, will be exported to Japan, Europe, and other markets.

Toshihiro Suzuki described this game as follows: "India's scale advantage is Suzuki's strength. We will fully utilize this advantage to provide high-quality and attractive products to markets such as Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Africa, and South and Central America."

Honda plans to use India as the production and export base for a new EV starting from 2027. Toyota, Honda, and Suzuki are also continuing to expand local investment. Lower labor costs, increasingly mature parts systems, and a huge local market jointly support this round of expansion.

The importance of Indian plants is not just about lower costs. When overseas bases can produce models for Japan and multiple countries, Japanese car companies gain greater space for production allocation.

But overseas plants are not mirror backups of Japanese factories that can be activated at any time.

Models produced in different factories, parts systems, dedicated equipment, and market specifications are not exactly the same. Shifting a car from Japan to be produced in India or Thailand still requires going through equipment preparation, supplier adjustment, quality confirmation, market certification, and logistics organization.

Therefore, global layout is difficult to solve the shutdown within days after an earthquake. It provides risk dispersion over a longer cycle: reducing enterprise dependence on a single production area, and allowing for the possibility of supplementing supply from other regions when some models are restricted from production in Japan.

Japanese domestic plants will not disappear for this reason.

Toyota announced in August 2025 that it will build a new vehicle plant in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, planned to start production in the early 2030s. This is the first time the company has built a new vehicle assembly plant in Japan proper since 2012.

At the same time, Toyota still maintains a long-term policy of annual production of about 3 million units in Japan, with about half used for export.

Nissan moves in the opposite direction. The company plans to stop vehicle production at the Tsu Plant before March 2028, transfer related output to Nissan Automotive Kyushu, and compress global annual capacity from 3.5 million units to 2.5 million units, reducing manufacturing bases from 17 to 10.

Tsu Plant started production in 1961 and has long been known as Nissan's "Mother Plant," cumulatively producing over 17.8 million cars. Before closing, it had about 3,900 employees. Nissan Japan plants have an average capacity utilization of only about 60%. After Tsu output is transferred to Kyushu, the company expects Kyushu plant's capacity utilization will rise to 100%.

A factory carrying memories of more than half a century is about to end vehicle production, while capacity concentrates on more efficient bases.

Toyota building new plants and Nissan closing plants look in opposite directions, but the logic behind them is interconnected: Japanese automotive manufacturing will not simply move entirely overseas, but will reallocate resources between local technical capabilities, production efficiency, and global capacity.

Overseas plants will undertake more mass-market models facing the Japanese and global markets; Japan proper will retain a large amount of vehicle production capacity, continuing to undertake export, high-end models, complex powertrains, and new process introduction.

Domestic and overseas are no longer just a choice of cost high or low, but gradually constitute two layers of supply chain resilience.

Thirty Years Have Passed

Over the past thirty years, the Japanese automotive supply chain has not become a network that will not break, but Japanese car companies have successively filled in several obvious gaps.

Dedicated equipment and molds still cannot be instantly replicated, precision production lines still need recalibration, and power, logistics, parts, and personnel still must be restored simultaneously. As long as automotive production continues to rely on highly specialized equipment and suppliers, earthquakes may still bring factories to a halt.

What truly changed is the way enterprises withstand interruptions.

The actual production location of suppliers has been entered into the database, so after an earthquake, it is not necessary to inquire layer by layer starting from Tier 1 suppliers; key chips have longer inventory, which can buy recovery time for damaged factories; factory buildings, equipment, and power systems have been reinforced so as not to start with rescuing molds and machines every time; shutdown arrangements can also be subdivided into specific plants, production lines, and shifts.

By 2026, Japanese car companies are already able to quickly locate affected suppliers, keep shutdowns within specific plants and production lines, and shift the focus of recovery to quality, logistics, and coordination under the condition that equipment is basically preserved.

Domestic plants rely on seismic reinforcement, supply chain databases, key inventory, and refined production management to shorten short-term shocks; overseas plants provide more long-term capacity dispersion for enterprises by undertaking more models.

The former allows car companies to stand up faster after earthquakes, while the latter reduces the production system's long-term dependence on a single region.

After thirty years, earthquakes will still force Toyota to stop and will also make Nissan assembly lines hundreds of kilometers away fall silent for not waiting for a part. But the Japanese automotive industry is clearer than before about where to start recovery and how to recover.

"Automotive Business Review" believes that in the era of intelligent electrification, when the dependence of cars on chips and precision electronics rises exponentially, the value of this "transparent supply chain" defense system exchanged by Japanese car companies for thirty years of earthquakes will be far greater than before.