By Kiko Itasaka, NBC News producer
More than 8 million Toyota owners had been waiting for an explanation and an apology. They were kept waiting for a reason -- saying sorry is no simple matter in Japan.
The art of expressing regret is very nuanced. There are different levels of saying sorry, ranging from a simple “excuse me” to “please accept my most humble regrets,” and these words are accompanied with bows of varying degrees. The degree of apology is often carefully considered.
On Tuesday, with heavily accented and carefully phrased English, Toyota’s president Akio Toyoda apologized for letting down his customers. It is not unusual for a Japanese executive to take responsibility. In fact it is very typically Japanese. Toyoda’s departure was to issue his statement in English. Normally a Japanese executive would speak in Japanese with simultaneous translation rather than be embarrassed by less-than-perfect English. Toyota is clearly desperate to reach out to its global audience and in particular, the huge American market.
Separately, in the Washington Post, Toyoda accepted that his company had let down their customers. “As president of Toyota, I take personal responsibility” he wrote. That is why I am personally leading the effort to restore trust in our world and in our products.” CONTINUED >>
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
KABUL - It was six in the morning on Oct. 3, 2009, when insurgents began their assault on Combat Outpost Keating, a remote area in Nuristan in eastern Afghanistan. The attack started with small-arms fire, but soon escalated as up to 300 militants -- it’s unclear exactly how many -- started to rush the outpost where two American platoons and a command element were positioned. Base commanders at Keating called for urgent air support. Insurgents were inside the wire. Parts of the outpost were on fire. If help didn’t come soon, the commanders said, COP Keating would be overrun.
Air support eventually did arrive at Keating and the attack was repelled, but eight American soldiers were killed.
A military investigation last week into the deaths offered harsh criticism. The investigation said commanders on the ground had become “complacent” with base security at COP Keating once they learned that the outpost scheduled to be closed. Military commanders in eastern Afghanistan had determined that COP Keating was of no real strategic or tactical value. In effect, the investigation blamed commanders for not continuing to adequately secure Keating once they knew U.S. troops would be leaving it.
“There were inadequate measures taken by the chain of command, resulting in an attractive target for enemy fighters,” the investigation said.
But why were U.S. troops still at COP Keating in October 2009, months after commanders decided to evacuate to outpost? Was it complacency that killed the soldiers, or delays in leaving the outpost in the first place?
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
TOKYO, Japan – I’ve always found Japanese press conferences to be infuriatingly polite.
And that’s initially how it seemed Thursday as we were ushered into a large conference hall at Toyota’s Tokyo headquarters for a presser called to unveil the company's much improved quarterly results.
It was packed, and soon highjacked by the recall crisis, putting beleaguered executives on the defensive, describing quality as their "lifeline." They revealed that the recalls would cost Toyota a staggering $2 billion in lost sales and costs to put right the gas pedal problems which have led to the recall of more than 8 million vehicles worldwide.
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| VIDEO: Hearts sinking in Toyota ci |
Just as I was beginning to enjoy it, Toyota called time. Thirty minutes had been allocated, and after precisely 30 minutes, that part ended. Then another executive in a grey suit took the hot seat to talk – for exactly 30 minutes more – about new problems, this time with Toyota’s best selling hybrid, the Prius.
The Prius problem is a brake problem, and involves dozens of complaints about inadequate braking on bumpy or frozen roads. It doesn’t appear to be on the scale of the gas pedal recalls, although the company plans to recall 270,000 of its Prius hybrid in Japan and the U.S., according to a report by the Nikkei News Service. However, on Thursday afternoon, a spokesperson at Toyota's U.S. sales division said he did not have any information about Toyota's decision to recall the Prius.
Still, Prius’ woes have a broader significance – the hybrid is the jewel in Toyota's crown, and these cars were made in Japan.
Until now, there has been a real tendency here to see the quality problems as a foreign problem. Several times I've been told, "This could never happen in Japan."
Toyota here is more than a car company – it’s a national icon. Only last week it was named as Japan’s best known and most valuable global brand.
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By Peter Jeary, NBC News
A celebrated British soccer coach once claimed some people thought the game was a matter of life and death: "Listen," he said, "it's more important than that." In some ways, that sums up how I feel about my special relationship with chocolate, and Cadbury’s chocolate in particular.
Cadbury has been one of the cornerstones of Britain’s confectionary industry for more than a century. I grew up with Cadbury chocolate; its TV commercials and advertising slogans ("Everyone’s a fruit and nut case"), its new product launches and most importantly its delicious creamy taste: there's nothing quite like the taste of Cadbury's chocolate. In blind tastings (common in the Jeary household), I can still pick out Cadbury's from other brands.
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| Courtesy Cadbury media |
| Cadbury's "Dairy Milk" bar is one of it's classic products. |
So to hear Cadbury is to be taken over by Kraft Foods sends a sugar rush from my taste buds to my waistline.
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By NBC News' Ed Flanagan
A favorite myth that pops up around this time each year is that the Super Bowl has a global audience of 1 billion people.
But if the National Football League has its way, Chinese football fans could turn that fiction into fact someday.
In a country where American sports imports have had mixed results – basketball being the noticeable exception – the NFL has been quietly trying to build a Chinese fan base over the past few years.
While Major League Baseball is trying to catch up to the National Basketball Association in China by
creating a generation of baseball players through large-scale school programs, the NFL has taken a different approach. The league has invested heavily in social media and is reaching out to fans through China’s preferred mediums: television and the Internet.
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By Eric Baculinao, NBC News Beijing Bureau Chief
BEIJING – China’s crackdown on organized crime and government corruption is reaching a climax with the start today of the trial of the former senior police officer of Chongqing on charges of corruption, rape and protecting criminal gangs.
The high-profile investigation, which began last summer, has captivated the nation due to its gripping tales of top-level corruption, sex and a violent underworld that controlled businesses and sowed terror in Chongqing, a city of 30 million people, chosen by Beijing in 1997 to lead the economic take-off of the poor southwestern hinterland.
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| AP |
Wen Qiang, 3rd from left, his wife Zhou Xiaoya, left, and three other senior former Chongqing policemen stand trial in a courtroom in Chongqing on Tuesday.
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So far, the campaign has resulted in 782 prosecutions, including 87 city officials, the police chiefs of six districts and several tycoons.
The clampdown has won popular support, although there is some skepticism about how far Beijing will go in striking at the roots of corruption across China.
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By Robert Bazell, NBC’s chief science and health correspondent
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – "I have never seen anything like this," said Dr. Neville Duncan an obstetrician from Milwaukee donating his time at Port-au-Prince General Hospital.
Duncan a gray-haired man with decades of medical experience was not referring entirely to the effects of the earthquake. He was talking about the many distressed baby deliveries he has had to attend since his arrival here. Most Haitian women are undernourished and few get any prenatal care. The earthquake has left many women extremely dehydrated as well. As a result, they often deliver babies that are sick, premature or both.
The tent now serving as a delivery ward at the city’s public hospital is far more often a place of sorrow than of joy. If mother and the newborn are fortunate to be healthy enough to leave the hospital these days after delivery, they usually return to one of the tent cities with terrible sanitation and the attendant risk of infection.
Port-au-Prince General Hospital has come a long way from the hellish place I visited a week ago. Armies of volunteer physicians, nurses and medics from the U.S. and other countries are now running an efficient system to treat some 400 patients a day in what has become a medical city of real tents – not the rags which serve as most people’s home. But there are still crucial shortages of supplies and there is a constant struggle to get critically ill or injured patients placed aboard the USNS Comfort just off shore or to some other hospital with means of treating them. The dispute over taking patients to the U.S. has only made the task more difficult
No one has accurate records of how many surgeries, including amputations, have been performed throughout the country since the earthquake. Some estimate there could be up to 5,000 new amputees. When they are well enough to leave the hospital they, too, must return to the unsanitary camps. Unfounded rumors of outbreaks of all sorts of diseases in the camps are spread day after day. No one doubts that an outbreak may happen soon, but there is currently no system in place to monitor the danger.
And perhaps the biggest challenge of all, there is no way to consider the health of post-earthquake Haiti without addressing its pre-earthquake poverty.
Click here for complete coverage of the Earthquake in Haiti
Marines are working tirelessly to deliver food, water and medical supplies to Haitians who are still desperate for help. NBC's Amna Nawaz reports from Haiti.
As the U.S. looks to train Afghan police and soliders at a faster pace, trainers are being forced to compromise on quality, and at times, safety. NBC News' Jim Maceda reports.
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By Peter Jeary, NBC News
LONDON – At first glance, it looks like the partial remains of an ancient mosaic or the garble of an out-of-order digital billboard. Then the scale of the work grabs your attention: It sprawls across three walls of a gallery in London’s trendy Chelsea district, stretching more than 40 yards.
Like many works of art, the totality of "American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq and Afghanistan (but not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghanis)," is revealed by standing back. But in Emily Prince’s installation each tiny piece of the mosaic is an artwork in itself – 5,158 portraits that chronicle the men and women of the American armed forces who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
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| Peter Jeary/ NBC News |
| The art installation at the Saatchi Gallery. |
Each portrait, on a piece of card four inches by three inches, has been rendered by Prince from photographs used in on-line obituaries. Where no portrait was available, a blank white card with a name is used instead. The portraits are pencil sketches, with the cards themselves color-coded to depict the racial diversity of the fallen: light brown, dark brown, yellow, off-white. Some of the cards contain brief biographical details of the subject, others just carry their name, hometown, age and the date they died.
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