Backgrounder: Scandals in Japanese manufacturing industry in recent years

A third-party independent investigation has recently revealed that Japanese automobile supplier Takata manipulated and falsified test data regarding its air bags, becoming another scandal of the Japanese manufacturing industry.

Takata is the main air bag manufacturer in Japan and the major supplier of most Japanese automobile manufacturers, and has exported its air bags to BMW and General Motors through its branch in Germany, with a world market share of approximately 20 percent.

Having caused over 100 deaths during the last decade, the defective air bags produced by Takata has led to a worldwide automobile recall from markets in North America, Europe, China and Japan.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Takata will recall 70 million defective air bags in the U.S. market by 2019, becoming the largest and most complicated automobile recall in U.S. history.

Actually, scandals are not rare in Japan's manufacturing industry, especially in recent years. Analysts say these scandals reflect the difficulty that the manufacturing industry is going through as Abenomics has failed to drag the country out of a prolonged recession.

The following is a list of major scandals in Japan's manufacturing industry since 2008:

On May 18, 2016, Suzuki, the second largest Japanese manufacturer of light vehicles, admitted that it had falsified the fuel-economy data regarding 16 types of vehicles sold in Japan, involving over 2.1 million vehicles.

On April 20, 2016, Mitsubishi Motors' President Tetsuro Aikawa admitted in a press conference that his company had manipulated the fuel-economy tests, which involved some 600,000 vehicles.

Scandals have also been revealed in Japan's household appliance industry, which has been struggling to maintain its market share in face of increasingly intense competition from rivals in China, South Korea and other countries after leading the country walk out of the shadows of World War II.

In July 2015, an independent investigation committee reported that Toshiba, a 140-year-old brand, had exaggerated profits in its report during the previous five years as of March 2014, a scandal believed to have caused a 360 million-U.S. dollar loss for the company in 2014.

In 2011, Olympus, a medical equipment and digital camera manufacturer, was found to have been cooking the books for 20 years to cover its 1.3-billion-dollar loss in other investment.

Scandals have also been exposed in other industries.

In June 2016, Japan's third largest steel manufacturer Kobe Steel said one of its subsidiary company had falsified test data of tensile strength regarding its stainless steel wire, in a bid to reduce defective products.

In October 2015, a department building developed by Mitsui Fudosan, a renowned real estate company, tilted, and investigations found that Asahi Kasei, the construction company hired by Mitsui Pudosan, had used insufficient and substandard concrete in the construction of the building.

In 2008, one subsidiary company of Kobe Steel was reported to have not run tests required by the Japanese government on its products before shipment. Endi