A geopolitical accident blocked Toyota’s foreign partnership, locking it into self-reliance.

Evidence

The outbreak of the Korean War led the U.S. government to frustrate international technical cooperation of the kind Toyota and Ford were about to agree on in June 1950 (Kamiya, 1976, pp. 71–72). In 1952–1953, when the company was no longer in crisis, Toyota, unlike the majority of the Japanese car makers, did not enter into a ‘tie-up’ with a Western automaker, despite an encouragement to do so from the Japanese government (Cusumano, 1985, p. 8). — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 189

Categorization

• QUESTION: How much of Toyota’s celebrated production system would have existed if the Korean War hadn’t killed the Ford tie-up?