TOYOTA CITY, Japan — Even amid countless moving parts, not far from where robots use lasers to weld together Priuses and Camrys, where multicolored car doors clatter by, suspended from tracks overhead, and heavy air conditioners roll past as if by magic, the jingling melodies stand out on the floor of Toyota's Tsutsumi plant.

They’re pleasant and, as a result, jarring — an intentional dissonance that, like everything here in the industrial nerve center of the automaker’s global empire, serves a unique purpose.

The sound, as Toyota factory workers from San Antonio to Thailand can tell you, is a signal that something is amiss. The melodies tell you that somewhere on the assembly line a human has encountered a problem that requires human intervention. In some ways, they’re also a monument to the things that have made Toyota the world’s largest automaker — its reverence for tradition, its human-centered approach to innovation.

Over the decades, Toyota’s production system has grown into a vaunted example of manufacturing consistency, churning out more than 9 million cars annually, and Toyota emphasizes the seemingly small contributions of workers.

Last year, employees submitted 635,000 ideas for improving their processes, many of which will be implemented companywide, a tour guide at Tsutsumi said. She pointed out a worker pulling tools from a dolly that had been synchronized with the car body he was working on as it moved down the assembly line — that was somebody’s idea.

But now, as Toyota faces a tech-disrupted future, those same qualities could become liabilities.

Demand for new cars is expected to keep sliding, and it’s unclear how traditional automotive companies will fit into a world in which the software running a vehicle will be just as important as its

. At the same time, radical changes to the global economy are forcing corporations like Toyota to rethink the way they make decisions.

Toyota's president, Akio Toyoda, has framed the problem as nothing short of existential.

"The automotive industry is now hurtling into an era of profound transformation, the likes of which come only once every 100 years," he told investors and reporters earlier this year. "With even our rivals and the rules of competition also changing, a life-or-death battle has begun."

Sakichi and Kiichiro

Spend a couple of days touring Toyota’s facilities around Aichi prefecture, and you’re bound to hear about Sakichi and Kiichiro. And you’ll start to understand how the ethos they represented is woven into the fabric of an automaker that employs about 70,000 people in Japan and 369,124 worldwide — including several thousand in North Texas.

Sakichi Toyoda, the story goes, founded a loom-making business on the strength of his ingenuity, his problem solver’s spirit.

A tour guide at a factory-turned-museum in Nagoya showed off the machines Sakichi Toyoda made, highlighting what the guide described as their world-changing innovations: shuttles that moved automatically, a system that physically stopped the loom if a thread broke.

Across an airy, brick-lined lobby, an exhibit tells the story of Sakichi’s son, Kiichiro, who visited America in the late 1920s, when cars were first becoming a common sight, and came back with the singular conviction that Japan needed to make its own automobiles.

A diorama of the shop where he directed a small, secret team to create Toyota’s first car, the Model AA, illustrates the close quarters and the sheer nothingness from which Kiichiro was able to forge the beginnings of the Japanese auto industry.

Decades later, Japan's ability to turn out cars has become so dominant that it once sparked a racist attack by American autoworkers facing competition from Japanese imports, and more recently, it has inspired fighting words from President Donald Trump.

But that’s not what you’re supposed to take away from the story of father and son.

Instead, it's meant to show how, using knowledge gleaned from employees' on-the-ground experiences, a business can continuously improve itself — or, to use Toyota's term, practice kaizen.

Just as Sakichi constantly tweaked his looms to make them ever more efficient, his great-grandson Akio Toyoda likes to say that Toyota should strive to make “ever-better cars.”

So how do you do that when you don’t know how much longer traditional passenger cars will be around?

“Ultimately in transportation, no matter how much technology you incorporate into it, there still has to be this physical part,” said Sam Abuelsamid, a senior research analyst and mobility expert with Navigant Research. “But they have to evolve the business model in order to stay relevant.”

A time to partner

Toyota has built its reputation on its ability to produce high-quality vehicles on an unprecedented scale. Unlike many of its American, European and Japanese competitors, who have embraced big partnerships (think the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi or Fiat Chrysler), Toyota has done it largely in-house.

But at this industrywide inflection point, that may have to change.

Michelle Krebs, an executive analyst with Autotrader, said automakers "are going to have to partner with tech companies and financial institutions they’ve not had relationships with before.”

And with the trend just getting started, the end point is anybody’s guess.

Experts widely acknowledge that individual car ownership is on the decline, but even if the cars don’t need drivers, people and stuff will still need to be moved around somehow.

“Nobody knows if we’re going to sell more or less vehicles in the autonomous future,” Krebs said.

She said some experts predict that by the middle of the next decade, half the vehicles on the road will be owned by fleets.

Toyota has announced high-dollar partnerships with many of the same tech companies that Akio Toyoda now sees as likely rivals, including Uber, Amazon and the Chinese ride-sharing app company DiDi — partnerships that not long ago would have been almost unheard-of for a company that had kept largely to itself when it came to research and development.

Executives say the relationships are mutually beneficial. Carmakers can use tech companies’ expertise in building software platforms and artificial intelligence, while tech companies can benefit from Toyota’s manufacturing know-how and capacity to gather huge amounts of data from vehicles that are actually out on the road.

Does that mean Toyota is betting on those kinds of partnerships in order to survive in the long term? Or do executives view those as stopgap measures as Toyota prepares to compete on its own, using in-house engineers and researchers?

“We have just started promoting these kinds of partnerships, so, honestly speaking, I don’t think we know what the future will be in terms of relationships with tech companies — whether or not we can peacefully coexist,” said Toyota Motor Corp. spokesman Maki Niimi. "But Akio Toyoda has been saying that as long as we have the same purpose of making society better or making mobility better for society, we’ll be able to have a good relationship and create new value.”

This is all taking place as Toyota, one of Japan’s largest and most prestigious employers, contends with dwindling labor and a Japanese corporate culture that’s in flux.

Changing the work culture

As in the United States, Japan's working population is aging, which economists have long said would make it hard for both economies to grow. Birth rates have fallen and not enough immigrants are arriving to replenish the workforce.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made attempts to reverse the trend. He's implemented measures that are often referred to as "womenomics" — efforts to boost the participation of women in the workforce — to mixed results.

While women's labor force participation in Japan long lagged behind that in the U.S., by 2016 Japanese women's prime-age labor force participation had actually outstripped America's, a report by the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project found. However, the report also found that women in Japan worked greater shares of part-time or lower-paid, non-regular jobs.

Ai Hisano, a senior lecturer at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Economics, said changes have been slow.

“I think it’s becoming better,” she said, “but it depends on companies.”

The Japanese government has also loosened restrictions on foreign workers and established a corporate governance code aimed at making the growth of big companies "more sustainable." The code introduced measures to boost transparency in the choosing and firing of CEOs and to promote gender and ethnic diversity in the workforce.

Nevertheless, Nicholas Benes, who heads the Board Director Training Institute of Japan and proposed the idea of a such a corporate governance code in 2013, said Japan's thorniest economic challenge might stem from a key part of Japanese work culture that has long been seen as an asset: Once an employee gets a full-time job at a big company, it's rare for the worker to be fired. And historically, it's been uncommon for workers to move from one company to another.

That might seem to promote job security in a way that Americans might envy. But it also creates a kind of class system, in which workers who manage to fit into a rigid corporate hierarchy can have stable jobs for life while others — often women who decide to have kids, or “non-regular” contractors — struggle.

“It’s not a mobile labor market — not a lot of lateral hires,” Benes said. “You have one chance when you’re 22, or you could be second-class forever.”

Benes said that makes it tough to compete with American companies in fast-changing industries, which have more freedom to hire up or pare down staff as needed to experiment.

“In more and more industries, what you’re talking about is a faster pace of disruptive change,” he said. “It’s a mutating universe, not incrementally improving the same old technology and manufacturing processes.”

Kyoto University’s Hisano said that Japan could be moving in that direction as younger workers face less pressure to stay at the same company forever and as “companies themselves are more willing to hire mid-career people.”

Toyota may be in a better position to adapt than other Japanese giants, experts said — though there’s still a sense that guiding its culture is like trying to steer a very, very large ship.

A need to be nimble

The company prides itself on not having laid off any employees — not since Kiichiro had to cut factory workers in 1950, after which he resigned as penance. During the Great Recession, Toyota famously had workers at its San Antonio plant do community service rather than shut the factory down.

In Japan, living in dorms with other Toyota employees fresh out of the country's top universities has been a rite of passage for decades.

And 30 to 40 percent of Toyota’s Japanese factory workers graduate from a special manufacturing academy for high school-age youths, according to Hiromi Shioji, a Kyoto University economics professor who has visited Toyota plants in 18 countries.

At the Toyota Technical Skills Academy, they learn about the company's vaunted production system and compete in computer-aided design competitions, as well as join the band or play sports. They’re paid even as students, and graduates are guaranteed a job until they retire.

While that stability and sense of loyalty have helped make Toyota a career destination for both manufacturing and corporate workers, experts say there’s a growing recognition that Toyota needs to become more nimble — to be able to experiment and change direction without encountering layers of slow-moving bureaucracy.

Niimi, the spokesman, explained how in recent years Toyota has restructured the upper rungs of its corporate ladder as a way to speed up decision-making. But instead of centralizing operations, as Toyota's North American company has done with its "One Toyota" initiative, the company took steps to give more autonomy to executives around the world.

In 2013, Toyota appointed chief executive officers to its regional companies, including Jim Lentz as head of Toyota Motor North America and others in Africa and Latin America. Previously, those roles were held by Japanese leaders.

Kyoto University's Shioji said that Toyota's sudden-acceleration crisis, which played out in government hearings and the court of public opinion starting in 2009, served as a wake-up call. It culminated with Akio Toyoda himself testifying before the U.S. Congress on Feb. 24, 2010.

“At that time, [Toyota Motor North America] didn’t have the authority to recall vehicles,” he said.

Since then, Shioji said, the role of Toyota’s U.S. operations has been increasing, particularly with growing investment in research and development.

In 2014, Toyota moved its North American headquarters from Southern California to a brand new 100-acre site in Plano, where Lentz has become a visible member of Texas' powerful business community.

Benes, of the Board Director Training Institute of Japan, said that standardizing talent management across a company’s global footprint and giving employees a clear career path upward no matter their origin or gender will be crucial.

Still, he said, Toyota’s size and its experience working in the U.S., one of its biggest markets and one where vast human resources operations are already the norm at big corporations, will give it an edge.

“If anybody can get through these issues, Toyota is a very strong contender,” Benes said.

Today, a small cherry tree stands in a flower-filled garden surrounding the former home of Kiichiro Toyoda, which was moved to the grounds of a hall built to honor Toyota's 10 millionth vehicle in 1974. Next to the tree, a plaque reads, "Commemorating Toyota's New Start." It's dated Feb. 24, 2011.

Future-proofing

Toyota executives say that high-level restructuring is just one of a constellation of efforts aimed at transforming its business. Others include big bets on hydrogen fuel cells, the development of robots to help an aging population move around, and plans to showcase its E-Palette — its multifunctional concept vehicle — on an Olympic-size stage in 2020.

But one of the clearest glimpses of the future came in Tokyo at the temporary offices of a new company started with a $2.8 billion investment from Toyota. It's dubbed TRI-AD, or Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development, and as at the Plano-based Toyota Connected, working there is supposed to be different from working for the automaker.

The company has been charged with turbo-boosting Toyota's autonomous vehicle research and development. Its recently hired head, James Kuffner, who came from the TRI office in Silicon Valley, has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and worked at Google from 2009 to 2016.

On a recent late morning, Kuffner sat at his desk in a large, open room without cubicles in a gleaming Nihonbashi district tower attached to a Mandarin Oriental hotel, before moving into a bare conference room to talk about his plans.

The key to TRI-AD’s success, he said, will be its ability to take on the parts of big tech that have driven innovation, without taking on its baggage — its tendency to skirt ethical considerations in pursuit of profit, its problems with women. That means hiring the best engineers, whether they are from Silicon Valley, Europe or a Tokyo university.

Eventually, he said, TRI-AD will have about 1,000 employees.

Kuffner said that the new office, under construction across the street, will have all the trappings of trendy new work spaces, and that Toyota's amenity-rich Plano campus is serving as inspiration. Employees will also be able to work more flexible schedules. He said he likes the idea (borrowed from Google) of building in "TRI-time" for employees to work on passion projects outside their normal roles. Living is actually cheaper and easier in Tokyo than in the San Francisco Bay Area, he said — and the Japanese city has the best food in the world.

The company’s official language is English.

Ultimately, though, he said TRI-AD’s ability to compete will come down to the work.

U.S.-based tech giants might seem to have the upper hand in recruiting the brightest, most advanced artificial-intelligence researchers from American research universities, though TRI has already partnered with Stanford, MIT and the University of Michigan.

But the thing about Toyota, Kuffner said, is that its product is cars. And each one can collect massive amounts of real user data, which he sees as a resource that’s unprecedented in human history.

“Toyota is open about using technology for the public good,” he said. “We want to make a car that’s incapable of causing a crash.”

Kuffner said that if a computer science grad or mid-career AI researcher still isn’t persuaded to spurn Google or Facebook in favor of an automaker in Japan, he puts it another way.

“You can work on software that sells ads to people,” he said, “or you can build technology that saves lives.”

Reporting in Japan was made possible by a fellowship with the International Center for Journalists. Junko Takahashi, a Tokyo-based interpreter for the center, contributed reporting and translation, and Tomoko Ohashi, a Nagoya-based interpreter with Inter Group Corp., contributed translation to this report.