489 Japan’s post-war economic success: Deming, quality, and contextual realities

Deming in Japan
Deming first arrived in Japan in 1947 to assist the “US occupation forces
prepare for the 1951 census. While there he met and socialized with a number of
members of Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), Japan’s most
important quality control organization, founded in 1946” (Bowles and
Hammond, 1991, p. 37). In 1950, Deming was invited as a dinner speaker to
Tokyo’s Industry Club by Ichiro Ishikawa, the president of the Federation of
Economic Organizations whose membership comprised more than 750 large
organizations. The message Deming delivered to Japan’s post-war industrial
leaders was “that they – management – were the problem, and that nothing
would get better until they took personal responsibility for change” (Bowles
and Hammond, 1991, p. 38).
Until this time, Japanese management, like their US counterparts,
traditionally placed about 85 percent of the responsibility for quality control on
line managers and engineering staff with the remaining 15 percent focused on

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Japan’s post-war
economic
success
491
the workers themselves. The essential message being communicated to the
Japanese by Deming was the 
reversal of the 80-15 formula. Instead of having quality control being primarily the
responsibility of a few managers, or desk engineers isolated from the shop floor, the opposite
should prevail. Quality control should be built into the structure of job tasks and worker
management relations. All hierarchical levels – shop floor workers, foremen, middle
managers, top management – should be exposed to statistical process control techniques.
Continuous training and discussions should be the norm, based on seminars, study groups,
and lectures (McMillian, 1985, p. 162).
Post-war Japanese industrial policy evolved as a skillfully planned and
beautifully executed program that represented the fruits of
industrial/government cooperation and partnership without precedent in a
Western-style democracy. The pre-war realization that foreign trade was critical
to the survival of a nation bereft of the natural resources necessary to sustain its
population or large-scale industrial activity was central to its post-war efforts.
In fact, the importance of government and industrial cooperation to economic
recovery was recognized by the occupation forces, which began to discern that
the zaibatsu[2] organizations, and their post-war counterparts the keiretsu,
would play a vital role in the rapid reindustrialization of Japan.
US industry’s remarkable shortsightedness also figured in Japan’s industrial
emergence. Licensing advanced US technologies to Japanese manufacturers,