Development of Industrial Engineering in Japan

Late nineteenth-century Japan was a rational shopper for models of administration, governance and technology.

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japanese governmental and industrial elites vigorously searched the West for new organizational models. Japan modelled its new navy after Britain, its army after Prussia and its judicial and police system after France. In the field of industrial management, Japanese attention focused on the Americal system of mass production and rational management (Greenwood and Ross 1982)

Taylor's Scientific Management was rapidely disseminated in Japan. Taylor's book was translated into Japanese in 1912, just a year after it was published in the United States, amd sold more than a million copies in a version revised for workers.

Enthusiastic exponents of Taylor's approach included Yoichi Ueno and Araki Toichiro. In 1921, the Industrial Efficiency Research Institute (Sangyo noritsu kenkyujo) was formed under Ueno's leadership to promote the methodology of scientific management.

In Japan, scientific management was positioned and practiced in a way that it emphasized building the employee skills and strengthening their preindustrial understanding of the craft. The notion of systematically improving the production techniques was accepted, while individualizing incentives like piece rates were rejected.

Japan's Industrial Efficiency Research Institute (Sangyo noritsu kenkyujo) under Yoichi Ueno's leadership was established within Kyochokai, the "Harmony and Cooperation Society'. This society was formed in 1919 by the state and leading corporations. Kyochokai conducted education and research aimed at the alleviation of labour conflict.

The Industrial Efficiency Research Institute 's emphasis was on increasing worker commitment and improving industrail training rather than on radical deskilling. The background of its first director, Yoichi Ueno, psychology could have brought in the change in emphasis.

The assimilation of Taylorism into Japan was done with a human relations frame which was different from that of US. For example, the Japanese National Railway was an early formal adopter of scientific management principles in the mid-1920s. It delayed implementation of motion study until 1929 in favor of group discussion and problem solving teams (Levine and Kawada 1980). Japanese version of scientific management led toward a personnel management system that combines rationalized production with participatory activities and themes of industrial harmony, a combination that reappeared after World War II in the Japanese quality movement.

Reference
The Oxford Handbook of Work and Organization, By Stephen Ackroyd, Published 2005,
Oxford University Press