>Japanese made products used to be synonymous to 'cheap' and 'poor quality.' It was not until July 1950 when Dr. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) introduced SQC to th

>Japanese made products used to be synonymous to 'cheap' and 'poor quality.' It was not until July 1950 when Dr. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) introduced SQC to the Japanese industry audience, using the trademark colored-beads experiment. >Eizaburo Nishibori, one of the country's post-war quality pioneers, describes in a book* the humble initial encounter to modern quality concepts that preceded Deming's historic 8-day seminar. >It was during American occupation of Japan (1945- 1952) when GHQ (offices of the Allied occupation) placed an order of vacuum tubes to Toshiba. Nishibori recalled the American officers wanted to see a 'control chart' from the manufacturing process being used to produce their order. No one at Toshiba knew what it was. "You don't know a control chart? How do you plan to manage quality?" Nishibori remembers replying, "If we, engineers at Toshiba, don't know it, most likely no one in Japan knows." http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html