ABSTRACT
Improvement means the elimination of waste, and the most essential precondition for improvement is the proper pursuit of goals. Eliminating waste means improving procedures that are too broadly or generally defined in terms of goals. It means asking why at every opportunity. The O Automobile plant was plagued by the problem of how to deal with electrodeposition coating liquid that was foaming and spilling out of a vat. The bubbles were eliminated when shop technicians sprayed an antifoaming agent on them, but this took a great deal of time and was costly. A die casting plant carried out casting in three back-to-back shifts. The night-shift crews loaded items onto pallets and placed them in temporary storage areas, and the next day female part-time workers used presses to shear off sprue and flash. Takuma was born in Kishu, some 90 kilometers south of Osaka, and inherited work of logging on family land in the second and third decades of this century.
