The Role of Quality Control and Everyone’s Participation in Japan to Prevent Pollution During Last Five Decades

Abstract

Economic Growth in Japan after World War II was very remarkable and products from its manufacturing industry were widely accepted in the world market after productivity and quality of them were tremendously improved. On the other hand, Japan soon found itself in severe environmental deterioration, due to not being paid any attention to environment. However, that pollution from industry was removed rather promptly with help of quality control and everyone’s participation. Japanese economic growth depends much on the quality of products, which was improved initially by what was known by Statistical Quality Control (SQC), widely used in the U.S.A. Later on SQC was transformed to Total Quality Control (TQC) with small group activities named QC Circles by Japanese and with some modifications and/or from different approaches, Total Quality Management (TQM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), KAIZEN (improvement) and so on were created. These approaches were introduced and widely used among industries and other sectors in Japan as well as in other countries of the world. The basic philosophy which leads these approaches to success was everyone’s participation and continuous efforts for improvement. The aim of these methods were at first to improve quality and productivity, but emission of hazardous material was reduced quickly and environmental circumstances inside and outside of manufacturing sites were drastically improved as well by these activities. As the result, most of Japanese products are environment-friendly from manufacturing origin and have excellent Quality at the same time. In this paper, the philosophies of these TQC, TPM etc. and how they had effectively worked for pollution prevention and environmentimprovement will be discussed with supporting result data.