System Kaizen behind the Type 32 Gunto production of the 1930s
System Kaizen behind the Type 32 Gunto production of the 1930s
The Kaizen Spirit
One bewildering aspect of the historical research I do into IJA equipment and weaponry is that all that I read in prewar documents sounds so familiar to me, evoking a sense of déjà vu as if I even know what comes next without reading further. That is because my professional experience and training in the Japanese manufacturing industry is largely overlapping with the know-how already present in the industrial state of the 1930s and 40s.
As an instructor in Toyota’s production know-how called TPS (Toyota Production System), I have generally explained to my class how this was mostly a system developed postwar. That was what I myself had come to believe through the training given me by my predecessors at Toyota. But the last few years of studying the IJA’s system of product development and production control have revealed to me that the core of what we call TPS today was already ever present within the lifeblood of the IJA and prewar industry.
Back in the days of the Model 25 Cavalry Sword, the IJA indeed still did not have the TPS knowhow known today as Heijunka, a method that would have allowed a wide variety of sword types to be produced simultaneously without causing the logistical chaos Japan experienced in the Sino-Japanese War. This Heijunka or levelling of production flow is one integral component of the Just-in-Time lean production system, which was indeed a postwar development. However, the core driving force behind the creation of TPS is the spirit of Kaizen (Continuous Improvement), an instinct-like knack for identifying areas in your job-flow that can be improved for higher efficiency.
At Toyota when asked by your superior whether you were having problems in dealing with your work, to answer “No problem, Sir” is highly taboo, as that was seen as tantamount to snoozing on the job. Continuously identifying problems and analyzing its root cause and implementing countermeasures is a duty everyone takes for granted whether you worked on the shop floor, building the cars or whether you were in the showroom selling them.
Human nature is to accept job procedures handed down to you from predecessors backed by scores of years of their experience simply as the best there can be and mindlessly apply yourself to it. However, this does not happen at Toyota, as workers are trained to stay on ones toes and identify problems in three crucial areas. The “3Ms” they call it, and they stand for (1) Muda/Wastefulness, (2) Mura/Inconsistency and (3) Muri/Stressful or Difficult.
The Just-In-Time lean production system was simply born as a postwar developed countermeasure for root causes that triggered problems in one or more of these 3Ms.
This process of identifying a problem, analyzing the root cause and implementing countermeasures is called Kaizen and, as this cycle is run as a perpetual cycle of refinement, Kaizen is thus translated as "Continuous Improvement System".
And the beauty of this system is that such countermeasures developed and discovered are widely shared within the company, not hoarded by the individual as a secret skill, as is often the case in western manufacturing cultures. This is done by sharing the whole process as a Kaizen report that gets published periodically and distributed within the company. Those in other areas, sharing similar problems take hints from these case studies and this creates a knock-on effect that goes company wide.
The IJA's Kaizen Initiatives
What I found was that the IJA Arsenals were already doing this since the 1920s and publishing the results for internal propagation of newly developed know-how. I will show such case studies below by focusing on production improvements implemented for the Type 32 Army Gunto as an example. I could do the same with Type 38 rifles or the Nambu 14 pistols, for that matter, as there are hundreds of such reports in the archives for those weapons, too, but I thought the Type 32 could use some more exposure on this forum, as a sword I have not featured yet in any depth.
The case study publications I picked out range from 1927 to 1936, but instead of showing them by year, I will show them by theme, namely the part of the sword being improved.
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