[Characters for Day, Moon, Fire, Water, Sheep, and Horse evolving over millennia, as posted by Ida Speyer on the Hutong School site]
Searching for deep meaning in Kanji within technical terms in the Toyota Production System is futile. Words evolve over time, and their current meaning is found in how people use them, not in the origins of their components.
Chinese characters, “Kanji” in Japanese, have fascinated me since I started learning Mandarin in 1971. But I didn’t get to China until 2002. When I arrived in Japan in 1977, I remembered about 100 Kanji and how to find them in a dictionary through radicals and stroke counts. It was like finding a wildflower in a field guide by counting petals. This background gave me a leg up in learning Japanese.
Kanji are the oldest script in use today, used by close to 20% of the world’s population. They are based on a different concept of writing than the alphabets, abugidas, and syllabaries that the other 80% use. And they are uniquely beautiful.
A calligraphed line in a woodblock printing draws our attention even if we can’t read it and all it says is the name of a mountain pass. It blends with the art and balances its composition in a way that text in the Latin alphabet never has, as in this Toyokuni print with snow, part of a series on three beautiful women, gifted to me by Susumu Mukai:
Written communication across dialects
In principle, a Kanji expresses a meaning and not a sound, and it is understood the same way by people who speak different dialects in China, or different languages like Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese that have adopted this foreign script for most of their history. If you show the Kanji for water to any literate person from Hokkaido in northern Japan to Yunnan in Southern China, they will understand you.
Korea has moved on to Hangul, an alphabet created in the 15th century, and Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet in 1906, but Japan still uses Kanji alongside two syllabaries and the Latin alphabet, for an exceptionally heterogeneous script.
The appeal of a logographic script is that it enables written communication between people who speak different languages. It is as if, once written, French and Russian came out the same. European traffic signs and the controls of appliances and car dashboards are designed in this spirit, to be understood from Poland to Portugal. I have proposed to call these signs euroglyphs.
Etymology, shmetymology!
I see posts on LinkedIn today searching for a deep meaning in the Kanji in some technical terms used in the Toyota Production System. It is futile. We shouldn’t make too much of the meaning of individual characters. They only matter when you are trying to memorize spelling.
Kanji were combined long ago into words whose meanings have evolved and cannot be guessed by parsing their constituent characters. It’s no different with the Greek and Latin roots we mashed together to designate abstractions.
Misleading etymology of Toyota terms
There are many examples beyond the following four.
Jishuken (自主研)
At Toyota, for example, the organization calls improvement activities “Jishuken” (自主研). Based on the Kanji, it means “autonomous study,” but anyone who has participated in it can tell you it’s far from just studying. It started in the early 1970s as autonomous study groups, but it morphed into making proposals and then implementing them. The name stuck, but its etymology is no help in understanding what it means. Dave Condinho recently posted on this very subject.
Kaizen (改善)
To understand Kaizen (改善), don’t waste your time breaking it down into 改 and 善 and researching what each one means separately. Instead, study the usage of this word in Japan. You find its meaning, as deep as you want to get, in how people use it, not where it comes from.
Muri (無理)
Living in Japan, you learn that Muri (無理) means “impossible,” in the social sense. It applies to something that isn’t done or that a person deems unreasonable. It’s distinct from impossible as violating the laws of physics, which would be Fukano (不可能). Never mind what the individual characters mean. Just focus on usage.
Heijunka (平準化)
I showed the Japanese word Heijunka (平準化) to Chinese managers. They knew what all the Kanji meant and pronounced it “píngzhǔnhuà,” but it’s not a word in Mandarin, and they couldn’t make sense of it. They pointed out to me that, to them, the Japanese word for emergency exit, Hijǒguchi (非常口) meant “exceptional mouth.” Again, never mind the characters; focus on the usage!
Misleading etymology in English
In English, before making words out of acronyms like radar, laser, awol, or fubar, we used Greek and Latin roots to make words like biology, tetralogy, agoraphobia, andragogy, or orchidoclast. But we don’t spend our time parsing them into their components, because it is misleading.
Catharsis (καθαρσις)
We also borrowed complete words from Greek and changed their meaning. A Greek hotel form told me that having a catharsis meant doing the laundry. After noticing catharsis (καθαρσις), I started looking for familiar roots in signs, labels, and restaurant menus. To us, the amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain; in Greek, an amygdala (αμυγδαλα) is an almond.
Paradigm (παράδειγμα)
“Paradigm” (παράδειγμα) is not something that shifts but a pattern to be replicated. The archeological museum at Epidaurus contains what it describes as the paradigm of the Corinthian capital, which was copied every time one was made and put on top of a column. Take that, Thomas Kuhn!
Andragogy
Sometimes, our use of Greek roots is downright bizarre. German educator Alexander Kapp called the science of adult education “andragogy,” as opposed to “pedagogy” for children. But the “andr-” root is for males, not adults. Ancient Greek actually has no gender-neutral word for adult. The men’s room on a Greek boat was marked “Andron” (Ανδρον); the women’s room, “Gynekon” (Γυνεκον). That makes “andragogy” the science of male education, not adult education. Yet the word is in use in the literature, with a meaning at odds with its etymology.
What’s wrong with logographic scripts
Most of the human race has opted to use symbols for sounds rather than meaning. The reason is obvious: logographic scripts take too long to learn. Knowledge of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt was limited to scribes who devoted a lifetime to it, but Japan has universal education and claims a 100% literacy rate. I assume it means that the entire adult population has mastered 2136 Kanji, two syllabaries of 46 characters each, and the Latin alphabet. Japanese schoolchildren keep learning characters until age 15! In countries that use the Latin alphabet, students know their letters by the end of 1st grade, at age 6.
It should provide an enormous educational advantage, but it’s only true with phonetic spelling. Many countries fritter away this advantage by sticking with complex spelling rules that take as long to learn as thousands of Kanji.
Conclusion
In the personal and professional lives of Japanese people, their script is just a script. It’s what they use to communicate. In manufacturing, it’s about products, processes, machines, suppliers, planning and scheduling, quality management, etc. When we read or translate documents, what matters is rendering their meaning accurately, based on how they’re used. It is enough of a challenge. Just because they use Kanji doesn’t mean we should look to them for a deeper meaning that isn’t there.
Aug 15 2026
Japanese manufacturing terms: focus on usage, not kanji!
[Characters for Day, Moon, Fire, Water, Sheep, and Horse evolving over millennia, as posted by Ida Speyer on the Hutong School site]
Searching for deep meaning in Kanji within technical terms in the Toyota Production System is futile. Words evolve over time, and their current meaning is found in how people use them, not in the origins of their components.
Contents
A beautiful script
Chinese characters, “Kanji” in Japanese, have fascinated me since I started learning Mandarin in 1971. But I didn’t get to China until 2002. When I arrived in Japan in 1977, I remembered about 100 Kanji and how to find them in a dictionary through radicals and stroke counts. It was like finding a wildflower in a field guide by counting petals. This background gave me a leg up in learning Japanese.
Kanji are the oldest script in use today, used by close to 20% of the world’s population. They are based on a different concept of writing than the alphabets, abugidas, and syllabaries that the other 80% use. And they are uniquely beautiful.
A calligraphed line in a woodblock printing draws our attention even if we can’t read it and all it says is the name of a mountain pass. It blends with the art and balances its composition in a way that text in the Latin alphabet never has, as in this Toyokuni print with snow, part of a series on three beautiful women, gifted to me by Susumu Mukai:
Written communication across dialects
In principle, a Kanji expresses a meaning and not a sound, and it is understood the same way by people who speak different dialects in China, or different languages like Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese that have adopted this foreign script for most of their history. If you show the Kanji for water to any literate person from Hokkaido in northern Japan to Yunnan in Southern China, they will understand you.
Korea has moved on to Hangul, an alphabet created in the 15th century, and Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet in 1906, but Japan still uses Kanji alongside two syllabaries and the Latin alphabet, for an exceptionally heterogeneous script.
The appeal of a logographic script is that it enables written communication between people who speak different languages. It is as if, once written, French and Russian came out the same. European traffic signs and the controls of appliances and car dashboards are designed in this spirit, to be understood from Poland to Portugal. I have proposed to call these signs euroglyphs.
Etymology, shmetymology!
I see posts on LinkedIn today searching for a deep meaning in the Kanji in some technical terms used in the Toyota Production System. It is futile. We shouldn’t make too much of the meaning of individual characters. They only matter when you are trying to memorize spelling.
Kanji were combined long ago into words whose meanings have evolved and cannot be guessed by parsing their constituent characters. It’s no different with the Greek and Latin roots we mashed together to designate abstractions.
Misleading etymology of Toyota terms
There are many examples beyond the following four.
Jishuken (自主研)
At Toyota, for example, the organization calls improvement activities “Jishuken” (自主研). Based on the Kanji, it means “autonomous study,” but anyone who has participated in it can tell you it’s far from just studying. It started in the early 1970s as autonomous study groups, but it morphed into making proposals and then implementing them. The name stuck, but its etymology is no help in understanding what it means. Dave Condinho recently posted on this very subject.
Kaizen (改善)
To understand Kaizen (改善), don’t waste your time breaking it down into 改 and 善 and researching what each one means separately. Instead, study the usage of this word in Japan. You find its meaning, as deep as you want to get, in how people use it, not where it comes from.
Muri (無理)
Living in Japan, you learn that Muri (無理) means “impossible,” in the social sense. It applies to something that isn’t done or that a person deems unreasonable. It’s distinct from impossible as violating the laws of physics, which would be Fukano (不可能). Never mind what the individual characters mean. Just focus on usage.
Heijunka (平準化)
I showed the Japanese word Heijunka (平準化) to Chinese managers. They knew what all the Kanji meant and pronounced it “píngzhǔnhuà,” but it’s not a word in Mandarin, and they couldn’t make sense of it. They pointed out to me that, to them, the Japanese word for emergency exit, Hijǒguchi (非常口) meant “exceptional mouth.” Again, never mind the characters; focus on the usage!
Misleading etymology in English
In English, before making words out of acronyms like radar, laser, awol, or fubar, we used Greek and Latin roots to make words like biology, tetralogy, agoraphobia, andragogy, or orchidoclast. But we don’t spend our time parsing them into their components, because it is misleading.
Catharsis (καθαρσις)
We also borrowed complete words from Greek and changed their meaning. A Greek hotel form told me that having a catharsis meant doing the laundry. After noticing catharsis (καθαρσις), I started looking for familiar roots in signs, labels, and restaurant menus. To us, the amygdala is an almond-shaped part of the brain; in Greek, an amygdala (αμυγδαλα) is an almond.
Paradigm (παράδειγμα)
“Paradigm” (παράδειγμα) is not something that shifts but a pattern to be replicated. The archeological museum at Epidaurus contains what it describes as the paradigm of the Corinthian capital, which was copied every time one was made and put on top of a column. Take that, Thomas Kuhn!
Andragogy
Sometimes, our use of Greek roots is downright bizarre. German educator Alexander Kapp called the science of adult education “andragogy,” as opposed to “pedagogy” for children. But the “andr-” root is for males, not adults. Ancient Greek actually has no gender-neutral word for adult. The men’s room on a Greek boat was marked “Andron” (Ανδρον); the women’s room, “Gynekon” (Γυνεκον). That makes “andragogy” the science of male education, not adult education. Yet the word is in use in the literature, with a meaning at odds with its etymology.
What’s wrong with logographic scripts
Most of the human race has opted to use symbols for sounds rather than meaning. The reason is obvious: logographic scripts take too long to learn. Knowledge of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt was limited to scribes who devoted a lifetime to it, but Japan has universal education and claims a 100% literacy rate. I assume it means that the entire adult population has mastered 2136 Kanji, two syllabaries of 46 characters each, and the Latin alphabet. Japanese schoolchildren keep learning characters until age 15! In countries that use the Latin alphabet, students know their letters by the end of 1st grade, at age 6.
It should provide an enormous educational advantage, but it’s only true with phonetic spelling. Many countries fritter away this advantage by sticking with complex spelling rules that take as long to learn as thousands of Kanji.
Conclusion
In the personal and professional lives of Japanese people, their script is just a script. It’s what they use to communicate. In manufacturing, it’s about products, processes, machines, suppliers, planning and scheduling, quality management, etc. When we read or translate documents, what matters is rendering their meaning accurately, based on how they’re used. It is enough of a challenge. Just because they use Kanji doesn’t mean we should look to them for a deeper meaning that isn’t there.
#kanji
Share this:
Like this:
Related
By Michel Baudin • Management 0 • Tags: kanji