WI Japan doesnt go to war with china 1937

Pays long term dividends for Japan. Their industry remains intact unlike everyone else in the world other than Canada and USA, so they are one of three industrial powers which haven't been bombed, so them become an export powerhouse.

So no reason for them to listen to Deming, or for him to even be in Japan, and they won't have brand new factories to do what they did OTL.

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."
Soon after this incident, the GHQ officers began giving lectures to their Japanese vendors, using QC books procured from their Washington D.C. office. Only two students attended at first, Nishibori from Toshiba and Nishio from NEC, with neither of them comprehending much of what was taught.
Later others joined, but a doubt lingered about the usefulness of QC and such seminars. "It looks like statistics, is QC statistics?" the students asked. This was the first time the Japanese ever heard of "Statistical Quality Control (SQC)." Nishibori remembered thinking, "Hmm, is this what Americans are doing now? How do I find out more?"
Meanwhile, another learning opportunity was set in motion by the same American GHQ. It was they who arranged Dr. Deming's first visit to Japan, to teach sampling methods to the post-war Japanese government that was about to conduct its first national census after the war. However, the cabinet level statisticians resisted the new idea and opted for an old fashioned 100% survey.

http://www.qfdi.org/newsletters/deming_in_japan.html

It's likely that Japan and 'shoddy' will limit export success in TTL
 
So no reason for them to listen to Deming, or for him to even be in Japan, and they won't have brand new factories to do what they did OTL.

It may well do fine; Japan had a really good education system. But presuming it will be OTL's Japan but better seems a real stretch.
 
It's likely that Japan and 'shoddy' will limit export success in TTL

From wiki:

Kiichiro Toyoda, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation, directed the engine casting work and discovered many problems in their manufacture. He decided he must stop the repairing of poor quality by intense study of each stage of the process. In 1936, when Toyota won its first truck contract with the Japanese government, his processes hit new problems and he developed the "Kaizen" improvement teams.

Concerning Kaizen (from Wiki):

The Toyota Production System is known for kaizen, where all line personnel are expected to stop their moving production line in case of any abnormality and, along with their supervisor, suggest an improvement to resolve the abnormality which may initiate a kaizen.

The cycle of kaizen activity can be defined as:

Standardize an operation and activities,
Measure the operation (find cycle time and amount of in-process inventory).
Gauge measurements against requirements.
Innovate to meet requirements and increase productivity.
Standardize the new, improved operations.
Continue cycle ad infinitum.

The quality of Japanese goods was going to increase, as they were implementing Lean Production before the war and shortly thereafter. Lean Production is essentially what gave the Japanese the edge and it was not borrowed from the US. It was a strictly Japanese philosophy (which has now been adopted by the west BTW) that arose from Japanese culture and contingencies (small factories, less capital to build gigantic monolithic plants like Ford was able to, etc.)
 
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