TWI Abroad and in Japan

The previous section closed on a paradox: TWI reached extraordinary scale in U.S. war industry, then faded almost completely at home once the war ended. This section follows what happened next. When the government program shut down, the people who had run it kept going privately, carried the "J" programs abroad, and — most consequentially — helped install them in occupied Japan, where they took root far more deeply and lasted far longer than they ever had in the country that invented them.

By the end of this section, you should understand:

• how TWI was carried abroad after the war, and roughly how widely it spread,
• how it was introduced into occupied Japan around 1950–51, and by whom,
• how the Japanese government adopted and institutionalized it nationally, and
• why TWI's deeper, more lasting hold in Japan than in the United States is a central reason its story matters to anyone studying Japanese manufacturing.

1The program ends; the people keep going

When TWI was deactivated as a government agency in the fall of 1945, the demand for what it did had not gone away. Many of its former staff found that their services were still wanted, and they chose to continue offering TWI training on a private basis.

Two organizations matter for the rest of this story. The Training Within Industry Foundation was incorporated in New Jersey in 1946 by the people who had headed the wartime TWI service; its mission was unchanged — to keep training industry to be self-helping. Separately, TWI Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio, was formed by other former TWI people. Together with similar groups founded by ex-TWI staffers, these organizations took the "J" programs abroad after the war. Some of this work was sponsored by the U.S. government, some by the host country.

2TWI abroad

TWI's spread after the war was wide and, in places, remarkably persistent.

• Great Britain had actually received TWI at the peak of the war, in 1944. Its hold there was deep and long-lasting: by a 1969 account from a senior British official, TWI was Britain's most widely used supervisor-training scheme, sponsored and developed by his department for nearly a quarter-century, with more than a million supervisors having attended courses — and demand still growing.
• As part of the reconstruction of Europe, TWI programs were set up in France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
• New Zealand set up its own government-run TWI Service in 1947 and used it very widely at least into 1969 — across railways, the post office, the meat and wool industries, utilities, banking, grocery, and even the Treasury. New Zealand's service, with private industry, then carried TWI into many further countries, including Australia, New Guinea, Hong Kong, Fiji, Taiwan, Singapore, Western Samoa, Iraq, Uganda, and South Vietnam.
• Elsewhere the numbers were striking: over 3 million supervisors in Indonesia were TWI-certified in 1951–1953; about 1,000 Mexican supervisors from 50 plants in 1956–57; 5,000 Turkish supervisors from 100 companies by 1956; and 1,226 supervisors in Nepal in 1958.

The picture is of a program that, freed from its wartime sponsor, became a general-purpose tool for raising supervisory capability anywhere industry was being built or rebuilt. But of all the places it reached, TWI had its greatest effect on Japan, which embraced the "J" programs more wholeheartedly than any other nation.

3Into occupied Japan

The U.S. Occupation of Japan, under General Douglas MacArthur, ran from 1945 to 1952. Its broad aim was to replace wartime militarism with a more democratic system — but none of that could proceed unless Japanese industry, which by the end of the war was running at less than ten percent of its prewar level, was restarted first. Without a fast recovery, the Occupation authorities feared mass starvation and unrest.

Japan's shortage of trained supervisors was glaring. A 1949 Occupation Army memorandum described in-plant training as a haphazard, rule-of-thumb affair — a new worker put under an experienced one to pick up what skills he could — and judged such practices incompatible with high output. The conclusion was that improving technology and machinery would do little unless supervisors and workers were prepared to use them well.

Several members of MacArthur's staff had served in the War Manpower Commission and knew the TWI programs firsthand. They saw TWI as both well suited to training supervisors and aligned with the Occupation's larger goal of introducing more democratic practices into the workplace. Requests for proposals went out, and the Army received two bids: one from the TWI Foundation, one from TWI Inc. Although TWI Inc. bid considerably higher, it won the contract because its proposal was more comprehensive and long-term — in plain terms, TWI Inc. planned to trigger the multiplier effect, and the Foundation did not.

TWI Inc.'s president, Lowell Mellen, had been the wartime TWI District Representative for Northern Ohio. He brought three other specialists to Japan, all former wartime TWI instructors. They were to run Master Institutes in the three "J" programs — known in Japan as JIT, JMT, and JRT — with one American responsible for each, and the fourth specialist handling "plant installation," which was largely the work of selling TWI's value to top management.

A few practical obstacles colored the launch. With no time to translate first, the Americans had to teach in English, even though most of the operating personnel the programs targeted did not speak it; the manuals were translated into Japanese only after TWI Inc. departed. As had happened in the United States, labor unions were wary of the government's motives — fears that were eased by a British labor representative's account of TWI's help to both management and workers in Britain, by the backing of the International Labor Organization, and by careful explanation that the "J" programs aimed to make supervisors better, not to make workers work harder.

4Institutionalization: the multiplier, made national

This is the heart of the Japan story. In its roughly six months in Japan, TWI Inc. left behind only 35 certified Institute Conductors. From that small seed the multiplier did exactly what it was designed to do: the count of trained Japanese managers and supervisors reached over one million by 1966, and many millions more by the early 1990s. What made the difference was not the Americans' brief visit but the Japanese institutions that picked the programs up and sustained them.

A succession of bodies carried it:

• In 1948 the Labor Ministry created the Japan Employment Problem Association (JEPA) to administer and spread the TWI programs through Japanese industry and government. JEPA kept little long-run statistics, but for 1990 and 1991 it trained about 2,450 and 2,490 new TWI instructors, and graduate counts for those years are estimated near 66,700 and 64,000 based on the wallet-size TWI cards issued to every graduate.
• The Labor Ministry also licensed other bodies to run the courses — referred to in Japan simply as JI, JM, and JR — and to produce new instructors. Foremost among these by 1992 was the quasi-governmental Japan Industrial Training Association (JITA), created in 1955 by MITI and Nikkeiren (the employers' federation); from 1955 to 1992, JITA produced 18,292 new TWI instructors. Licensees also included roughly a third of Japan's prefectural governments and several training institutes.

The programs also spread through the management-training courses derived from them, which carried TWI's content into government and white-collar work:

• The Management Training Program (MTP), introduced by the U.S. Air Force in 1949, devoted more than half its content to the JM, JI, and JR courses; officially, 3,300 MTP instructors were produced and 1.2 million middle managers graduated after 1951.
• The Jinji-in Supervisor Training (JST) course — Jinji-in being the National Personnel Authority of the Japanese government — was adapted from MTP in 1952 for government administrators and is used across government and in banking and finance. As of 1992, Jinji-in had produced 38,912 JST instructors and certified a further 1.3 million managers.
• A further Tokyo Supervisor Training course, derived from JST, served middle managers in the Tokyo municipal government.

There was also a great deal of growth that never shows up in any tally. Companies routinely sent employees to official courses to be certified as instructors, then ran their own slightly modified versions in-house under different names — Canon required all 1,200 of its training staff to be TWI-certified and ran its versions about five times a year; Toyota ran its own version, called TTWI ("Toyota TWI"). Even the Justice Department adopted TWI in 1989 for vocational training and rehabilitation of prisoners. This intramural diffusion makes the true national total genuinely hard to document.

5Why Japan, and not home

Put the two halves of TWI's postwar life side by side and the contrast is hard to miss.

In the United States, TWI was a wartime emergency measure. When the emergency ended, so, largely, did the program — the government service was deactivated in 1945, and TWI faded from American practice even as the people who had run it had to take it private to keep it alive.

In Japan, TWI arrived at the start of a long reconstruction, was adopted as deliberate national policy, and was handed to permanent institutions — JEPA, JITA, Jinji-in, MITI-backed MTP — that kept producing instructors and graduates for decades. It was woven into government, finance, and major manufacturers, and it spawned a family of derivative courses that carried its content far beyond the factory floor. Where the United States used TWI for the duration of a war, Japan made it part of how a nation trains its supervisors and managers.

That difference is the reason this chapter sits in the middle of a guide written for a lean audience. Anyone trying to understand postwar Japanese manufacturing is, knowingly or not, looking at an industrial culture in which the disciplined development of the first-line supervisor was institutionalized at national scale — and a large part of that came from an American wartime program its own country had set aside. TWI did not become "the roots of lean" — that question is taken up in its own section — but it did become a permanent fixture of the soil in which Japanese manufacturing grew.

TWI was also not the only American current to reach postwar Japan. On a separate track, the statistical approach to quality — Walter Shewhart's control charts, carried over and taught by W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran — arrived in the same era and shaped Japanese industry deeply. That is a different lineage from TWI's practical work-method training — the Taylor–Gilbreth–Mogensen tradition that stands behind the "J" programs — and it has its own treatment in later learning sections.