Design Engineering in Japan and the JSME Design and Systems Division

Abstract

When considering design engineering in Japan, we must refer to its economic position in the world. Japan has been a great economic nation in the past four decades. Japanese GDP was the second largest in the world, until the Chinese GDP surpassed it in 2011. Needless to say, manufacturing supported Japan’s economic growth. Japanese high-quality, low-cost products proliferated in the western markets in the 1980s. The world manufacturing circumstances in the 1980s influenced Japan’s trends in design engineering that appeared in the 1990s, for example, attention to design quality, concurrent engineering, and early-phases of the design process. One may consider quality function deployment (QFD) and the Taguchi method as symbolic of this trend. While developed independently in Japan in the 1960s, they were systematized in the USA in the 1980s and early 1990s, and then reimported from the USA to Japan in the 1990s and later. Following this period, the Japanese manufacturing industries experienced a lengthy severe recession starting in the 1990s, and they are still facing various difficulties with the increased globalization, aging population, and changing society and lifestyles.