The Complete Meaning of Shitsuke

I agree completely that the Japanese terms should be used and I do so. However, in my practice, I’ve chosen to be more (dare I say) pragmatic if necessary. If a client’s leadership (leadership not shop floor) says they want to use English substitutes (note I did not say equivalents), then we go that way. I do not however leave out the origins of the term or approach in teaching moments (that is disrespectful to both the originator and the learner). To me, the philosophy and approach are more important than the terminology. That may be selling out or dumbing down, I’m not sure, but to do otherwise, seems to lack respect for the client.

We are all fiends here (I hope).

Thanks for the great blog.

I too am in agreement with using the Japanese terms. You lose too much in translation. The English translation can sometimes make someone loose the point of what we are trying to accomplish. For example, when I tell our team that we need to reduce the amount of waste, instead of muda that we have in the production cells, each member of the team could interrupt it differently. Some could think of waste in the process, but others cold be thinking about wasted energy, paper, or money. Yes, we should reduce all those things, but the focus was lost simply because we used the English word, instead of the Japanese word. I like the reference to “being humble”, too.

If they haven’t learned, you haven’t taught. The value is when students of this stuff adopt new behaviors. So to get them to adopt counterintuitive new behaviors you propose distracting them from the new behaviors with:

1. Words that begin with profanities that represent poop.
2. Words that are Japanese.

Frankly, you lost me at poop.

Plus in a year you are coming back and telling me you have found a new insight in the mystery word. So the fifth S has two meanings.

You couldn’t just have had 6 S’s to begin with? What am I paying you for?

A teacher who distracts her students from learning with this much self-indulgent waste has no business admonishing them about humility.

/rant

Thank you for the wonderful post. I have actually started to learn Japanese after getting into TPS.

-Harish

I’m the lean 6 sigma programme manager for a global company.

One advantage to using the Japanese terms is the uniformity across different languages. We now have Polish operators who do not understand English, but do understand Muda.

It’s not a definative argument for adopting Japanese Terms, but it is a useful tool.

Thank you very much, Sir, for your very enlightening sharing on Shitsuke. I really appreciate much your sharing this. I, too, am convinced on the productive merits of retaining the original Japanese words. In my sharing of 5S in our plant I normally make it a point that these Japanese words be somehow understood as to their real context. Seems like the substitutes or other language “interpretations” may not really suffice if really one intends to achieve a real understanding of these words. Also, retaining the Japanese words gives one a chance to initiate in his own a further discovery of the real meaning of the word. Thanks again, Sir.

I am genrally with you on the japanese words. You won’t hear me say we have to say policy deployment instead of hoshin kanri.” I say both.
However, I would suggest that that the people who read Deming, Henry Ford, and the US War Department’s TWI manuals obviously lacked ‘humility’ when they translated all this into Japanese. Your logic not mine. I don’t think it is a lack of humility to try to translate words in to the local language. It may lead to a lack of understanding in many cases. I don’t find it particularly arrogant to try to put something in terms that might be understood by the masses. I don’t think Ohno, or Shingo, or Kiichiro Toyoda were being arrogant when they took the good ideas of americans and translated them for their people.