INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method as catalogued here was developed within Japanese industry, research, or practice.
Geography: Japan — the postwar manufacturers and their supplier networks, the national research programmes, the universities, and the craft and martial lineages that fed vocabulary and structure into them.
Time: 1868 to the present, from the Meiji reorganization onward, with the working mass falling between 1945 and 1995. The two clusters are distinct and the entry states which it belongs to: the production and quality methods built at Toyota and its imitators from 1948, and the national computing and AI programmes of 1982–1992 and their surrounding academic work.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- Development in Japan, or substantive Japanese extension of a method taken from elsewhere
- An attributable site: the firm, programme, or institute, and the problem it was set against
Not sufficient: A Japanese name attached to a method developed elsewhere. A Western account of Japanese practice, where the account is the contribution — that is a Western method about Japan. Cultural characterization of Japanese working life without a procedure.
Boundary: Two classes are admitted with the qualification stated in the entry's Origin. Methods taken from abroad and materially extended in Japan belong here when the extension is what the entry catalogues, and the entry must say what Japan added rather than only that Japan adopted it — behaviour-based AI is Brooks's subsumption architecture at MIT, and it is here for the Waseda, Sony, and Honda robotics that extended it; blackboard architecture is Stanford's HEARSAY-II, and it is here for the multi-agent manufacturing work built on it; case-based reasoning is Schank and Kolodner at Yale, and it is here for the Japanese case-library and similarity apparatus. Where nothing was added, the entry belongs to the tradition that produced it. Pre-Meiji craft and martial inheritance is admitted where an industrial practice carries it — shu-ha-ri comes from Noh and the martial ryūha and is here because the training procedure was taken up as one; the aesthetic doctrine it came from is not a method.