A three-hour oral history interview with taiichi-ohno conducted on July 16, 1984, by professors Koichi Shimokawa and Takahiro Fujimoto. The most extensive recorded account of TPS development in Ohno's own words.
Overview
The interview covers the full arc of TPS development — from Ohno's early experiments with multi-machine operation in the 1940s through the maturation of the system in the 1970s. The transcript preserves Ohno's spoken style, free of interpretation by the interviewers.
Key Content (from English excerpts)
On outsourcing strategy: Ohno advocated producing low-volume parts internally to drive cost reduction through continuous improvement, while outsourcing high-volume items suppliers could make economically.
On production layout: When assigned to machining, Ohno reduced operators from multiple people per machine to one operator managing several machines in sequence — deliberately accepting lower machine utilization to optimize overall flow.
On kanban's purpose: "The aim of kanban is to make troubles come to the surface and link them to kaizen activity." Kanban was not about production scheduling but about exposing problems.
On standard work: "If the kanbans do not change for one month you are salary thieves." standard-work exists to be improved, not to be frozen.
On the Deming Prize: The term "kanban" was adopted as a marketing phrase after toyota-motor-corporation won the Deming Prize in 1965 (see toyota-wins-deming-prize-1965).