This is the fifth post in a series of short blog posts focusing on data quality related to different countries around the world. I am not aiming at presenting a single version of the full truth but rather presenting a few random observations that I hope someone living in or with knowledge about the country are able to clarify in a comment.
Home of quality philosophy
Japan is the home and inspiration of quality thinking. Therefore we also have some Japanese words used when talking quality. For example kaizen is used for continuous quality improvement, muda is the waste we should avoid and gemba is the real place where things happens and things could be changed.
Streets with no names
When sending letters to Japan the way of addressing is different from how it is done in most other parts of the world. Street names are seldom used in Japanese postal addresses, but the numbers/names of the blocks between the streets are used.
Would you like Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana or Romaji?
No, this is not a selection from the a la carte menu at a Japanese restaurant but different kind of writing systems to choose from in Japan covering three different kinds of script systems. Kanji is the old symbolic writing system similar to Chinese writing. Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic writing systems while Romaji is transcription of Japanese into Roman alphabetic letters.
Previous Data Quality World Tour blog posts:
Liliendahl on Data Quality 