IN JAPAN, THE family name appears first. Thus, the famed inventor of the Toyota production system is known in Japan as Ōno Taiichi, and not Taiichi Ohno as usually written in the West.

In Productivity Press books we try to follow the Japanese practice of placing the surname first, in part, to make the representation of Japanese names uniform but primarily out of common courtesy. The reader therefore will find members of the Toyoda family referred to as Toyoda Sakichi, Toyoda Kiichirō, Toyoda Eiji, and so forth. However, when a person such as Taiichi Ohno is frequently referred to in other Western publications and the media in the Western manner, we refer to him or her likewise.

Also, when romanizing Japanese characters, a macron is used over a long vowel in all Japanese words except for well-known place names (Kyoto, Tokyo), words that have entered the English language (shogun, daimyo), and individual’s names in which customarily the macron is replaced by an h (Ohno, not Ōno).