
- 田邉 康雄
- 有限会社田辺コンサルタント・グループ 代表取締役社長
- 東京都
- 経営コンサルタント
対象:経営コンサルティング
- 戸村 智憲
- (経営コンサルタント ジャーナリスト 講師)
- 荒井 信雄
- (起業コンサルタント)
Kaizen -- A treasure of Japanese Industries(3)
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カイゼン (Kaizen --- Writen in English)
2009-10-06 17:58
Another well-known example of an international Japanese word like Kaizen is Umami, More than a hundred yeas ago, Dr. K. Ideda, a Japanese scientist, discovered a new taste of Umami which came from sodium glutamate extracted from kelp of sea.
Up to that period, the words for taste had been confined to the following four (4) --- ‘salty’, ‘sweet’, ‘sourer’, and ‘bitter’. Dr. Ikeda discovered the fifth taste --- Umami.
In Japanese, we say or even shout ‘Umai’ when we eat delicious dishes. And ‘Mi’ means taste. So, Dr. Ideka created the word of Umami, combining Umai and Mi. He reported Umami in his paper in English. This fact caused Umami to be an international word.