Having spent many years in Japan I have always searched for the source of this industrial perfection. It not only results in a stunning cleanliness of every sort, but subways are able to run at high speed only a few minutes apart.
I have concluded that this commercial miracle originates in the Japanese skill at maintenance. Maintenance is very different from traditional ideas of repair. When a human artifact fails and the artifact is restored to its operating level, that is repair. When the human artifact is serviced at regular intervals to avoid failure, that is maintenance.
I believe the Japanese learned the importance and function of maintenance because the entire country has been in rice production for two millennia. Rice fields require maintenance on the field, the water supplies and seasonally, to function. I believe this rice field maintenance experience has been central to the rest of the Japanese industrial society.
The first evidence of maintenance that I see in our Amero-European society was in airplanes and that appears to have come from France along with the word maintenance.
When Japanese automobiles entered the American market in the 1960s and 70 they created the need for maintenance on the part of the American automobile industry. A new world that fortunately spread to many commercial fields.