In 1951, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers created the Deming Prize, an award for people and companies that have contributed to quality control. It honors W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician who came to Japan in 1950 and 1951 to teach quality control.
In a chapter posted on the union’s website, the quality pioneer Ishikawa Kaoru writes that Deming gave the royalties from the record of his lectures to the union’s managing director, Koyanagi Ken’ichi. The union then announced the prize.