Deming tried to get his ideas adopted in America, but he fell largely on deaf ears with American industrialists. That isn’t terribly surprising, you need to understand the times, especially shortly after World War II: Americans were the rulers of the world. Europe was in ruins, sometimes even still smoking. China wasn’t the high-tech supplier it is today, but a poor agrarian country. BRIC wasn’t even invented as an acronym, and nobody talked about the “tiger states”.
Why indeed should America change its ways? The future looked bright.
Not only lay Europe in ruins, Japan did, too, maybe even more so. America was occupying Japan, and the story goes that General MacArthur exploded with frustration when his phone call to another island of Japan repeatedly broke off. So he wanted to re-build Japan, at least some infrastructure.
Well, that’s probably not exactly what happened, the story is apocryphal after all, and many other people were in favor of helping rebuild Japan. But the important thing is: America decided to help rebuild Japan. And so many experts from all kinds of fields embarked and came to Japan.