For twelve years starting in 1955 the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development (JPC-SED) (formerly the Japan Productivity Center) assembled around 500 observation teams to focus on improving productivity, an international movement at the time, and carried out on-site surveys mainly in the United States, producing 170 reports on their findings. These teams included managers, engineers, university professors and union representatives, and the list of senior managers involved includes prominent figures such as Taizo Ishizaka and Heigo Fujii. Productivity has been a major theme of academic conferences on international business history since the second half of the '90s, and one that will undoubtedly be taken up in Japan as well, making the publication of this set of resources especially timely.