What is the Japanese translation of kaizen?

In my last post, I ranted a bit about how we focus a bit to much on jargon and tools without really understanding the literal meaning of the Japanese words we throw around. In that post was a graphic of the kanri writing which represents the word kaizen. I pulled these from wikipedia for purposes of illustration.

I posted a question on the NWLEAN board requesting literal translations of many lean words such as kaizen, mura, muri, muda, etc. So far, a few people have posted the commonly understood english meanings. I'm really looking for the japanese meanings. For example, I plugged these characters individually into alta vista's babel fish translator and received the following words:

"Reforming" and "virtue".

It is easy then, to imply that in english, this means "change for the good" and then is not a leap to get to continuous improvement.

Is there more to this? Is there a different paradigm associated with a system built on "reforming virtue" in Japan that is different than America's version of "good change"? What do you think? Please post your comments.