"The Fable of the Keiretsu, and Other Tales of Japan We Wish Were
True"
BY: YOSHIRO MIWA
University of Tokyo
J. MARK RAMSEYER
Harvard Law School
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=607382
Paper ID: Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper No. 471
Date: April 2004
Contact: YOSHIRO MIWA
Email: Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Postal: University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 113-0033, JAPAN
Phone: 011-81-3-5841-5530
Fax: 011-81-3-5841-5521
Co-Auth: J. MARK RAMSEYER
Email: Mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Postal: Harvard Law School
1563 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138 UNITED STATES
ABSTRACT:
Most of what we collectively think we know about the Japanese
economy is urban legend. In fact:
- The keiretsu do not exist, and never did. An entrepreneurial
research institute in the 1950s created the rosters to sell to
Marxist economists looking for the monopoly capital that their
theory told them would dominate their bourgeois capitalist
world. Western scholars hoping for examples of culture-specific
forms of economic organization then brought them back to the
U.S.
- The zaibatsu did not succeed pre-war because they bought
politicians, exploited the poor, or manipulated disfunctional
capital markets. They succeeded for all the usual varied reasons
a few firms succeed in any modern economy. They acquired the
(perjorative) zaibatsu label because they happened to be
thriving when muckraking journalists in the 1920s and 30s came
looking for someone to blame for the depression.
- Japanese firms have no main bank system, and never did.
Economists popularized the idea as an anecdote on which to peg
their mathetical models, and non-economists use it (like the
keiretsu as yet another putatively culture-bound economic
phenomenon.
- Japanese firms are neither short of outside directors nor
badly governed. The charges simply represent yet another variant
on populist journalism. Like firms in other competitive
capitalist countries, Japanese firms survive only if they adopt
governance mechanisms appropriate to the markets within which
they must compete.
- The Japanese government never seriously guided or intervened
in the Japanese economy. When the economy boomed, politicians
and bureaucrats did take credit. They had created the success
through their own far-sighted leadership, they claimed. Marxist
scholars dominated Japanese social science departments, and they
were not about to suggest instead that market competition might
account for the success. Happy as they were to find an example
of successful government intervention, neither were most Western
scholars of Japan.
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
