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Zaibatsu (財閥) is a
Japanese term meaning "money clique" or
conglomerate. It was used in the
19th century and the first half of the
20th century to refer to large family-controlled banking and
industrial combines, especially the Big Four of
Mitsubishi,
Mitsui,
Sumitomo and
Yasuda.
The term gained popularity in the
United States in the
1980s to refer to any large
corporation, in large part from its usage in a few
cyberpunk stories, but is not used in
Japan for anything other than historical discussions.
The zaibatsu were technically dissolved by reformers during the Allied
occupation of Japan. Their controlling families' assets were seized;
holding companies, the previous 'heads' of the zaibatsu conglomorates,
eliminated; and interlocking directorships, essential to the old system of
inter-company coordination, were outlawed.
Even so, complete dissolution of the zaibatsu was never achieved by
Allied reformers or
SCAP, in part because the
Zeitgeist of the time supported such conglomerates. They were widely
considered beneficial, and the opinions of the Japanese public, of
zaibatsu workers and management and of the entrenched bureaucracy
regarding plans for zaibatsu break-up ranged from unenthusiastic to
disapproving. Additionally, the changing politics of the Occupation during
the
reverse course served as a crippling, if not terminal, roadblock to
zaibatsu elimination.
Keiretsu, the subsequent inheritors of the corporate legacy of
zaibatsu, remained fundamentally correlative, but the old "mechanisms of
financial and administrative control" were destroyed (Allinson 75).
Despite the absence of an actualized sweeping change to the existence of
large industrial conglomerates in Japan, the zaibatsu's previous vertical
chain of command, ending with a single family, was displaced by the
horizontal relationships of association and coordination now
characteristic of
keiretsu -- an important difference. The Japanese term
keiretsu (系列), meaning 'series' or 'subsidiary,' could be interpreted
as being suggestive of this difference.
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