Word: zaibatsu
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Tokyo's Kabutocho, accustomed to the prewar idea of stocks held closely by the Zaibatsu financial combines, at first scoffed at Okumura, and occupation forces took a dim view of his plan to set up investment trusts that would operate somewhat like U.S. mutual funds. But Japan's amazing postwar resurgence proved fertile ground for Okumura's ideas. "I am the world's most stubborn man," says Okumura, "when I decide that I want something and meet opposition." Many Japanese companies now prefer to sell shares to raise money rather than to ask the once...
...Zaibatsu & Politics. Tokyo's business journal was born 86 years ago, just after the country itself burst from feudalism with a bang that startled the world. Nikkei's own progress to distinction was by no means as swift. A creation of one of the zaibatsu, or business cartels, that dominated Japan's early industrialization period, Nikkei struggled for years against public apathy. Its proprietors, the Mitsui interests, finally tired of their experiment in 1901, sold the paper to its staff (it remains a staff-owned paper today). When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, Nikkei...
...that has increased its production 500% (to $2.9 billion a year) since 1950. But shy, plump Lawyer Doi, an expert on the proper chanting of ancient Japanese ballads, speaks with an even more powerful voice as the de facto chief of the most flourishing of Japan's former zaibatsu (family trusts). Propelled into the presidency of the Sumitomo Chemical Co. in 1947 when Occupation purges eliminated all his seniors, Doi got around U.S. directives to split up the zaibatsu by organizing the White Water Society, a "social club" consisting of the heads of all former Sumitomo enterprises. Today, though...
American occupation authorities lumped him with the zaibatsu, who were scheduled to be obliterated from the industrial scene...
Neglected Cranny. Matsushita managed to exist alongside the grasping zaibatsu by slipping into a cranny of industry they cared nothing about: consumer goods. The Osaka zaibatsu even lent him money, with no attempt to dominate him. But his success came from introducing the Japanese to a brand of imaginative. Western-style salesmanship they had never seen. When retailers refused to believe that his battery-powered bicycle lamp would run 30 hours-ten times longer than any other then on the market-he left one turned on in each store. Before long, orders came streaming in, and Matsushita Electric...