La Porta et al. see common law as most favorable to corporate development and economic growth, but Japanese legislators explicitly based their system on German civil law. However, Japan’s commercial ...code of 1899 omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al. see as the jewel in the crown of Germany’s organizational menu. Neither apparent “mistake” retarded Japan’s adoption of the corporate form, because its commercial code offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. It was this liberal flexibility, not choice of legal family or hybrid corporate forms emphasized by previous writers, that drove corporatization forward in Japan and more widely. Surprisingly (given that Germany’s superficially fuller organizational menu predated Japan’s by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japan already had not only more corporations than Germany, but also more commandite partnerships (with some corporate characteristics). After the introduction of the yugen kaisha (private company) in 1940, corporate forms became nearly as widely used in Japan as in the United States, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.
A comparative examination of financial institutions in the interwar period focusing on the UK, the US, Germany, France, and Japan. In this latest addition to the prestigious Fuji Business History ...series, the contributors to the volume analyse the ways in which different institutions coped with the financial crises at this time, and how they competed with each other. They also ask how this affected the financial climates of the countries in question. The discussion is divided into three parts: commercial banking, universal banking, and insurance and securities. Contributors to this volume - Eric Bussiere (University of Paris IV, Sorbonne) Youssef Cassis (University of Grenoble II; Visiting Research Fellow, LSE) Michael Collins (University of Leeds) Makoto Kasuya (University of Tokyo) Shinji Ogura (Chiba University of Commerce) Edwin Perkins (University of Southern California) Mariko Tatsuki (Keisen University) Eugene White (Rutgers University) Harald Wixforth (Hannal-Arendt Institute)
The issuance of bonds increased in inter-war Japan, the main investors being banks because the demand for loans declined in this period. Banks that were more tolerant to risk (that is, whose capital ...ratio was higher) made a larger amount of loans, which were riskier than bonds. While national bonds were traded actively in secondary markets, local bonds, corporate bonds, and bank debentures were not traded actively during this period. After the formation of cartels of banks and securities firms for bond underwriting and trading during the Great Depression, bond trading in secondary markets diminished, except for national bonds.
Lifetime employment is one of the most conspicuous features of contemporary large Japanese corporations. The employment practices of merchant houses in the Edo period (1603–1868) are sometimes ...proposed as one origin of such lifetime commitment. Little attention has been paid, however, to the connections between long-term employment in the Edo period and its practice in the twentieth century. This article examines how Edo employment practices were adapted to the environment of the early twentieth century within a new context of modern educational institutions and the need for professional managers.
Histories of Japanese companies are usually written by employees of the company and privately published. While some are written by scholars, their names are rarely showed on a page for publication ...information. On the other hand, histories of American or European companies are ordinarily written by scholars and published by a publisher, though company executives hold the right to read the manuscripts and make comments on them or request modifications by contracts with authors. This paper also shows how a company history is ‘made’ on the case of hundred-year history of Yamaichi Securities.
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