From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Zaibatsu (財閥) is a Japanese for "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 it is not in use today in Japan for anything other than historical discussions.
The zaibatsu were technically dissolved by reformers during the Allied occupation of Japan. Their controlling families' assests 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/SCAP, in part because the Zeitgeist of the time supported such conglomorates; they were widely considered beneficial. The opinions of the Japanese public, of zaibatsu workers and management, and of the entrenched bureaucraucy regarding plans for zaibtsu break-up ranged from unenthusiastic to dissaproving. Additionally, the changing politics of the Occupation during the reverse course served as a crippling, if not terminal roadblock to intentions of zaibatsu elimination. Keiretsu, subsequent inheritors to the corporate legacy of zaibatsu, remained fundamentally correlative, but the old "mechanisms of financial and administrative control" were destroyed (Allinson 75). Despite the abscense 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 characteristc of keiretsu -- an important difference.
The Japanese term keiretsu (系列), meaning 'series' or 'subsidiary,' could be interpreted as being suggestive of this difference.
Reference
Gary D. Allinson's "Japan's Postwar History" (ISBN 0-8014-3312-6).
