6 - Japanese Business Corporations

Summary

At first glance a discussion of business corporations would seem to fit rather badly with the guilds, unions and sects examined in the previous chapter. Companies are run for profit, after all, and as such they have entirely different aims than those of these other, more altruistically-oriented organizations. And although this is undoubtedly true, private businesses are associations of a sort too. Just like guilds, unions and sects, they occupy an intermediary position in social life somewhere between the individual and the market. Companies are private in the sense that they are owned by private individuals, but they are simultaneously public in the sense that they are ‘PLCs’, companies publicly available on the stock market. Moreover, companies occupy an intermediary position also in the sense that they provide a way for individuals to leave their private spheres and work together with others in the pursuit of common goals. They are places where strangers become colleagues and friends.

The etymology of the word is revealing in this respect. ‘Corporation’ derives from corpus, the Latin for ‘body’, and in the Middle Ages the body in question consisted of partners who pooled their resources in order to be able to invest in some common project, above all in trade ventures overseas. By owning a part rather than the whole of a company, merchants were able to reduce their exposure to risk.