(5) Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda were the most significant corporate groups, known as the four major
Zaibatsu of Japan at that time.
While such groups (called
zaibatsu in Japan) are thought to have provided this coordination successfully in pre-second-world-war Japan after a state-run big push failed, it is still being debated whether such coordination is being successfully provided by pyramidal business groups that are found in developing countries in Asia.
Perceived as a threat to the global order, the emergence of communism in Asia after WWII cut short the dismantling of the remaining
zaibatsu in Japan.
Then the administrative bureaucrats gradually lost their dominance, first with the rise of keiretsu business conglomerates to replace the
zaibatsu family businesses dismantled by the Allies after the war, then with a frontal assault on the bureaucratic privileges carried out by political reformers (Samuels 2007).
Clearly, industrializing Japan provided a "demonstration effect." The Korean economic structure bears certain similarities with Japan, notably in, for example, the predominance of large conglomerates, with the Korean chaebol modeled on the Japanese
zaibatsu, subsequently known as keiretsu.
Initially, the GHQ/SCAP tried to diminish the powers of
zaibatsu, which was the dominant form of corporate group in Japan at the time and was considered to have facilitated the war by funding and supplying products.
Japan already occupied Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula even before the Manchuria Incident and its aggressive territorial expansion was a consistent policy of the Japanese government, military and the pre-war "
zaibatsu" conglomerates.
At the same time, large trading companies, known as
zaibatsu, flourished due to the unstable markets and rampant inflation.
SCAP was to democratize, disarm, demilitarize, and implement economic reform (the deconcentration of the Japanese
zaibatsu.)
On the one hand, there are entries for narrative elements from the novels (Panther Moderns, the Aleph,
zaibatsu) or concepts relevant for his fiction (apophenia, eversion, desiring machine).
These brief depictions do not approach the level of the "Gulliver's Travails," "
Zaibatsu," "Digital Cacophony," and "King Khan" scenarios developed in the Air Force's Alternate Futures for 2025 study of 1996, but they do offer a glimpse of future possibilities that deserve consideration.