Sarah Taber
Soybean yakuza thread!
This is a continuation of a thread I started on twitter, shifting to Mastodon for Reasons.
https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1603577651415101440
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Disclaimer, I'm not a historian of Japanese business practices.
That said: I think folks on tumblr may be confusing the yakuza (organized street crime) with zaibatsu (business conglomerates).
Sarah Taber
We got some folks on tumblr worried that diving too deep into "what happened to the soy sauce" will end in reprisal from the yakuza
which...I think is kind of like worrying that the Medellín cartel's gonna come get you if you talk too much about the Sacklers because "they're both American drug gangs."
Just because multiple Japanese people are doing a thing doesn't make it the yakuza? This shouldn't need to be said?
Sarah Taber
Don't get me wrong, formal business conglomerates do all kinds of crimes.
But confusing the yakuza & zaibatsu is kind of like confusing the Sicilian mafia with DuPont.
Yakuza: street-level vice. Gambling, sex work, mostly lower-class Japanese people & Japan-born Korean immigrants. The kind of crime that's fed by limited opportunities for marginalized people.
Zaibatsu: wealthy families who industrialized Japan. Very official. Crimes committed are of the white-collar variety.
Sarah Taber
Zaibatsu made it impossible for US capitalists to buy their way into Japan's economy.
I think that was the motivation for the US occupation's desire to break up the zaibatsu, as much as anything else.
New Deal liberals wanted to break up the zaibatsu for trust-busting reasons, & capitalists wanted to break them up for vulture capital reasons.
Sarah Taber
Say you have a zaibatsu with 20 businesses in it. Each one owns 3% of the shares in all the others.
That means each business in the zaibatsu is 60% owned by allies. They're airtight. You CANNOT buy up enough shares to mount a hostile takeover or do "shareholder activism."
It's the business equivalent of a phalanx formation.
And for US-style capitalism, that's unforgivable.
Sarah Taber
So part of the US occupation's goal was to break up the zaibatsu. The idea is this would unleash competition & innovation so Japan could be a proper free market economy.
However! AFAIK, zaibatsu's real crime in the eyes of the US business community was that interlocking ownership: how each business in a zaibatsu owned blocks of each others' shares.
Sarah Taber
The zaibatsu format helped business grow very rapidly. Zaibatsu more or less powered Japan's meteoric pace of industrialization in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
Zaibatsu also helped a few families consolidate control of Japan's entire economy. That can be very bad for consumer protection, upward mobility, cause stagnation, etc.
Sarah Taber
Anyway, zaibatsu are really interesting org behavior-wise. One family would own several interrelated businesses that all contracted with each other, financed by a bank the family also owned.
Each business in a zaibatsu owned shares of the others. So they were motivated to collaborate & enhance each others' well-being. This made each family who owned a zaibatsu network very wealthy.
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