This work provides an analysis of the inner workings of Japan's keiretsu - the corporate alliances that have been the cause of much debate. The text aims to reveal what the keiretsu really are and how they work, covering topics such as how foreign firms ca

For Western economists and journalists, the most distinctive facet of the post-war Japanese business world has been the keiretsu, or the insular business alliances among powerful corporations. Within keiretsu groups, argue these observers, firms preferentially trade, lend money, take and receive technical and financial assistance, and cement their ties through cross-shareholding agreements. In The Fable of the Keiretsu, Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer demonstrate that all this talk is really just urban legend. In their insightful analysis, the authors show that the very idea of the keiretsu was created and propagated by Marxist scholars in post-war Japan. Western scholars merely repatriated the legend to show the culturally contingent nature of modern economic analysis. Laying waste to the notion of keiretsu, the authors debunk several related “facts” as well: that Japanese firms maintain special arrangements with a “main bank,” that firms are systematically poorly managed, and that the Japanese government guided post-war growth. In demolishing these long-held assumptions, they offer one of the few reliable chronicles of the realities of Japanese business.

This book describes the application of a high-level technology to solve problems in distributed systems that have networked structures with millions to billions of nodes. The main difference from other works is that the approach is based on holistically and simultaneously analysing these systems using a spatial pattern-matching mode, which produces solutions hundreds of times faster than usual. The latest version of the technology is described, together with implementation details and basic Spatial Grasp Language. In addition, the book highlights numerous solutions, covering graph and network problems, their use in large social, industrial, and business ecosystems, social robotics and driverless transport, and the possibility of extrapolating from known gestalt laws on distributed systems, which could potentially be applied in civil and defence contexts. The book is intended for system scientists, business and industry managers, economists, application programmers, security and defence personnel, as well as university students.

Their unbiased, readable investigation delivers a wealth of information about the system as a whole, its individual members, and the intricate web of relationships that links banks, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and the Japanese government.