is a Japanese term meaning "wealthy clique" or conglomerate.

Zaibatsu was used in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century to refer to large family controlled banking and industrial combines. The four major zaibatsu have a history that goes back to the Edo period. The four major zaibatsu (四大財閥) are Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo and Yasuda. Business conglomerates, second-tier zaibatsus, that emerged after the Russo-Japanese War until the Pacific War are Okura, Furukawa, Nakajima, and Nissan.

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 used in Japan for anything other than historical discussions.

The zaibatsu were technically dissolved by reformers during the Allied occupation of Japan. Their controlling families' assets were seized; holding companies, the previous "heads" of the zaibatsu conglomerates, eliminated; and interlocking directorships, essential to the old system of intercompany coordination, were outlawed. Amongst the zaibatsu that were targeted by the SCAP for dissolution in 1946 were Asano, Furukawa, Nakajima, Nissan, Nomura, and Okura. Matsushita, while not a zaibatsu, was originally targeted for breakup, but was saved by a petition organized by the union, which was signed by 15,000 of its workers and their families.Morck & Nakamura, p. 33

Complete dissolution of the zaibatsu was never achieved by Allied reformers or SCAP, in part because the zeitgeist supported such conglomerates. They were widely considered beneficial, and the opinions of the Japanese public, of zaibatsu workers and management and of the entrenched bureaucracy regarding plans for zaibatsu breakup ranged from unenthusiastic to disapproving. Additionally, the changing politics of the Occupation during the reverse course served as a crippling, if not terminal, roadblock to zaibatsu elimination.

Today, the old "mechanisms of financial and administrative control" were destroyed . Despite the absence of an actualized sweeping change to the existence of large industrial conglomerates in Japan, the zaibatsu's previous vertically integrated chain of command, ending with a single family, was displaced by the horizontal relationships of association and coordination now characteristic of keiretsu—an important difference. The Japanese term keiretsu (系列), meaning "series" or "subsidiary", could be interpreted as being suggestive of this difference.

List of zaibatsu

The Big Four

• Mitsubishi (三菱財閥)
• Mitsui (三井財閥)
• Sumitomo (住友財閥)
• Yasuda (安田財閥)

Second-tier zaibatsu

• Asano (浅野財閥)
• Fujita (藤田財閥)
• Furukawa (古河財閥)
• Mori (森コンツェルン)
• Kawasaki (川崎財閥)
• Nakajima (中島飛行機)
• Nitchitsu (日窒コンツェルン)
• Nissan (日産コンツェルン)
• Nisso (日曹コンツェルン)
• Nomura (野村財閥)
• Okura (大倉財閥)
• Riken (理研コンツェルン)
• Shibusawa (渋沢財閥)

Past zaibatsu

• Suzuki (鈴木商店)

See also

• Keiretsu
• Japanese post-war economic miracle
• South Korean Chaebol (the Korean "cognate" to zaibatsu (both the Korean and the Japanese words are composed of loans from Chinese, so are not cognates in the true sense of the word))

References