> Is the media hype about the death of Japan Inc.
> (MITI-LDP-industrial/financial conglomerates) just that, hype?
Yes. Ironically, the real strength of the Japanese developmental state isn't big biz (that's where the keiretsu come in) but supporting innovative small and medium-size biz; MITI did a white paper on concentration of capital and found that the US, for all its ideological fealty to family capitalism, is highly concentrated in terms of firm size, while Germany and Japan are much less so (OECD statistics on firm size confirm this, BTW). David Friedman's "The Misunderstood Miracle" is a good capsule summary of the remarkable complexity of the state planning apparatus involved here. Right now, the keiretsu aren't dissolving, they're merging into mind-bendingly vast super-keiretsu; Sumitomo and Sakura Bank are now the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, etc. Wish I had time to discuss this further, but the dissertation calls...
-- Dennis