Most of what we collectively think we know about the Japanese economy is urban legend. In fact: - The keiretsu do not exist, and never did. An entrepreneurial research institute in the 1950s created the rosters to sell to Marxist economists looking for the monopoly capital that their theory told...

Central to so many accounts of post-war Japan, the keiretsu corporate groups have never had economic substance. Conceived by Marxists committed to locating "domination" by "monopoly capital," they found an early audience among western scholars searching for evidence of culture-specific group...