The Rise and Fall of the Zaibatsu - Japan's Industrial and Economic Modernization
| Author | David A. C. Addicott |
|---|---|
| Published | 2017 |
| Format | Research paper |
| Original | Read the original |
TL;DR — A Pepperdine student paper tracing Japan’s zaibatsu — Mitsui, Mitsubishi and the other family conglomerates — from the Meiji Restoration to their break-up after 1945.
Published in Global Tides, vol. 11 (2017), Pepperdine University’s undergraduate journal of international studies, and hosted on Pepperdine Digital Commons. David Addicott traces how the zaibatsu (“financial clique”) conglomerates grew out of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, as the state sold off enterprises and favoured well-connected families, and how they became the backbone of Japan’s industrialisation and its war economy.
The paper then covers the American occupation’s dissolution of the zaibatsu after World War II and their partial reassembly as the looser keiretsu groups, presenting the zaibatsu as a case study of technocracy and corporate governance driving rapid development.
What it is: an undergraduate research paper in a student journal: a clear secondary synthesis, not original scholarship. Openly published by the university repository.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
- Public copy: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol11/iss1/5/
17 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.