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In this article:
- A century of civil wars among samurai warlords shaped Japan into a centralized feudal state.
- Rigid class systems and centralized control of wealth helped shoguns maintain power and order.
- The shoguns transitioned from being warlords to government officials to corporate executives, carrying the rigid order and control they had as shoguns into the corporate world.
- Bushido, the way of the warrior, is working Japanese employees to their deaths and it might be hurting Japanese society.
Japan is a country of contradictions. On one hand, we know it for Tokyo’s city lights, high-tech toilets, robot cafes, and its contributions to cyberpunk, a subgenre of sci-fi. On the other hand, Japan is a country of long-standing traditions passed down across centuries where you can sit down for a tea ceremony in a hotel managed by the same family for 52 generations.
During my last trip to Japan, I was struck by how easy it was to find little pockets of history in places as urbanized as Tokyo. One of the places I visited was Tokyo Tower which had a viewing deck that gave a stunning view of the city, including the Imperial Palace and Zojoji Temple.
The temple doesn’t show up in “must visit” lists, but if you ever find yourself standing behind Tokyo Tower, know that what you’re looking at is the family temple of the Tokugawa clan whose shoguns reigned over a 250 year period of peace. Tokugawa Ieyasu himself chose it and six of his descendants are interred there.
Though the great shogun and his peers have long since passed, the way of life they led and the social, political, and economic systems that made their rule possible haven’t. In fact, they live on in the culture and structure of Japanese corporations.
How Feudal Japan Worked
Before we talk about the present day, let’s do a little time traveling to get an idea of the ways feudal Japan is mirrored by modern Japan and how this all happened.
Back when Tokyo was still called Edo, Japan was organized under a feudal system of government. Unlike the centralized governments we often see today, feudal systems relied on a network of local samurai warlords, known as daimyo, to manage the affairs of specific regions and provinces.
These daimyos answered to the emperor or the shogun, the Daimyo of Daimyos, and provided them with an army. But if they were ruling directly, why did the early daimyo agree to have a boss in the first place?
This was because the daimyo needed access to the power and wealth that only the emperor had. Giri (military service) was given by the daimyo in exchange for land and titles which gave the daimyo a way to make money and establish their rule since nothing says legitimacy like the descendant of your religion’s deity giving you a hereditary office.
Once titles and land were granted, however, there was little that could be done to stop a daimyo who no longer wanted to fork over taxes to the guy above him. This was especially true for daimyo who ruled in regions far from the capital. In most cases, they didn’t even have to rebel at all since the minimal oversight made it easy for them to extort additional taxes and ignore the law.
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The flaws built into the feudal system would come to a head during the Sengoku Period when all the daimyos realized that the emperor didn’t really have any power anymore. Since the emperor stayed out of their affairs, the samurai clans decided they’d just duke it out amongst themselves. This is an incredibly simplistic way of explaining it, but hey, we don’t want to be here all day.
As the civil wars waged on, power began to concentrate in the hands of just a few clans who took the land and armies of defeated daimyos. The increasing centralization of power allowed Oda Nobunaga, the first guy to unify Japan under a more or less centralized government, to become one of the first shoguns. As shogun, Nobunaga had all the real power in Japan, making the emperor a figurehead.
One of his generals, Ieyasu Tokugawa, would take over his spot as shogun after his assassination. Tokugawa made Edo his seat of power, turning it into a hub of government and trade. The policies enacted by the Tokugawa clan during their reign set the groundwork for the industrialization of Japan.
The bakufu-han system, a riff on the original feudal system, deliberately kept the daimyos just poor enough to make sure they never had enough money to spend on war against the shogun.
It also established a caste system that put the samurai class at the top of society. As brutal as their rule was, the Tokugawa bakufu provided stability and forced the daimyos to pay for public infrastructure projects. You know, roads, the stuff that makes trade possible.
Centralization meant there were fewer samurai lords, but the new conditions also meant that the remaining lords were richer and had been so integrated into the centralized government that they were practically government officials rather than warlords. By the time the Meiji Restoration rolled around, a lot of them were surprisingly fine with leaving their feudal past behind.
But old ways die hard.
Edo’s Centralized Feudalism Paved the Way to Corporate Japan
The establishment of banks fueled economic growth in the Meiji period, but the banks were started because the ex-samurai clans now needed somewhere to put their shiny new bond deposits which were given to them by the government after laws converted their agricultural wealth into bonds.
The banks, now flush with samurai blood money, started lending it to new businesses. Some of these businesses would go on to become zaibatsus.
The zaibatsu, literally translated as “wealth clan,” were adaptations of Western firms that functioned as a sort of spiritual descendant of the bakufu-han system. Not only were they funded by ex-samurai clan money, but several former samurai clan members also went on to start their own zaibatsu with the intent of dominating several industries at once.
Zaibatsus weren’t just one company; they were a collection of companies, ranging from a handful to the hundreds, all controlled by one family.
The “Big Four” zaibatsu to emerge from the Meiji era were Mitsui, Sumitomo, Yasuda, and Mitsubishi. All of them had samurai roots and could, in one way or another, trace their family history to the reign of the Tokugawa shogunate.
That said, not all of the zaibatsu founders were former samurai lords. It’s just that growing up under the bakufu-han system meant that it shaped their approach to what the relationship between an employer, employees, and contractors should look like.
The feudal-like relationship that zaibatsus and their employees and contractors had was evident to Kuniyasu Sakai, a prolific writer on Japanese business practices. In an article written for the Harvard Business Review, Sakai shared that he was surprised that Western executives, whose job it was to compete with other companies, didn’t seem to see how sharply corporate Japan is defined by its feudal practices.
Unlike what I’m doing here, Sakai wasn’t some armchair historian and economist. He’s had a hand in building dozens of businesses in the electronics manufacturing industry. The companies he made supply their parts and provide their services to big-name zaibatsus.
According to Sakai, what appeared in the ’80s and ’90s to be Japanese corporations’ endless capability for innovation was actually the work of thousands of “vassal” companies who make the parts for the big companies that stamp their name on the finished product.
But isn’t that just a regular subcontractor setup? Sakai says it isn’t. At least, not in the way we typically understand it. Outside of Japan, subcontractors are what Sakai calls free agents. They can do business with whoever they want and stop doing business when they want to.
Japanese subcontractors don’t work that way. When they sign a contract with a keiretsu, the larger client company, that keiretsu can now dictate the prices of the goods they make, the production of which the keiretsu has a final say on. Most importantly, they can’t work with another company.
When Sakai tried to find a workaround, his keiretsu threatened to ruin his reputation in the industry, permanently putting him out of business. Much like the daimyo and shoguns that came before, the keiretsu demanded absolute loyalty to the point that something as minor as what beer is served at a party can be taken as a sign of declaring your allegiance to the keiretsu a beer manufacturer is allied with.
As you can see, it’s pretty intense.
Sakai wrote, “If you belong to the Mitsubishi group, for instance, you not only drink Kirin beer to support a member of the group but you also bank with Mitsubishi Bank, buy securities from Nikko and life insurance from Meiji Mutual Life, drive a Mitsubishi car, and insure it through Tokio Marine & Fire.”
That is true brand loyalty.
Just like the shogun before them, though, the keiretsu are able to demand this all-pervading devotion from their workers because they, in turn, promise to keep them employed forever. Guaranteed employment? Sign us up. Here’s the thing, though: the benefits of this extreme loyalty to a company are fading but the toxic groupthink that comes with it isn’t going away.
Bushido Blues: Why the Way of the Samurai Is Hurting the Japanese Worker
If it’s lifetime employment you seek, look no further than the practice of shushin koyo. This employment scheme promises young recruits that they’ll never have to worry about how they’ll make a living as long as they swear their undying loyalty to a single company until they retire.
This practice is common among large Japanese firms but it’s begun to decline in recent years due to the stagnation of the Japanese economy. But the companies that still do it do so through the shinsotsu-ikkatsu-saiyล. In English, that’s “simultaneous recruitment of new graduates.”
The shinsotsu-ikkatsu-saiyล isn’t kind to young adults. Only the best of the best are hired by keiretsu during this mass recruitment.
If you don’t make the cut, you become one of the many young Japanese who struggle to find stable employment because companies, who already have employees, will only hire outsiders as freelancers or part-time employees. Naturally, this cut-throat system fuels the competition that makes Japanese university students excel and commit suicide.
Here’s something I noticed when I was in Japan: I rarely saw small children. In a country where overtime work is a demonstration of company loyalty, no one has the time for relationships, self-care, or a family.
The unlucky ones succumb to karoshi, death from overwork, and the lucky ones have to prove their loyalty and goodwill to their company by participating in nomikai, after-work drinking parties with your boss and coworkers.
The Airbnb I rented during my stay in Tokyo was surrounded by izakayas. You could see groups of men in nice suits barely able to walk out of a bar from the window and, even at that distance, it was easy to see their red faces.
Toshio Yamagishi, a social psychologist studying how deeply bushido runs through Japanese culture, thinks it’s the root of many social problems in Japan.
Bushido is the samurai code of conduct that many Japanese writers love to wax poetic about. According to Yamagishi, the feudal mentality it promotes holds the Japanese people back from becoming a truly modern society.
Among the many purported ills of bushido are the promotion of extreme “groupism” that discourages acting in one’s best interest, an innovation-averse climate that would rather stick to established rules, and a xenophobic outlook on the world.
Though the pseudo-feudal ways of Japanese corporate life might seem unique to its home country, some of it feels a little too familiar for comfort.
