Like the U.S. and Europe, Japan is a free market economy in which companies compete to offer the best products and services that will delight consumers and result in profits for shareholders, but there are some differences in how capitalism works here. First, some of the harsher aspects of competition seen in other countries don’t exist here, like the now-commonplace strategy of “disrupt the stable business of a competitor and profit from the confusion that results” — Sony never sabotages Panasonic’s business for its own benefit. Though there are abuses, like when construction companies teamed up with government to push through a tunnel across Tokyo Bay which no one needed or uses today, one refreshing aspect of capitalism in Japan is that the average salaries of Japanese CEOs is only 16x the lowest employee, compared with 344x in the U.S. (2007 numbers). One of the strangest aspects of doing business in Japan as J-List is the way companies cooperate rather than compete. If we want to work with a new distributor for bento boxes for example, they might decline to sell to us lest it appear they’re trying to steal our business away from a competitor we’re already established with. So the free market economy in Japan is really based on “polite capitalism.”
Japan is the land of “polite capitalism.”
