ABSTRACT
After enjoying a long period of prosperity, the Japanese economy plunged into a serious slump in the 1990s. Among those old factors that lifted the Japanese economy to become one of the economic superpowers, this chapter places a particular emphasis on the changes in inter-firm relations, which have generally been called keiretsu. The Japanese economy has been in a long and serious slump since the collapse of the Bubble economy in the early 1990s, especially since the financial crisis in 1997. Furthermore, quite a number of the shares possessed by the corporate stockholders have been interlocked between large firms, often called 'cross shareholdings'. In particular, stockholdings by major banks has created the famous 'main bank system'. Such traditional Japanese stockholder structures, however, began weaken due to fall in stock prices. Keywords for the Japanese economy during the 1990s were 'deregulation' and 'financial Big Bang'.
