ABSTRACT
Various observers report that the general trading companies gather strategic information on a global scale. High-technology, global-production volume trading companies handling autos and electronic goods operate on behalf of the one-product domestic zaibatsu such as Toyota. Strategic policies require strategic information and effective data gathering requires a well-developed global intelligence service: Japan External Trade Organization. Japan’s strategic economy operates in two different dimensions, one domestic and the other international. Japan’s 10 general trading companies, the overseas representatives of Japan, Incorporated, maintain hundreds of offices and tens of thousands of officers around the globe. Japanese statesmen carry on strategic intelligence gathering with the purpose of achieving industrial policy objectives. There is accumulating evidence in the scholarship of serious Western observers that certain aspects of the international dimension of Japanese economic activity are strategic in nature, not commercial, and that they respond to public policy priorities rather than merely to market conditions.
