Japanese Agency and Business Reform in Occupied Japan: The Holding Company Liquidation Commission and Zaibatsu Dissolution

• In Event: New Perspectives on Business and the Economy in Occupied Japan

Abstract

To date, studies of the zaibatsu dissolution and business deconcentration programs during the U.S. occupation of Japan have foregrounded an array of American players—Douglas MacArthur and his subordinates in Tokyo, Washington bureaucrats and Congressmen, U.S. businessmen and other members of the “Japan Lobby”—but they tend to mention only in passing Japanese initiative or agency. In this paper, I investigate the activities of the Holding Company Liquidation Commission (HCLC), a poorly understood Japanese body that scholars have tended to characterize as a tool of Occupation headquarters, one that dutifully carried out U.S. directives on business breakup and reorganization. Drawing especially on the memoirs of Noda Iwajirō, a central figure in the HCLC, I examine the critical part played by this agency in shaping the Occupation’s business reforms and in mitigating their effects. Through skillful negotiation and persuasion, the commission contributed to a scaling back of reforms that previous studies have attributed primarily to American geopolitical, business, and financial concerns after 1947.

Author

• Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College