Small Business as Majority Culture

Popular overseas soto images of Japanese society are colored by the notion that it is a country of mega-corporations. These perceptions have been engendered by Japanese products and associated with such household names as Toyota, Mitsubishi, and NEC. However, the uchi reality is that, although powerful and influential, large corporations constitute a very small minority of businesses in Japan, both in terms of the number of establishments and the size of their workforce. An overwhelming majority of Japanese enterprises are small or medium in size, and it is these that employ the bulk of the workforce. While small may or may not be beautiful, ‘it certainly is bountiful, and thereby deserving of its fair share of attention’. Small- and medium-sized companies are the mainstay of the Japanese economy.

In the Japanese business world they are known as chūshō kigyō, medium and small firms. For brevity, one may lump both types together and call them small businesses. The Small Business Standard Law defines chūshō kigyō as those companies that employ not more than three hundred persons or whose capital does not exceed three hundred million yen.