Corporate Governance in Japan

A study that presents a view of the company as an entity that not only maximizes profit for stockholders but that also has a social role to play in maintaining a sustainable society.

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In Japan, the problem of corporate governance has been cogently argued in the ?eld of social science for the past decade, and the issue has also been taken up separately in law, business administration, and accounting.This book, however, is the ?rst to take a general overview of corporate governance with respect to management, risk management, accounting, and the capital markets. Corporate governance in the broad sense must include stakeholders with various interests while taking into consideration the sometimes unscrupulous affairs of companies and bankruptcies of big businesses, along with today’s increasing numbers of mergers and acquisitions.Both the company manager and the institutional investor have begun to be more concerned about corporate social responsibility (CSR) and socially responsible investment. After 2003, the issue of CSR began to be taken up more frequently by the media in Japan,and study meetings and committees associated with the Ministry of Economy,Trade and Industry, Ministry of the Environment, and the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare were established.These trends are evidence of signi?cant changes in Japanese corporate governance.The study presented here proposes that a company should play a social role to bring about a sustainable society.