Chapter 3 examines business cultures in East Asia, explores their origins, and identifies characteristics that may assist in designing and implementing competition law and policy. It is argued that authoritarianism, paternalism, and collectivism engender dependence on and subservience to corporate authority. Further, business groups (SOEs in China, zaibatsu and keiretsu in Japan, and chaebol in Korea) have played an important role in industrialization. The chapter underlines the links between culture at the level of society and at the level of business communities and enterprises, the norms and practices of such enterprises, and their competitive effects. Given these links, it would be constructive to take account of elements of culture in developing and implementing a well-designed competition law and policy. The chapter discusses six dimensions that should be taken into account in competition law: competition goals, the enforcement of competition law against government-linked companies, the management of family firms, the enforcement of competition law where business groups are prevalent, the design of compliance programmes and the promotion of ‘competition culture’ in East Asia.

On 9 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a port city of Japan. Sumiteru Taniguchi was sixteen at the time, delivering post about a mile from ground zero. The force of the explosion threw him from his bicycle, melting his cotton shirt and searing the skin off his back and one arm. But Taniguchi survived, one of the fortunate few who did. Many thousands in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the first city to be bombed, were not as fortunate. Japan surrendered six days later, thereby ending the Second World War.

Just like Taniguchi, who would become a lifelong advocate for the prohibition of nuclear weapons, Japan was left badly scarred after the war. But to understand the extent of the devastation, it helps to briefly discuss what came before the Second World War.