The rash of U.S. corporate scandals has rocked the Japanese business community, which until recently admired the success of the American business model.
Now many Japanese business managers are reassessing the values of Japanese-style corporate management, which was criticized as inefficient and inflexible in the decade following the collapse of the country's bubble economy.
"It's wrong to accept without criticism the American way of thinking that emphasizes only stockholders," Masatoshi Kishimoto, chairman of Olympus Optical Co., said during a recent summer seminar of the Japan Productivity Center for Socioeconomic Development.