This volume grew out of a study group on corporate governance at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in 2002. The project was motivated by a concern to take stock of the changes underway in corporate governance in Japan. Our feeling was that the conventional understanding about the Japanese Wrm was increasingly becoming outdated. At the same time, both popular and academic commentators seemed all too often to either over claim that little had changed in Japan, or to portray those changes in terms of an inevitable process of convergence toward the model of ‘‘shareholder value’’ found in the United States. To bring this debate.
