Book Reviews : Mark Fruin, KIKKOMAN: Company, Clan and Community. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. $30.00
Abstract
307 Book ReviewsMark Fruin, KIKKOMAN: Company, Clan and Community. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. $30.00 SAGE Publications, Inc.1984DOI: 10.1177/002190968401900332 Thomas Rohlen 120 Sturdevent Avenue San Anselmo, California 94960, U.S.A. Even medium-size Japanese companies document their own histories in remarkable depth. Thick commemorative volumes produced for anniversaries eventually pile up in used bookstores awaiting a boom in business history. The explanation for this rather exotic practice lies, I think, in the continuing influence of a Confucian perspective within the minds of business leaders. History not only gives meaning, value and orientation for the present, but the act of doing it is a ritual of recognition to the corporate ancestors. Japan's companies are different in this and other ways, but just how different has become an issue of widespread interest. This book helps us sort out this question from the vantage point of time. Mark Fruin has taken one company's particularly rich history and turned it into a fine case study and treatise in Japanese social history, a fit companion for Gary Allin- son's,Japanese Urbanism: Indust')! and Politics in Kariya, 1872-1.972 and considerably more reliable than Robert's Mitsui. Kikkoman is Japan's premier maker of shoyu (soy sauce). Originating in the