From the mid seventeenth century to 1887, there was a complete separation of ownership and managerial control - a separation that takes place earlier here than elsewhere in the world - with the owning families keeping their distance from the highly specialised operations. Family roles were, instead, ceremonial, and the workers were managed like a commodity by local labor contractors. While a large number of families owned the many
shoyu breweries, they were all rather fragmented operations with little
family feeling or loyalty.
The second phase, 1887 to 1917, saw several families band together in order to share some costs and reduce some levels of uncertainty. Kikkoman used their competencies to create and monopolize a global industry, then drive the economic forces of both the industry and the local community by forming a cartel (1887). Owning families would meet to set prices and wages, and to minimize competition, while workers were still under the power of labor contractors. Owning families began to control wages, shipping and purchasing, but left alone other internal operations.
In the third phase, 1918-1946, the assets of nine families related by lineage or marriage were combined from the cartel to form the Noda Shoyu Company Limited, with a parent holding company securing family ownership (1918). Through the efforts of consolidation, owners then became managers. Apparently, 85% of the directors and 65% of the first eighty managers came from family. The firm soon outgrew the family's ability to provide sufficient managerial talent, and the two thousand employees were managed by more non-kinsmen than kinsmen.
From around 1900 the government's campaign, for
every firm a family was to have individuals see themselves as part of an extensive family in the shape of the firm, whose duty was to follow the example of the Japanese imperial family where the firm was owned and controlled by a family. This led to exceptional loyalty and a new corporate paternalism where performance in the factory was tied to the performance of the national economy: work became a patriotic duty. The effect was to engender a sense of team responsibility and ultimately to the firm as opposed to the sense of individual interest as was advocated by the union.
If the firm benefited, then employees and their local and national communities benefited, and this corresponded with the national drive for a belief in responsibility to a state whose people were related to each other under the emperor. Managers set about institutionalising their new approach by setting up
affective and effective teams within the firm, and extending this sense of belonging to the wider community by considerable investment and participation in local building and social programs. This switch from a downward spiral of industrial relations before 1930 to the family's articulation of an ideological function for the company within the imperial mission meant such a family owned and operated enterprise
could expect, and did receive outstanding performance from its workers, in large measure because of the close conjunction of structure and ideology. Soon, sons and daughters joined fathers and mothers in the firm's employ. This transformation from confrontative to paternalistic management style
may have been the greatest achievement of the Noda Shoyu company after 1930. The reality of the economic dualism of this strategy - that a core of insiders enjoyed lifetime employment while outsiders were subcontracted dispensable resources who enjoyed little security is clearly one of the issues which the family struggled with in its bid to be labor cost-effective, and may in part, along with the government campaigns of the day, explain why there was such an enduring link with the community.
The final phase of post-war democracy, from 1945 to present, saw the abolition of the definition of the male-centred hierarchical legal family, and of the holding company form of organization. Employee benefits became rights as opposed to gifts, and within the family, male primogeniture and single heir inheritance was abolished. The firm-family analogy exists in Japan today only in the smaller firms, which constitute 98% of Japan's business.
Generally, family and firm tend to overlap now only under certain conditions and are no longer a structural and ideological response to the legal, social and economic imperatives of the day, as they were in pre-war Japan.
In contrast to Western families, Japanese family relationships can be described as kin-based units where affection, volitional or contractual arrangements were often absent. The household unit is in effect a legal invention with its exclusively male household head the executor of corporate functions, including the maintenance and continuity of property, genealogy and household ritual. In some Japanese stem families, including the Kikkoman families, the family is broadly defined, with boundaries of membership extended to those who can contribute to the economic welfare of the group.
Kinship is not a necessary criterion of membership. The Kikkoman families brought in an adopted male heir on six occasions over the 19 generations studied. Once to implement the strategy of
shoyu capacity expansion through household division, and on five occasions to sustain continuity of family ownership and control in soy sauce breweries. Economic considerations, such as the founding of a new shoyu brewery, thus took priority over kinship considerations when the economic imperative prevailed.
The role of women in the family up to the period of occupation during World War II was to marry males where a useful linkage with minor houses allowed the main household to expand as it wished. Sons, apparently created branching, while daughters merely married. An epigram describes this ideology:
It's better to give than receive,
Between clans, dispatch daughters,
Within clans, secure sons.
The family had to abandon this practice after World War II when the occupying forces eliminated male-centred inheritance and family headship. In its place merged a new legal framework to support a social ideology of equality rather than hierarchy.
Parental obligation and a much reduced civil authority of parents over children replaced absolute power of the household. The democratisation of the family also changed corporate ownership profiles and therefore the definition of family enterprises in Japan. Families were no longer managed like firms, where property counted for more than people.
While the demise of the stem family after 1945 saw increasingly constricted ownership (the Mogis-Takanashis now own 25%), the family has continued the domination of management control. Excellent academic achievement, usually graduate degrees firm the best Japanese or US universities, is a requirement for the rapid promotion and continuity of family management at Kikkoman. Daughters, however, are
still excluded from significant managerial careers outside of the family.
Kikkoman is a testament to the achievement over time of entrepreneurialism on a global scale, and to maintaining security and stability over three centuries by constantly re-configuring the structure and infrastructure of family and firm within the context of society, culture, and country.
Kikkoman therefore represents an alternative model of the business family where cultural norms in effect controlled some family variables in ways which would be unacceptable in probably all other societies in the world. The role and place of women were controlled in the firm by means of cultural subordination, and the right of eldest males to the leadership position were controlled by the use of adoption and branching of families.
The role of women was quite profound - without their submission to be dispatched in Darwinian fashion to the fittest suitor offering desirable economic characteristics, the firm would have been maladapted to survive in the evolving business world.
Even in latter day Japan, the role of these corporate wives is to open the pathways for their families' firms to resources, for example by marrying into banking families or useful industrial or commercial connections.
To survive and grow, the
ie - the economic family unit - needed only the fittest males in prime leadership positions; natural sons either lived up to such criteria or accepted the adoption of a more suitable and eligible male in their place. And so the family firm endured as a result of the general humility and subordination of offspring for the greater good of the
ie.