Should the Japanese corporate governance model be harmonized to the global standard?

Corporations are organized differently from country to country in terms of their management structures, stakeholder power, and nature of corporate control. This paper basically addresses the following three issues in order to reach a conclusion: (1) comparative differences of corporate governance models across nations, where various corporate governance practices and systems are compared across major developed countries, including UK, US, France, Germany and Japan; (2) historical and socio-cultural “origin” of the Japanese corporate governance model, where its deep-rooted institutional backgrounds are depicted in some depth; and (3) environmental changes and their impact on the Japanese corporate governance model, where major and fundamental social, economic and institutional external changes that would affect the nature of the Japanese corporate governance system