The objective of this paper is to clarify the direction of future researches in the studies of Japanese firms and Japanese management in order to contribute to the academia by utilizing existing researches conducted in Japan. In addition, this paper reviews extensive studies on Japanese management in top journals and articles targeting Japanese firms from the year 2000 to date, when interests in Japanese management started diminishing. Moreover, this paper reveals three strategic directions for future researches concerning Japanese firms and Japanese management to regain global academic attention.

This essay discusses how the Japanese academic community of management should deal with the evaluation system of a global standard based on publications in prestigious academic journals in English. Firstly, the essay argues that the main mission of management scholars is to send “good academic messages” to the society—be it local or global—and that while it is important, writing for English journal publications is not the only means. Secondly, the essay proposes that the Japanese academic community of management, with an internationally middle-sized scale and a relatively large national economy/industry behind it, should adopt a hybrid system of sending good messages both locally and globally with local-global loops of knowledge creation and adoption, rather than continuing to be totally local or becoming a component of the global management academic platform based on uniform evaluations by English journal publications. Lastly, the essay proposes that the Japanese academic community of management, including universities and associations, should systematically support its members who challenges international journal publications, younger scholars in particular, considering such barriers that many of them may face as language, methodologies, locality of themes and data collection.

This paper discusses interesting aspects of studying Japanese companies based on knowledge from fieldworks abroad. What the author considers to be interesting is a phenomenon different from a view commonly accepted. The author hopes that young scholars are stimulated from a discussion why such a phenomenon is observed. Main issues discussed in this paper are as follows: “centralization and decentralization regarding headquarter-foreign subsidiary relationship”, “localization of managers and human resource development” and “can Japanese system overcome the institutional and cultural barriers?”

Japanese scholars of management and organization are stuck in the midst of various divides. While executing the project of “Organization Survey,” we have found clear shapes of those divides, and it has become evident that our true goal of the project is to bridge over the divides. As the project leaders of Organization Survey project, we examine how those divides are created and how we are intend to solve them through results of an insider action research.

This paper examines whether a corporate governance system can prevent fraud by executives at the top of corporate organizational hierarchy. The result of an empirical analysis from 2006 to 2015 of fraudulent accounting in Japanese listed companies shows that a corporate governance mechanism reduces fraudulent accounting by non-executives, but that it is difficult to prevent fraud by top executives within the organizational hierarchy. This paper provides a new perspective on corporate governance based on equity approaches.

This study examines the importance of facial expressions of management executives on strategically repairing organizational legitimacy. Most of previous studies have focused on verbal content of such strategies. A comparative case study was conducted between two prominent companies’ repairs on their organizational legitimacy in facing a same food safety crisis. The verbal content of the two cases was considered similar; however, the legitimacy of one company decreased dramatically after an explanation, while that of the other remained. The result indicates that a crucial factor was a difference in the evaluation of facial expressions by stakeholders in the context of Japanese culture.