Like you don’t see Gibson branded cars.
In: Economics
There were no anti-monopoly laws in Japan until the late 40’s and the laws that do now exist on the subject are very weak and aren’t usually enforced.
Because of this, monopolies were allowed to form. Prior to WWII, there were only 4 companies in Japan – Sumitomo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Yamada. These 4 companies divided up the Japanese economy and just didn’t compete with one another. So if you were living in Imperial Japan and wanted to buy a car, your only option was to buy it from Mazda, which was owned by Sumitomo. If you wanted to buy any kind of insurance you had to go through one of Yasuda’s insurance companies. The same was true of every industry in the country.
During the US occupation of Japan following WWII, the US introduced some laws regarding monopolies and broke up those 4 companies. This resulted in a large number of smaller companies buying up assets from those big 4 to compete in the newly liberalized economy. What assets those smaller companies bought up were kind of random, which led to companies like Yamaha, which was a small musical instrument company, to acquire the machinery to produce marine engines from Mitsubishi.
After the US occupation ended, the Japanese government stopped enforcing the occupation era laws on monopolies. This led the remnants of the big 4 to buy back a lot of their former assets, but again, what they were able to buy back was kind of random. This led to some weird Japanese conglomerates that owned a hodgepodge of factories producing equipment for wildly different industries.
The result in the modern day is that you still have the big 4, which produces stuff in a large number of unrelated industries, and then a bunch of smaller companies like Yamaha that produce stuff in a small number of unrelated industries.
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