Introduction

This chapter briefly introduces the topic of ‘commercial morality’ as a concept that emerged in nineteenth-century debates on the ethics of day-to-day business transactions. It notes how from the late nineteenth century, as Japan became increasingly integrated into international trade, Westerners considered Japan’s standards of business ethics to be particularly low. It outlines the contents of the book’s chapters, highlighting the key issues: the absence of a single, universally accepted global standard of business behaviour; the extent to which rapid economic change facilitated cheating; and the failure of formal institutions to keep pace with growing opportunities for malpractice. It also suggests that the Japanese case is potentially instructive when we consider the situation of contemporary developing economies seeking to establish themselves in the global economy in the face of powerful vested interests.