This article seems to suggest it's near impossible to leave a megacorp and start a company. So how did the first megacorps get started in the first place? Presumably there is a fair amount of entrepreneurship in Japan, otherwise they would not have been able to achieve their vast economic success. But I'm curious what the traditional path to entrepreneurial success is in Japan, given the way this piece makes entrepreneurship there seem impossible.
> This article seems to suggest it's near impossible to leave a megacorp and start a company. So how did the first megacorps get started in the first place?
Japan's main modern megacorps largely are the same entities that were major business from the time of the Meiji Restoration (and some were founded much earlier, and are older than the US), or remixes of those entities that occurred when some of the old zaibatsu were broken up after WWII. They were formed as megacorps, for the most part, through very intense relations between government (both national and clan governments) and business industries, with a major component of that formation being either new or existing private enterprises whose founders had government connections taking over (often, at least initially, by leasing) the facilities of government business enterprises.
Those megacorps clearly aren't an indication of entrepreneurship in modern Japan. (That's not to say that such a thing doesn't exist, just that "how did the first megacorps get started" has nothing to say about it.)
>This article seems to suggest it's near impossible to leave a megacorp and start a company. So how did the first megacorps get started in the first place?
Don't know whether or not Sony comes under the category of megacorps that dragonwriter mentions in a sibling comment, i.e. "Japan's main modern megacorps largely are the same entities that were major business from the time of the Meiji Restoration".
But the story of Sony is interesting regardless of that. I had read the book Made in Japan by Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony, a while ago. It's mostly about Sony, not that much about his personal life.
Well, Softbank's founder is a son of Korean immigrants who moved to California at age 16, attending high school in SF and studying CS at UC Berkeley, after which he founded a company before moving back to Japan.
