Japan: Pleasing the Ancestors

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Like chewing gum, rock 'n' roll and girls in slacks, people's capitalism was unthinkable in prewar Japan. Today, an estimated 6,000,000 Japanese—many of them housewives, factory workers and shopkeepers—own stocks. An average trading day on the Tokyo Exchange sees no fewer than 100 million shares of stock change hands. The trail blazer in this phenomenal growth of stock ownership is a jovial, pipe-chewing kabuya (securities broker) named Tsunao Okumura, who has fought public apathy, occupation forces, and the power of Kabutocho, Japan's Wall Street, to educate the Japanese public in the benefits of owning stocks.

Stubborn Man. Okumura, 60, is chairman of Tokyo's Nomura Securities Co. Ltd., the world's largest brokerage firm after Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith. Nomura, in fact, is known as the Merrill Lynch of Japan and not by accident. As a worker in Nomura's research department before the war, Okumura admired Merrill Lynch's corporate philosophy of people's capitalism, made a study of the American firm's operations. When he took over as head of Nomura in 1948, he began to push widespread stock ownership. He put ads in newspapers, made scores of lectures and even organized tours to plants to show potential small investors what they would own a part of.

Tokyo's Kabutocho, accustomed to the prewar idea of stocks held closely by the Zaibatsu financial combines, at first scoffed at Okumura, and occupation forces took a dim view of his plan to set up investment trusts that would operate somewhat like U.S. mutual funds. But Japan's amazing postwar resurgence proved fertile ground for Okumura's ideas. "I am the world's most stubborn man," says Okumura, "when I decide that I want something and meet opposition." Many Japanese companies now prefer to sell shares to raise money rather than to ask the once all-powerful banks; the number of firms listed on the stock exchange has gone from 577 in 1953 to 1,291, and the total value of listed shares has soared from $1.8 billion to $25.3 billion.

Sold Like Brushes. Nomura has 8,350 employees and 125 offices in Japan, plus branches in Honolulu and New York. Its volume of stock transactions in 1962 reached $8 billion. In fact, Nomura handles nearly 20% of Japan's entire stock business, 16.6% of all Japanese bond underwriting, 23.1% of its stock underwriting and 30.5% of all investment trust business. Its modern building in the heart of Tokyo boasts electronic data equipment, Japan's second biggest vault, and closed circuit TV that links it with 38 main branches in Tokyo. Last year, the firm made $6,100,000 in profits.