Accountics: Impacts of internationally standardized accounting on the Japanese socio-economy

This is a case study of the dissemination of internationally standardized accounting to a nation where standardized accounting was hitherto only loosely practised under domestic conditions. Soon after World War II, a growing interest in socio-economic management, rather than microeconomic or corporate financing, accelerated the implementation of standardized accounting in Japan. In order to make unintelligible delineations of the economy and its constituent firms comprehensible, official and governable, both national and corporate accounting came to occupy an important position as a formal mode of economic data and management. The actors were the officials of the Allied Powers, economic statisticians and academic accountants; whose motives, political manoeuvres and consequences are here reconstructed based on the primary archives of, and interviews with, those who were directly involved in this revolution. The revolution directed new courses of the Japanese economy and firms through the development of “statistical habits of thought”. In order to clarify the relevance of this history to today’s international accounting issues, a few comparative references are also made to the recent development and implementation process of International Accounting Standards and International Financial Reporting Standards (IAS/IFRS).