Neo Sengoku Jidai

From SaschaWiki

The Neo Sengoku Jidai (Americanised Japanese: New Warring States period) was a period of inter-Corporate street warfare that took place in the major cities of Japan during the late 2050s. It is sometimes considered the opening conflict of the Corporate Wars, but the tactics and objectives were somewhat different. The period was characterised mostly by street fighting between Corporate-sponsored gangs backed up by Japanese Crisis Agents. The archetypal image of two fully-enhanced Crisis Agents battling each other with katanas is unlikely to have occurred on a regular basis during the fighting. By the 2060s, the majority of Japanese businesses had conglomerated into Asaraka Suukou.

The Neo Sengoku Jidai has been popularised for the mass media in the holoshows Bionic Superninja, Bionic Superninja: Outrageous and Bionic Ninja Death Amazing.

Scholars of Classical Japanese abhor the term Neo Sengoku Jidai, pointing out the essential differences between two centuries of warfare in the original Sengoku Jidai and less than five years of intermittent street fighting in the new.

Keiretsu

Before World War 2, Japanese businesses were organised into large conglemerates called zaibatsu which bore a notable resemblance to modern Corporations. In the post-war period these conglomerates were forcibly dissolved by the Western powers, but the old alliances persisted in loose business groups called keiretsu. The effect of 20th and 21st century shortermism in corporate policy gradually weakened the keiretsu to the point of irrelevance, but the effects of Executive Trust Clauses in the 2010s and 2020s saw them gradually revitalised. As Corporations worldwide formed larger and larger conglomerates, so the keiretsu began to more closely resemble the zaibatsu of a century before.

By 2054 there were eight major Japanese keiretsu, most of which did not exclusively operate on the Japanese mainland, being either owned by foreign holding companies or owning foreign subsidiaries to a greater or lesser extent. The Neo Sengoku Jidai erupted as when the economic and legal situation promoted physical fighting as a tool of expansion.

By 2058 almost all business operations in Japan were owned or run by Asaraka Suukou or one of its subsidiaries.