Kobe Forum Perspectives on Japanese Accounting and Management Research

The seven papers presented at the 2008 Kobe Forum report important and interesting results from Japanese research on accounting and management. In Japan, the focus of accounting on helping management operate the firm efficiently has yielded great economies. The single-minded focus of the IFRS, based on investor and security market orientation of U.S.-U.K. accounting does not serve the Japanese economy well. The dysfunctional consequences of the attempts to force convergence of Japanese financial reporting to IFRS can be seen in the weaknesses of the so-called fair value accounting and in accounting for business combinations. Probabilistic purchase method of accounting for business combinations holds a promising alternative. Measurement of performance of corporations can be advantageously expanded beyond the concerns of shareholder to include the interests of other stakeholders in the corporation. The technological success of Japanese manufacturers in the recent decades has been accompanied by strong focus on value creation but inadequate attention to capturing the value for the shareholders. Finally, experimental research on laboratory games with Japanese subjects tends to debunk the theories about national traits so popular in armchair analyses of economic performance and behavior