Meaning & use
zaibatsu
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A large Japanese business conglomerate, especially one of the powerful family-controlled industrial groups that dominated Japan's economy before World War II.
See it in a sentence
The Mitsubishi zaibatsu controlled shipping, banking, and manufacturing before the war.
Historians study how the zaibatsu were broken up during the Allied occupation of Japan.
A note on using this word
A Japanese loanword used in English mainly in historical and economic writing about Japan's industrial history.
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