Marketing History as Social Responsibility

This chapter examines the role that historical narrative plays in the public relations agenda of corporate Japan. Executives of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) have been intensely concerned about public perception of the company’s place in history since the early twentieth century. Like most member companies of Japan’s twentieth century keiretsu (corporate conglomerates that included Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo), NYK regularly published, before and after the war, official histories as a means of enhancing corporate prestige and brand image as well as to ameliorate lingering memories of the organization’s links to less pleasant aspects of the recent past. As a result, company history narratives, like many tropes of national history, often obscure more than they illuminate about the corporate subject. In particular, the chapter unpacks the way in which corporate history narratives have been interwoven with philanthropic initiatives, so-called Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs, in part developed to rehabilitate corporate reputation and enhance public perception of the [private] enterprise