Its keiretsu includes 1, 000 companies that employ 10 workers for every one of Nissan's.
Keiretsu ties are extensive and touch every part of the lives of a group's employees.
Mitsubishi Real Estate, part of the same keiretsu or business group, is the buyer.
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the companies in the old Mitsubishi keiretsu, also sees gold in green.
Some business groups even have marriage counselors who help young employees find mates from within the keiretsu.
"Japanese banks and others are unwinding their cross-shareholding of keiretsu groups at a savage pace, " says C.
Instead, Toyota kept its keiretsu so it could count on getting first crack at its suppliers' best inventions.
Then there are those Friday meetings, which co-ordinate the keiretsu's overall strategy on big technological and economic questions.
The big question is whether they will take advantage of this, while breaking free from their keiretsu shackles.
The non-life companies now seem destined to be folded into the bigger keiretsu groupings through their related life insurers.
"The once-lionized keiretsu system has become a liability, " says analyst Chris Redl at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Tokyo.
Remember those mighty keiretsu, the webs of supplier relationships that improved parts quality and manufacturing flow for Japanese companies?
With no reason to shop around, keiretsu have kept virtually all insurance in-house.
True, pension funds still hand a big portion of their money to the investment advisory firm in their keiretsu.
The Facebook Keiretsu is the newest in a strong tradition of techies still working together once they hit it rich.
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Four big universal financial groups, created from the merger of six keiretsu into three, together with a regional bank alliance.
At Sumitomo Bank, for example, staff are encouraged to drink only Asahi beer because the brewery is in its keiretsu.
There, it has been helped not by DaimlerChrysler but by the marketing prowess of its keiretsu partner, the Mitsubishi trading company.
ECONOMIST: Mitsubishi and Mazda struggle, despite western partners
Nor is there much pressure from big shareholders to increase profits: the cross-shareholdings of the keiretsu come with an implicit non-aggression pact.
For a start, crude keiretsu characterisations seem out of date at Matsushita.
While hardly made in heaven the merger would be the first between banks from rival keiretsu the match is better than it might first appear.
Given that the banks themselves are eager to sell their large shareholdings in firms within their own keiretsu (or group), further falls seem likely.
With banks merging across keiretsu lines, it may be too easy for companies to do the same, regardless of whether such deals make sense.
Companies simply handed their pension money to a life-insurance company that held some of their shares, or to the trust bank in their keiretsu.
At the core of the corporate group, or keiretsu, with which the insurer had close ties, were no less than Nissan Motors and Hitachi Ltd.
For the sake of maintaining relationships among members of the keiretsu, or corporate groups, Japanese bankers lend a lot of money to big, strong companies.
After Nissan crashed, one way Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn brought it back was to unwind the company's keiretsu relationships of interlinking ownership with its parts suppliers.
Mr Makino says that the traditional distribution practices of the keiretsu, or families of firms, ensured that manufacturers had a lot of control over high-street prices.
This means that a parent company may happily pay more for something from a small company in its keiretsu, or group, than from an outside supplier.
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