The corporate executive or spokesperson has now become the reference librarian for the reporter.

FORBES: Delete Your Database Of Knowledge -Media Training

Some unquestioning reference to this theory has crept into most reporting on corporate Japan of late.

WSJ: Business Asia: Unearned Praise for Abenomics

It's a reference to the pre-World War II forerunners of a corporate form whose modern iterations are better known as keiretsu, those vertically integrated manufacturing and trading cartels that gave Japan Inc. its fearsome reputation in the 1980s.

CNN: ASIANOW - TIME Asia | Asian Newsmaker 1999: Masayoshi Son--Page 1