Merrill Lynch has snapped up 29 branches and 2, 000 employees from defunct Yamaichi Securities.
Also in 1998 it bought the trust banking unit of bankrupt Yamaichi and went into the banking business.
Shares in Japanese banks fell precipitously when Yamaichi Securities, then Japan's fourth-largest securities firm, went bust in November.
Merrill Lynch has taken over 30 branches of the defunct Yamaichi and hired some 2, 000 of its workforce.
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Core Pacific-Yamaichi International analyst Olive Xia's coverage universe ranges from food and beverage stocks to Chinese insurance providers.
The disdain of Yamaichi and other brokers for small customers was matched only by their disregard for the law.
Before Yamaichi went bust in November, Merrill was talking to Sanwa Bank about jointly buying Yamaichi's languishing investment-trust business.
Last November two big Japanese financial firms collapsed: Yamaichi (the country's fourth-largest stockbroker) and Hokkaido Takushoku, a commercial bank.
But the opportunity to build a full retail-broking business in Japan from the ashes of Yamaichi clearly excites Merrill more.
Using its own product-development skills, Yamaichi's customer base and Sanwa's 400 branches, Merrill hoped for a fast start in fund management.
The month at Yamaichi typically began with a sales list from head office, says Toshiyuki Suzuki, now Merrill's Nagano branch manager.
In March Orix snapped up a trust license from bankrupt Yamaichi Securities so its branches can offer clearing and other banking services.
Even last week the present finance minister claimed that Yamaichi, the country's fourth-largest stockbroker, was still solvent, even though the firm has said it will close.
"Investors are pricing in a scenario under which there will be an outbreak which will severely hurt the airlines' earnings, " said Castor Pang, head of research at Core Pacific-Yamaichi.
Renault has faced no such meddling: Nissan's big shareholders, such as Yamaichi Securities, Industrial Bank of Japan and Fuji Bank, were either bust or in too much of a mess to interfere.
This is partly because their treatment of workers no longer seems quite so brutal: when Yamaichi Securities went bankrupt last year, Merrill Lynch stepped in and gave jobs to a third of its staff.
Yamaichi's brokers have been retrained to look at the bigger picture, extracting financial information from customers in private booths that have been introduced into branch lobbies, then offering advice and only later clinching the sale.
It set up Merrill Lynch Japan Securities, which hired 2, 000 people from Yamaichi, one of Japan's four big brokers until it went bust in November 1997, and took out new leases on many old Yamaichi offices.
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