The network idea has become a central metaphor in our daily lives. We talk of networking as a way to advance a career or gain political leverage. We refer to the breadth, density, and connectivity of someone's network as social capital that has real productive value and can be cultivated and deployed. With the fusion of computer and communications technology in the Internet have come significant new forms of social and economic organization as organizational and geographic boundaries dissolve in unbounded cyberspace. The drift toward network thinking has also broadly shaped the business world, as companies everywhere are forced to rethink not only their own relationships with suppliers, customers, banks, shareholders, and other stakeholders, but the relations among these as well. In some industries, firms are forging alliances with competitors and across industries in order to exploit market opportunities offered by new technologies. In others, the scale and scope of business activities has grown so broad that no firm can handle all the steps of the production process and firms cooperate simply to survive.

Nowhere is the importance of network thinking more evident than in Japan. As an emerging social science literature contends, the constitutive tissue of Japanese society is the formal and informal relationships that span all walks of daily life, from local community to political arena to economic sphere.