Most Japanese business failures are rather messy affairs because of the informal means for squaring accounts. Specialized trucking companies make a business of removing assets quickly and quietly from a company's place of operations in the dead of night before creditors descend on the premises to seize whatever they can lay their hands on. Creditors also use specialized firms to break into premises to seize movable equipment, furnishings and whatever else can be taken and possibly sold. Since small firms often go into debt with loan sharks in their last attempts to survive, the failure to repay a loan on time can mean visits from yakuza-related collection experts. Not all business dissolutions end up as bankruptcies, however defined.
Many companies simply cease operations.
Therefore, it was not included in the bankruptcy statistics. Another example is the net decline of 86,000 or so manufacturing establishments between 1991 and 1996, based on the Management and Coordination Agency's establishment and enterprise census. This contraction amounted to 10 percent of all manufacturing establishments. The rest vanished without a statistical trace. In addition to the loss of some 86,000 production establishments, employment in manufacturing fell by more than 1.2 million workers from 1991 through 1996.