Japanese Management Accounting and its Effects on the Asian-Pacific Region

Most Japanese students stand at a turning point in the research on management accounting. In which direction will they set their research forward? They have learnt a lot of management accounting methods from American scholars since the Second World War. They introduced traditional management accounting (standard costing and budgetary control) from North America in the 1950s and in the 1980 and 1990s imitated field study after learning econometric and quantitative analysis which prevailed there in the 1970s (Nishimura, 1988). For the first time in the 1990s, Japanese scholars had a chance to direct their efforts into studying and introducing Japanese practices of management accounting to foreign scholars thanks to the international success of large Japanese enterprises.