The corporate social environment is changing through the need for corporations to co-exist with consumers and the public. Also corporate respect for individuals and consideration of stockholders' rights, as well as progressive globalization, must be met. We must not forget either the changing responsibilities that society expects the corporations to meet.
Today's business firms, although economic entities seeking to earn appropriate profits through fair competition, are expected to be entities that serve to help people live lives of plenty as well as being of some use to society. Toward this end, corporations must not merely obey the law but also bring a social conscience to bear on their undertakings.
As employees are constituent members of corporations who also participate in society as individual consumers and residents, it is clear that from now on corporation must demonstrate their ability to meet society's demands and show themselves as trusted corporate citizens.
From this perspective, Japanese corporations need to rigorously reconsider traditional business practices and their own behavior. So as not to give grounds for the criticism that Japanese business practices are exclusionary and opaque, it is urgent for us to work to achieve a free, transparent, fair market and establish international confidence in Japan's economic system. In doing so, we should pay particular attention to recent criticism that the principles of corporate behavior deviate from social norms and are difficult to understand from the outside. In response to such criticism, corporations must make an effort to regulate their own behavior in a manner that can be seen from the outside.
Individual corporations and industries have already made various efforts to introduce rules and regulations. At this juncture, however, we are requesting that the top management of individual firms and industry organizations take the lead in securing total observance of the spirit of this charter within their corporations and industries and that they conduct an overall review of their corporate behavior and business practices. The goal of a free, transparent, and fair market can be achieved only with repeated efforts by corporations to review their overall behavior and with the establishment of the principle that corporations must assume responsibility for their own acts and decisions.
We hope that this charter will be a reference for member corporations as they engage in overall reviews that take into account their individual circumstances and the nature of their businesses. In addition to following up on the results of these reviews, Keidanren intends to work on topics like the reconsideration of business practices. In addition, we will endeavor to deepen communication with consumers and residents through open forums and other public relations and policy dialogue activities so as to close the gap between corporate behavior and social norms.