After reading the very interesting book Japan as anything but Number One, I found out that the Japanese economy has been relying on practices that have been illegal for over a century in the USA. It mainly had to do with anti-trust laws which apparently don't exist in Japan.

Price fixing is obvious to anyone who has ever been to Japan, for such things as food and drinks and transports (shinkansen and domestic flight fares being fixed on highway fees between cities). As a result, all cinemas (=movie theaters) nationwide charge a fixed 1800yen, and a domestic flight anywhere inside Japan cost more than a flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles or even sometimes London or Paris. There are also very few discounts on public transports compared to Western countries. "Under 26" youth discount, over 18 student discounts, group pass, or such are mostly unheard of in Japan, both for trains, cinemas and museums.

Tying is more widespread in Japan than in any other country I know. This is common-practice with computers. For example :
- Almost all big electronic shops (BicCamera, Sakuraya...) sell only brand PC's (Fujitsu, Sony, NEC, IBM...) with lots of mostly useless pre-installed programmes for 2 or 3x the price of an ordinary PC.
- Departments stores sell "New Year packages" that aren't much cheaper than individual pieces to get rid of the unsold products.

An startling share of the Japanese industries, such as transport, beverage, banking, media and telecommunication, would certainly be accused of Oligopoly in many EU countries.
- ANA and JAL famously fix their prices on each other and try all they can to make smaller airlines go bankrupt by cutting their prices to seriously unprofitable levels on the few routes where small airlines operates, then take them over once they are in financial difficulty.
- Japan may have hundreds of brands of drinks (included imported ones like Evian, Vittel or Nescafe), but they must all pass through one of the 5 major distributors : Suntory, Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo and Coca Cola Japan. The first four each have their own beer, coffee and (usually French) mineral water. About 90% of the vending machines in Japan belong to one of these companies, each distributing drinks from dozens of other companies and makng large profit from the oligopoly.
- The Japanese banking industry has undergone tremendous changes in the last few years. All the 10 major banks have merged within 5 years, leaving only 3 megabanks on the market (Mitsubishi-UFJ, Mizuho and Mitsui-Sumitomo), plus dozens of tiny regional banks that often do not have branches outside their prefecture.
- Commercial Japanese medias are doing all they can to converge into a tight oligopoly of five players. TV and Newspapers companies have all merged with each others, forming 5 duets controlling over 80% of the market (all the free TV market, were it not for NHK). These are Yomiuri Shimbun/NihonTV, Asahi Shimbun/AsahiTV, FujiTV/Sankei Shimbun and Mainichi/TBS and Nikkei/TokyoTV.
- The telecom market is still mostly controlled by NTT (and NTTDocomo), with only moderate competition from KDDI and Vodafone on the mobile market.