Word.ws English Dictionary

zaikai

Syllables: zai·kai/ˈzaɪkaɪ/

zaikai noun: collectively, the powerful and influential businesspeople and tycoons of Japan.

zaikai: collectively, the powerful and influential businesspeople and tycoons of Japan
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0 de, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

zaikai (plural zaikais or zaikai)

  1. Collectively, the powerful and influential businesspeople and tycoons of Japan.
    • Behind the trading company and the bank are the financially interconnected companies known as zaikai, many of which descended from pre-war zaibatsu oligopolists. The modern zaikai has remained every bit as strong as its zaibatsu predecessors, achieving this result by linking companies (through...1995, Lee Khoon Choy, Japan—Between Myth and Reality, Singapore; River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific, →ISBN, page 181
    • In exchange for the continued support of the zaikai, which expresses the consensus of big business and acts as a large pipeline supplying the capital necessary for LDP activities, the LDP has made the utmost effort to reflect the designs of big business in its policy-making.1996, “Dynamics of the Big Business Organisation: A Study from Japan”, in Raghubir Dayal, Peter Zachariah, Kireet Rajpal, editors, Organisation Theory and Behaviour (Encyclopaedia of Economics...

Examples of zaikai in a sentence

  • Behind the trading company and the bank are the financially interconnected companies known as zaikai, many of which descended from pre-war zaibatsu oligopolists.1995, Lee Khoon Choy, Japan—Between Myth and Reality, Singapore; River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific, →ISBN, page 181:
  • Whereas elitist models include the big business circles, or zaikai, as one of the inseparable power elite, pluralists emphasize their relative independence of the political and administrative elite.1999, Atsuko Abe, Japan and the European Union: Domestic Politics and Transnational Relations, London; New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press...

Forms of zaikai

pluralzaikais
pluralzaikai

Origin of zaikai

Borrowed from Japanese 財界 (zaikai, “world of money”), from 財 (zai, “money; wealth”) + 界 (kai, “world”).

Questions about zaikai

What does zaikai mean?
Zaikai means collectively, the powerful and influential businesspeople and tycoons of Japan.
How do you use zaikai in a sentence?
Behind the trading company and the bank are the financially interconnected companies known as zaikai, many of which descended from pre-war zaibatsu oligopolists.
What part of speech is zaikai?
Zaikai is a noun.
How do you pronounce zaikai?
Zaikai is pronounced /ˈzaɪkaɪ/.
What is the plural of zaikai?
The plural of zaikai is zaikais.

Words near zaikai in the dictionary

  1. Zaidite
  2. Zaidites
  3. Zaids
  4. zaidy
  5. Zaiets
  6. zaikai
  7. zaikais
  8. zail
  9. Zailckas
  10. zaildar
  11. zaildars

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zaikai (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-zaikai.wav.

Cite this entry: “zaikai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/zaikai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.