In general, Corporate Governance describes the external and internal structural frame for the management and supervision of enterprises. The term has a comprehensive outreach and includes - besides legal regulations with pre-defined legal forms such as Aktiengesellschaft or Kabushiki-aisha - also basics of statutes of the firms themselves, on their ownership and capital relations, the decision-making processes of their management, the organizational structures, questions of information management and the capitalization of firms and aspects of corporate cultures. This wide range of research questions enables this approach to connect with current research questions of business history as well as economic history and corporate law history and should be combined in respect to the development of the end of the 19th and throughout 20th century in a comparative way between Japan and Germany.