The announcement came only a few hours after Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two remaining out of the five largest American investment banks, said they would turn into bank holding companies.
The takeover price will be between 400 billion yen (about W4,280 billion) and 900 billion yen (about W9,640 billion), Japanese media outlets said. MUFJ is a supersize financial group with assets of 194 trillion yen, the result of a merger of the Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group, Japan's second largest financial group, and UFJ Holdings, Japan's fourth largest financial firm, in 2005.
Nomura Holdings, Japan's largest securities firm, beat Barclays Group of Britain in the takeover bid for Lehman Brothers, the U.S.’ fourth largest investment bank, which has filed for bankruptcy.
This was not the first time Japanese firms have been aggressive in their bid to buy American firms. During the "bubble economy" in the late 1980s, Japanese conglomerates or large investors were busy property shopping in the U.S. and Europe. Mitsubishi Estate's purchase of the Rockefeller Center building in New York in 1989 was a symbolic incident. In a poll in the U.S. at the time, Americans said Japanese economic power was more fearsome than Soviet military power. But Japanese property shopping spree in the U.S. ended up in failure when the economic bubble burst.
Japan experienced a "lost decade" while the American economy boomed in the 1990s. But in 2007, Japanese economic growth (2.1 percent) overtook that of the U.S. (2 percent) for the first time in 15 years. Based on their restored economic power, the Japanese are back.