TOKYO, July 13 - Corporate bankruptcy cases in Japan rose 1.3 percent in the first half of 2001 from a year earlier to 9,427 cases, the highest first-half figure in three years, a private credit research firm said on Friday.
Teikoku Databank said the prolonged economic slowdown and banks' reluctance to support troubled firms pushed up bankruptcies to the fourth-highest figure in post-war Japan.
It said 7,018 cases, or 74.4 percent of the total, were caused by the economy's weakness.
Bankruptcy debt for the January to June period climbed for the second straight year to 7.21 trillion yen ($58.13 billion), a 3.7 percent rise from a year earlier.
The failure in March of Tokyo Mutual Life Insurance Co with a negative net worth of 34.1 billion yen weighed on the total figure.
Teikoku Databank also warned that Japan's long-troubled banking sector is becoming increasingly cautious on its lending stance.
"As banks face more pressure to speed up their bad-loan write-offs and become more selective about their borrowers, more failures will be triggered in small- to medium-sized firms," it said.
In June alone, the total number of failed firms edged up 0.2 percent to 1,563 from a year earlier, marking the third straight monthly rise.
But total debt fell 63 percent to 690.7 billion yen.
In the first half of the year, failures at firms with less than 10 billion yen in debt accounted for almost 87 percent of the total. ($1=124.02 Yen)