In fact I would absolutely not mind for Ares and Renraku to go away, but one corporation take the place of Ares for a new Big Nine. After all, an odd number makes decisions much easier on court level.
As far as the books went so far, there are no situation where the Corporate Court goes "One corp, one vote".
- Regular court decisions are taken by a college of thirteen justices. Some of the prime megacorporations have more than one justice (MCT had as much as three at some point), either because they have enough clout at the time of the election to bargain with the other, or because they were so weak at that time the other corporations considered it the less dangerous option.
- The Corporate Court Crisis Coordination Committee ("C5") features six justices rotating among the thirteen).
- The justice election itself is described has having a "complex weighted vote system," where each of the prime megacorporations gets a number of vote based on obscure formulas that account for assets, revenues, and whatever. According to the short story at the beginning of
Blood in the Boardroom, the votes are also split between a number of representatives (the plot being about Lofwyr asking Jean-Claude Priault to publicly opposes the election of Wuxing candidate, while ordering several of S-K other representatives to vote for it nonetheless).
And in any case, I don't feel that 'there isn't enough to fill out three Japanacorps'. All three of them essentially represent something different, a core difference, in Japanese culture - which still has a pretty heavy influence on the genre. Shiawase represents its history, tradition, the core cultural 'Japanese identity' and the purity of it; they are the stolid samurai-and-emperor traditionalists. Renraku represents the ultra-accelerated future - a future within which the Japanese people do not lose their cultural identity; they are the cybersamurai, the ultra-robot jocks, the computer cowboys. MCT represents the uncertain and shifting struggle of the (nominally) lower-caste sorts, the criminals, the middle-class, the peasant trying to get by without getting squashed while also playing a trick on 'the Man'.
Shiawase has its ties in traditional
medieval Japan. It's more than the Shiawase family. It is the Shiawase
clan. They take care of the elderly ("future care beyond what a typical corporate wage slave normally expects" was the original description of the corporation in
Seattle Sourcebook), worships kami and ancestors ghosts.
As its core, Shiawase is a rural corporation, with major investments in agriculture and power plants. Although by no mean a small city, the headquarters' location in Osaka, instead of the capital Tokyo (or the former imperial capital Kyoto), can be thought off as a tribute to this "provincial" identity.
MCT is, as every one knows, related to the Yakuza. Which means much more than just some dirty money. Just as everything in Japan, Yakuza occupy a well-defined social position: their business is necessary. When Shiawase is saying "the family needs you", MCT is saying "the society needs us". Yakuza origins goes back to peddlers and dockers. That is, people on the roads and in the ports, who were outsiders to that rural society of clans that Shiawase represents, and came to prominence later in the Meiji era, in the 19th and early 20th century. Unlike Shiawase or Renraku, MCT does not maintain any samurai-themed units - the closest they have a samurai-styled
drones, which is in itself telling of how much consideration they give to the concept (also, when I play with people savvy enough on Japanese culture, I always give MCT and Yakuza henchmen only
wakizashi and no
katana, which was strictly a samurai weapon).
Renraku Computer Systems had been at some point depicted not as a Japanese corporation, but rather as a corporation owned by Japanese shareholders, which is slightly different. Renraku is about Japanese money taking over the world, rather than Japanese culture. It originally was an European corporation, Keruba International, that was taken over by Japanese investors in 2029, because that's where the money was in 2029, and they relocated the headquarters and established R&D centers in Chiba (again, not Tokyo) because that was where the SOTA was being developed by other corps in the 2030ies (because it is a requirement of the cyberpunk genre).
Renraku Asia did become the main division by 2040, while the European division was slowly falling apart because of internal corruption. It took almost a decade for the Japanese management to realize and deal with the practices the European managers were carrying out (which they root out for a part by simply selling the most corrupt subsidiaries). But by 2050, it was Renraku Americas who was taking the lead (headed by one Sherman Huang, not even a Japanese). And by 2057, the head of Renraku network security and his best engineers were still Eastern European hackers, as mentioned in
Black Madonna.
Sure, Renraku does have the Red Samurai. They were originally a ceremonial unit with shiny armors and SOTA weapons and no actual training to use it (not exactly a tribute to the Bushido - I'm sure they did even know how to write poetry). They slowly moved into being one of the most elite units in the setting, but with strict rules on race and ethnicity. They are actually completely cut off from, like, 90% of Renraku. Highly-skilled guards from European, American or even Indian or Chinese division are never going to join the Red Sams (the
Seattle Sourcebook mentions most of the arcology guards are actually trained in the Renraku Guard Academy in Seoul). The Red Samurais may be a symbol (especially to the Shadowrunners who encounter them) but they are the opposite of what makes a corporate culture - from a Renraku employee's point of view, the Red Sams belong to the management, not the corporation as a whole.
Then there was Fuchi Industrial Electronics (the alliance with the West), Yamatetsu (the colonization of Asia, more specifically the Philippines and Eastern Russia, wavering between cooperation and domination), Yakashima (buy-restructure-sell-repeat...), Monobe (buy whatever company is for sale anywhere in the world), the Pacific Rim Bank & Financial Services Corporation (the godfather of the Japanacorps: why ask for AAA rating when there are several of them beholden to you ?)... Which still leave Daiatsu, Komatsu, Pacific Rim Communications, Sony and Yokogawa to flesh out beyond the little that was put in
Shadows of Asia.
