  Production in an economy is a set of firms' activities as suppliers and
customers; a firm buys goods from other firms, puts value added and sells
products to others in a giant network of production. Empirical study is lacking
despite the fact that the structure of the production network is important to
understand and make models for many aspects of dynamics in economy. We study a
nation-wide production network comprising a million firms and millions of
supplier-customer links by using recent statistical methods developed in
physics. We show in the empirical analysis scale-free degree distribution,
disassortativity, correlation of degree to firm-size, and community structure
having sectoral and regional modules. Since suppliers usually provide credit to
their customers, who supply it to theirs in turn, each link is actually a
creditor-debtor relationship. We also study chains of failures or bankruptcies
that take place along those links in the network, and corresponding
avalanche-size distribution.
