  Using an exhaustive list of Japanese bankruptcy in 1997, we discover a Zipf
law for the distribution of total liabilities of bankrupted firms in high debt
range. The life-time of these bankrupted firms has exponential distribution in
correlation with entry rate of new firms. We also show that the debt and size
are highly correlated, so the Zipf law holds consistently with that for size
distribution. In attempt to understand ``physics'' of bankruptcy, we show that
a model of debtor-creditor dynamics of firms and a bank, recently proposed by
economists, can reproduce these phenomenological findings.
