9 - The British Export Marketing Centre and the Promotion of British Exports from 1972

Summary

FOUNDATIONS

THIS PORTRAIT is of the generation of individuals who built the structure for promoting British business in Japan in the early 1970s. Principal among them were a group of British officials in Tokyo and London, many motivated by their positive experience of working at the Tokyo embassy. But a number of inspired British businessmen (few British businesswomen in Tokyo in those days) and increasingly supportive Japanese businessmen and officials were much involved. Collectively they and their supporting teams, too many to mention here, left a legacy on which their successors built well into the twentyfirst century. This became a crossover time when the management of trade promotion gained British Government attention as a top priority alongside traditional, broader trade policy (much of which itself migrated to the European Commission after Britain's joining the EEC in 1973). Through the increasing scale of its operations as well as innovation in its work, the commercial department of the Tokyo embassy over that period came to be recognized alongside the Foreign Office posts at Dusseldorf and New York as benchmarks for advancing trade promotion practice, combined with the emerging, further new focus on inward investment promotion.

For much of the 1960s to 1980s protectionism and trade friction between Japan and the US and Europe meant that managed trade tended to dominate the bilateral trading relationships. Quotas, high tariffs and non-tariff barriers restricted Japanese imports from the UK and voluntary trade agreements limited Japanese exports. But from the mid-1960s the British embassy at Tokyo increased the pace and strength of effort to encourage British business to pay attention to the fast developing Japanese domestic market. Hugh Cortazzi (later Sir Hugh and ambassador to Japan) drove much of this as commercial counsellor in the second half of the 1960s. He had been recalled to Tokyo in 1966 by the ambassador, Sir Francis Rundall, after less than a year since he completed his assignment as head of chancery. Hugh Cortazzi was supported on the economic side of the embassy by John Whitehead (later Sir John) and David Wright (later Sir David), both also subsequent ambassadors at Tokyo, and on the commercial side by Alan Harvey and a growing number of Foreign Office former Japanese language students and locally engaged Japanese commercial officers and commercial assistants, many of whom went on to serve the embassy loyally for several decades.