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The Multinational Spread of Japanese Manufacturing Investment since World War II*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

M.Y. Yoshino
M.Y. Yoshino
Affiliation:
Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard University
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Abstract

Professor Yoshino traces the evolution of direct investment in overseas manufacturing by Japanese enterprises in the postwar era. Much of that expansion is of very recent origin, and the prospects are for the spread of considerably more Japanese investment abroad in the future.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 48 , Issue 3: Multinational Enterprise , Autumn 1974 , pp. 357 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1974

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References

1 Wagakuni Kigyo no Kaigai Jigyo Katsudo ni Kansuru Chosa Hokokusho [A Report on Overseas Business Activities of Japanese Enterprises] (Tokyo: The Ministry of International Trade and Industry, 1973), 1–25.

2 This analysis covers only the post-World War II period. In the prewar era, there was a substantial amount of Japanese investment in the cotton textile industry in China.

3 These large, diversified commercial concerns (sogoshosha) played a key role in handling importing and exporting after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. From the early seventeenth century, the Tokugawa Shogunates (hereditary military dictatorships) had banned all but an extremely limited trade with the outside world. Trading companies arose after the Restoration as the institution through which foreign commerce was transacted. Until the late 1930s, Japanese imports and exports continued to be handled by these trading companies, which had branch offices around the world and naturally became the major repository of knowledge about economic opportunities overseas.