ABSTRACT
Introduction Japanese direct investment in UK manufacturing industry is of very recent origin. The first post-World War II manufacturing affiliate-UK Fasteners Ltd-was set up in 1969 at Runcorn, Cheshire, to produce zip fasteners, and was very much the prototype of the more successful ventures which succeeded it.1 By the middle of 1983, there were 26 UK manufacturing affiliates of Japanese companies employing 5,5555 people including 142 Japanese nationals; all but three of these, viz. J2T and George Ellison and Key Med, were 50% or more owned by Japanese capital. At the same time, there were three other affiliates involved in warehousing and storage activities which, in the 1970s, had undertaken some manufacturing.2 We also identified four manufacturing companies which at one time were partly Japanese owned, but which are now either defunct or entirely UK owned.3 It is, perhaps, salutary to remark that, at a time when Japanese companies are lauded as an example for UK industry to emulate, the majority of the ventures set up in the early 1970s were unsuccessful.
