ABSTRACT
Offshore manufacturing, in combination with worldwide investment in capital and real estate markets, can be marked as one of the significant indicators of Japan's economic structural adjustment in the late 1980s. Investment in the US made up the most significant proportion of total Japanese foreign direct investment in all sectors in this period; and it was relatively smoothly absorbed by the US's giant economy. By contrast Japanese investment in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Malaysia, focused on manufacturing. The structural impact on these nations' economies and societies was enormous. At the end of the 1980s, when Thailand had the fastest growing economy in the world, Japanese investment alone accounted for 20–40 per cent of annual growth. Change in Greater Bangkok's urban landscape was palpable, as was change in its socio-scape: A farm labourer in Northeast Thailand on Tuesday was on the assembly line at Mazda in suburban Bangkok on Thursday. Moreover he was now working within the Japanese production system for Japanese managers, whose management techniques are, naturally, Japanese. It is this interplay between Japanese management and the Thai environment, onto which it has been grafted, that forms the focus of this chapter.
