Japanese Business Blog - Rudlin Consulting

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 7

(continued from part 6)

The Japanese consumer electronics companies which were such prominent sponsors of the 1985 Japanese Miracle conference at Oxford University had all set up manufacturing in the UK in the 1970s. Sony was the first, taking over an empty factory in Bridgend, with support from the Welsh development agency. Sony denied that it had been forced to manufacture in the UK because of the upward trend in the yen, or in response protests from British manufacturers at the high level of imports coming from Japan. It pledged to use local components as far as possible, and when asked whether it would introduce Japanese paternalism to UK labour relations, Mr Okochi, the MD, responded “when in Wales do as the Welsh do”.

Panasonic (or Matsushita as it then was) also set up a factory in Wales, near Cardiff and Hitachi adopted an old GEC TV factory in Aberdare. Nissan started manufacturing in Sunderland a year after the conference, the same year Honda opened its plant in Swindon, after having had a partnership with Rover since 1979, and manufacturing under licence.

It is well documented that Honda was extremely shocked by the state of British automotive manufacturing efficiency that it saw at the Rover plant, of tea breaks, working to rule and demarcation disputes. No doubt this was why Nissan and Toyota – who set up in Derbyshire in 1989 – were determined to build an effective, well trained workforce from scratch.

Hitachi and Nissan also brought Japanese style labour relations to the UK, by adopting a one union policy – and as far as I am aware, Nissan has never had a strike in its Sunderland factory since. British workers were in turn favourable towards other Japanese management practices, such as managers eating with workers in the same canteen, and dressing in the same corporate overalls, rather than a jacket and tie.

Sony still has operations in Bridgend to this day, but more focused on B2B rather than consumer electronics, such as broadcast equipment. Panasonic still manufactures home appliances in Wales but Hitachi closed its Aberdare plant in 2001. Hitachi is also now more focused on B2B, particularly energy and rail related businesses, with a rolling stock plant in Newton Aycliffe.

(For more on this period, see our post Hitachi in the UK from TV to Trains)

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Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 6

(continued from part 5)

The Japanese Miracle was the title of a conference held by AISEC at Oxford University in December 1985. Japan’s economic success was beginning to be noticed, but often as a threat, with books starting to appear such as Japan as Number 1 and American unionists smashing up Toyota cars.

I joined the organizing committee of the conference, but am unnamed in the programme you can see here, as I was only a fresher, so was mainly used like a runner on a film set. The programme is a great snapshot of the influential people in UK-Japan business and political relations who were guest speakers, and features a long list of Japanese and British corporate sponsors.

On the Japanese side, the list is dominated by consumer electronics manufacturers – Hitachi Consumer Products, Casio, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba Consumer products. My generation had grown up as teenagers with the Sony Walkman, a Panasonic or Sharp double cassette deck, Hitachi TVs and Casio calculators. The Zaikai (Japanese financial community) are represented by trading companies such as C. Itoh (now Itochu) and Mitsubishi Corporation and Nomura and the Industrial Bank of Japan. All of these companies still exist to this day – although the consumer electronics companies have shifted more to B2B.

Financial services companies featured heavily on the UK sponsor list, but very few have the same name or ownership structure as in 1985 apart from Barclays. Price Waterhouse is now PwC, Ernst & Whinney is EY, Touche Rosse is Deloitte. Austin Rover has become part of JLR, owned by an Indian company. British Steel is owned by a Chinese company. ICI was mostly acquired by the Dutch company AkzoNobel. Jaeger went bankrupt and is now just a brand owned by Marks and Spencer. The only company that remains pretty much as it was in 1985 is J Sainsbury. To quote Napoleon again, Britain is indeed a nation of shopkeepers.

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 5

(continued from part 4)

In the next part of my speech to Jiji Top Seminar, I took Napoleon Bonaparte’s view that “to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty” and looked at the state of the UK in the 1980s, to understand the influences this might have on Keir Starmer now.

After a year at Hiroshima University in 1984-5, I began my degree at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University. This photo was taken on our matriculation day – if you look at the orange circles you can see me, aged 19, but also Keir Starmer, who had just turned 23.

I don’t think we ever met properly, as he was doing a postgraduate law degree and I was a first year, studying Modern History and Economics – I do remember one time drinking with some post graduate lawyers at the Middle Common Room bar, but that was a rare event. But, having read Tom Baldwin’s excellent biography of Starmer, I feel we are very much of the same generation and mindset in terms of what influenced us around the age of 20.

The poster on the right was on quite a few student bedroom walls – our generation grew up during the Cold War and was genuinely fearful of a nuclear apocalypse. There had been a real war too, the Falklands war of 1982, which Britain won, and that gained huge popularity for Mrs Thatcher. But for young people on the left, the defining event of that time was the miners’ strike of 1984-5- a gruelling, year long strike where there was bitter conflict and even a couple of deaths. Thatcher was determined to win that too and had stockpiled coal in preparation.

It was all part of the deindustrialization of Britain, perhaps inevitable, but the way the miners were treated, with no thought as to what would happen to them next, seemed unforgivable. In fact the year before the strike had already marked a turning point, when the contribution of the services sector to UK GDP outstripped the contribution of the manufacturing sector.

(to be continued)

Kubota to build excavator factory in Germany

Japanese construction machinery maker Kubota will build a new factory in Germany to produce mini excavators, planning for a long-term rise in demand in Europe despite sluggish demand in the region. Kubota already has a factory nearby employing over 500 people and another factory in France, producing tractors, where it also has an R&D centre. It acquired the Norwegian agricultural machinery manufacturing company Kverneland in 2012.

JERA and BP to merge offshore wind businesses

Japanese energy provider and British oil company BP are to set up a company named JERA Nex bp in the U.K. by next September after they gain approval from authorities. They intend to invest $5.8bn in the 50-50 venture by 2030. Both have been struggling to achieve profitability in offshore wind due to rising costs. Presumably it is hoped that the larger scale of the merged business will help to find economies. The new company will be the fourth largest industry player in terms of the amount of offshore wind power capacity, including those under development.

JERA already has offices in London and Amsterdam. Its subsidiary JERA Trading acquired EDF Trading’s coal and freight business Amstuw BV, which operates the Rietlanden coal terminal in the Netherlands, in 2016.

Nippon Life to acquire Resolution Life

Nippon Life is negotiating to acquire Bermuda headquartered Resolution Life for $8.2bn, making it the biggest ever acquisition by a Japanese insurer. The last major acquisition in this sector was MS&AD acquiring UK non-life insurance and reinsurance company Amlin in 2015 for $5.3bn.

Resolution Life was founded by British philanthropist Sir Clive Cowdery and was a consolidator of closed book insurance – taking on life insurance policies from companies that wanted to focus their business elsewhere. As it was originally headquartered in the UK, many of the brands it now looks after are British, but it also has businesses in Australia and the USA – all together employing around 1,800 people. It moved its headquarters to Bermuda and had investments from private equity group Blackstone and Nippon Life. Nippon Life is now negotiating to acquire Blackstone’s share.

Nippon Life had already been seconding staff to Resolution Life to understand the closed book business and has been helping Resolution Life expand its business in Japan. Nippon Life has both a branch office and an investment subsidiary in London, employing around 30 people and an office in Germany.

It has been lagging behind on overseas expansion compared to other Japanese insurance companies, with only 4% of core profit coming from its overseas business, compared to Dai-ichi Life’s 34% in 2022.

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 4

(continuing from part 3)

Britain still seemed very inward looking when we returned to it in 1977 after five years in Japan. Friends and family showed very little interest in asking us about our experiences.

At school, I was the outsider, the odd one. Thanks to my funny name I was teased with chants of “PernilleitsDanish”. I was totally ignorant of British popular culture and it was only through pure luck that I passed the leader of the girl’s gang’s test of what football team I supported (thank you Liverpool) and which Bay City Roller I fancied (thank you Les McKeown for being obviously the most handsome). If I talked about my time in Japan people would either ask me to say something in Japanese, or say “yes, you look a bit Japanese.”

Looking back on it, I estimate my school was 99% White British and British born. There were immigrants in Britain, of course, but in particular areas of the UK like Bradford or Brixton. This is confirmed by the chart here showing the census results from 1851 to 2021* – in the 1970s only around 5 or 6% of the population were born overseas, compared to around 17% now. In current day Japan, around 3% of the population have foreign nationality – similar to the UK in the 1950s.

The Wimbledon effect, whereby foreign ownership of businesses and foreign talent were welcomed into the UK, started under Thatcher’s conservative government, with a programme of privatisation and deregulation. With this also came public sector funding cuts, including in higher education. This spurred my parents into moving back to Japan again, just as I was finishing my school.

*The eagle eyed will note this chart is based on research by MigrationWatch, which campaigns to reduce immigration. I have spent many years researching the census returns myself, and suspect there will be problems with the data as often place of birth entries are mangled or illegible or not given – particularly if digitised records that are on Ancestry.com are used. I suspect the mistakes cancel each other out, however, and the general overall trend is correct. Note however that MigrationWatch does not include Ireland born people as “foreign born”. Also that people who are only visiting the UK temporarily are recorded in the census.

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 3

(continuing from part 2)

When we returned to Britain in 1977 after nearly five years of living in Japan, it was quite a shock. We had become used to a lifestyle of easy travel by train or car to cities such as Osaka or Kobe with brightly lit streets full of department stores and shopping arcades, regularly going out to eat wonderful food and drink excellent coffee and for me, the best ever chocolate cakes in the plentiful restaurants and coffee shops.

Back in England, we initially lived in a village between Bath and Bristol and then moved to a village in north Buckinghamshire. We had to buy a car for my mother to drive to Bletchley station and commute into London. In Japan we’d had a much loved Daihatsu, so my parents wanted the nearest equivalent Japanese car in the UK. The only available Japanese cars in Britain were from Nissan, so we bought a Datsun Sunny 120Y – very similar to the one in this photo.

It rusted quite badly but was utterly reliable, starting every morning, however frosty. I remember hearing the hacking noises of neighbours’ cars as they repeatedly try to start the ignition. My grandparents were horrified that we had bought a Japanese car rather than a British one. They were of the generation that had bad memories of Japan in World War II. They had bought a Triumph Dolomite, which had to be taken to the garage frequently for repairs.

Everything in Britain seemed broken, dirty and inefficient compared to Japan. My childhood memories are coloured by brown, orange and a grey dampness. The atmosphere was also depressed and antagonistic – strikes continued, culminating in the Winter of Discontent. It was no surprise that Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative Party won in 1979.

(PS: This debate in the House of Commons shows the tone and concerns in 1977 regarding the British car industry and Japanese imports)

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 2

(continuing from part 1)

I lived in Japan three times in my life. The first time was in 1972, when I was six years old, following my stepfather’s appointment as a visiting lecturer at Tohoku University in Sendai. It was not at all common for British people to travel to Japan at that time – unlike now where everyone seems to want to visit Japan. Our friends and family asked why on earth we would want to do this. My school friends thought China and Japan were the same country. I imagined all Japanese wore dressing gowns and had chopsticks in their hair.

My parents decided to move to Japan due to the frustration they felt about Britain at the time. Inflation was high, the oil crisis was beginning to develop and there was a miners’ strike leading to a state of emergency. The Troubles in Northern Ireland meant terrorist incidents were commonplace. Britain had become known as the “sick man of Europe.”

As there weren’t many foreigners living in Sendai, there was no international school. So I went to Shirayuri, a Catholic girls private school. I was the first non-Japanese person to attend the school. You can see me in the photo with my mother, in my sailor uniform. I also had to wear a hat and carry a Randoseru backpack.

As I said in the interview at the end of my Jiji lecture, because foreigners were so unusual in Sendai, people would stop in the street to look at us and shout “wah, gaijin” (wow, a foreigner) and the school children would crowd round me at playtime to look into my blue eyes or touch my fair hair. But after six months they got bored and I was just “uchi no gaijin” (“our foreigner”).

I also learnt Japanese very quickly – and the accent and natural grammatical fluency have remained with me to this day. I later came to understand that it is quite easy to pick up other languages at that age, as your native language is not yet hardwired. I even came top in composition once. My parents were very excited for me but I was more sanguine – saying it was deserved because it was the best composition.

I think we struggled a bit at first in our pre-war freezing cold ijinkan house, but by the time we moved further south to Kobe, my mother also had a job and I remember living a comfortable life in a nice modern house in a town between my international school in Kobe and my stepfather’s university in Osaka. I would commute to school every day by myself on two different trains and be met after Saturday morning school by my parents. They would take me for a Sachertorte in one of the local coffee shops, before wandering round Kobe’s excellent department stores and bookshops, or going to the sports club to play squash or swim. On Sundays we would attend the Seamen’s Mission church and then have lunch at the Italian restaurant opposite the Catholic church.

It was quite a shock when we returned to Britain in 1977.

(Part 3)

Reflections on the past forty years of Japanese business in the UK – what’s next? – 1

Pernille Rudlin gave a talk in Japanese to the Jiji Top Seminar on November 22nd 2024. She took look at 40 years of Japanese business in the UK, how it has evolved and what the future might hold.

Through the lens of her own career working in and with Japanese companies, she traced the fortunes of the British and Japanese companies who supported the 1985 “Japanese Miracle” conference at Oxford University which she helped with as a student. She covered the impact of the “Big Bang” in 1986, the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble, the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom bubble and crash, the global financial crisis and Brexit. The shifts in balance between manufacturing, services and European coordination were also analysed, with some thoughts on what the new Labour government might mean for Japanese companies in the UK.

This is a summary in English of the talk – each slide will be a separate post.

Slide 1: In researching this topic, I came across the poster you can see here. It’s from the 1906 General Election, and as you can see it was issued by the Conservative Party. The alliance that they refer to was the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance. Both countries were worried by the the threat from Russia, and then in 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War, Japan defeated Russia, the first time in modern history that an Eastern nation had defeated a Western one.

The British government praised the Japanese for their victory and the British public were also admiring of Japan’s “pluck” but the alliance was not a vote winner for the Conservatives, who lost badly to the Liberals. The 1906 election also saw the rise of the newly renamed Labour Party, headed by Keir Hardie. Our prime minister, Keir Starmer’s parents named their son after Keir Hardie – evidence that Starmer very much came from a Labour supporting household.

When I first saw this poster, it set me thinking whether we were about to see an Anglo-Japanese Alliance 2.0.