The regional nature of Japanese firms: antecedents and consequences

This article examines the regional nature of Japanese firms, in line with the framework suggested by Collinson and Rugman in 2008. By analysing 52 of the largest Japanese firms, it argues for the regional nature of Japanese firms even in the 2010s, clarifying the inevitable consequences (as well as antecedents) of firms being global. Its findings and contributions are twofold. Firstly, it confirms that Japanese firms have continued to maintain region bound advantages in the Asian region, even in the face of macro challenges, such as the financial crisis and the rise of China. This sharply contradicts the underlying assumptions in the current literature that Japanese firms are moving to being global. Secondly, it shows that the selection of case studies in the current literature is still biased towards global and bi-regional large Japanese firms, rather than reflecting the majority of Japanese firms, which are regional. This underlying tendency to focus on an unrepresentative sample explains why international business scholars wrongly assume a single path of firms becoming global. This article, albeit limited to only Japanese firms, redirects our attention to how firms move dynamically in and between regions, alerting scholars to the need to avoid the possible pitfall of selecting large established manufacturers, typically global firms.