Fascinating "On This Day" article for yesterday on the BBC website about the first purpose-built (and floating) Japanese trade fair in London in 1964.
"The exhibition was intended to show that Britain had more to export than whisky and woollens". I still have to remind people that, while Scotch whisky is a wonderful export, it represents a very, very small proportion of overall British exports to Japan. We now sell over £8billion worth of goods and services to Japan every year - nearly everything from helicopters, through gas turbines to pharmaceuticals, scientific equipment and food and drink. British retailers are in Japanese high streets, British food and drink in the department stores. British music is popular too.
We now have over 1400 Japanese companies investing in the UK, employing over 100,000 people. The three big automobile producers, Toyota, Nissan and Honda, make half the cars produced in the UK every year. The slowdown in growth to which the BBC article refers hasn't actually held Japanese investment back - we had a strong year in 2009. But we can never take anything for granted. It is a tough investment market in Europe, and we have to go on competing for that next factory, R and D centre, or sales headquarters to be placed in the UK rather than somewhere else in Europe.
As the article says, Britain was slow to get a foothold in the years immediately after World War Two. But Japanese trade promotion missions like the one described in this article - which I remember dealing with when I was first working in the British Embassy in the late 1970s - did a lot to raise the profile. And the export promotion campaigns we used to run helped too. Now, at a time, when companies are understandably focused on faster-growing Asian markets, we shouldn't forget the continuing importance of Japan. As we used to say when we ran the "Action Japan" campaign referred to here ten years ago - "The Japanese are among the most demanding, but also the most reliable, business partners in the world. British companies that sell successfully in Japan - and thousands do every year - can sell anywhere."
See the UK Trade and Investment Japan pages for more promotional events coming up.
David Warren, HM Ambassador to Japan