Japanese Firms in the EU: Enduring national business culture in the age of Europeanization

This paper, in pursuing the development of Japanese lobbying, explores the Europeanization/harmonization of business-government relationship at the EU level, and assesses how Japanese firms have adapted to the constantly evolving EU lobbying system. Based on thirty interviews with firms, business associations, and EU institutions, we provide an empirical investigation of interaction between traditional Japanese lobbying practices and the EU institutional environment in forming firms’ preferences for particular lobbying strategies in the automobile and electronics sectors. In recognizing the persistence of national business culture among the firms’ political behaviours, a key objective is to highlight the variations in Japanese lobbying, with special attention to the firms’ efforts to blend into the EU policymaking process on the one hand and their embeddedness in traditional business culture on the other. This article concludes that Japanese firms have restructured their political behaviours to suit the EU policymaking process; however the degree of such Europeanization of lobbying strategies has significantly varied across sectors and firms due to the ranging influence of several institutional factors.