Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Asia occupies a special place in Japan’s economic strateg, although as a region it lags behind North America and Europe as a target of Japanese fdi. In the face of the higher yen and a serious domestic labor shortage, Japanese companies moved rapidly to relocate high labor-content production to countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and more recently, Indonesia and coastal China. Japanese companies took these actions both to maintain their competitiveness in global markets and as an entry point into the growing, but still protectionist, regional markets.