It’s a very great pleasure to be invited to join the Japan400 launch today and very exciting for me. I came back from four and a half years as ambassador in Japan in November last year and am in the process of retiring from the Foreign Office after nearly 38 years as a diplomat, as well as this month becoming Chairman of the Japan Society which is the friendship body, the cultural, educational business network, which helps to bridge the gap between Britain and Japan here in the UK.
The reason that I’m particularly excited to be part of this celebration this morning is that the relationship between Japan and the United Kingdom is an extraordinarily strong one. This launch is rightfully celebrating the beginning of that history. But what I want to talk about for a couple of minutes is the present relationship because it is a strong friendship. It is an exceptionally strong partnership and we are seeing it in so many areas of activity every day. Takeshita-san referred briefly to the massive investment from Japan in the United Kingdom. This is extraordinarily wide-ranging and has continued to grow even during the period of worldwide economic downturn.
There are now over 1200 Japanese companies in the UK, employing over 130,000 people directly and many more hundreds of thousands in the supply chains. These are companies that extend right across the manufacturing and services sector. We’ve seen major investments from world leading companies from Japan this year with Nissan expanding its investment in the Northeast on automotive production. Nissan’s most productive factory is up in Sunderland. Hitachi is investing in UK infrastructure through the rail network on the West Coast line and investing in the UK nuclear industry through its purchase of the Horizon consortium. At the same time we’re seeing growing trade in the other direction, with exports by British companies to Japan now reaching between eight and nine billion pounds a year and again covering an extraordinarily wide range of economic sectors. So the trade investment relationship is a very, very strong one and I think it’s a great thing that we should be celebrating the small beginnings of that relationship in this year-long celebration.
But the relationship goes much broader than trade and investment. It covers, as we’ve heard already, science, technology, culture and education. I’ve just come this morning from Bristol where the University of Bristol is welcoming a very large delegation from Kyoto University, one of the great universities of the world. Over 90 senior academics and staff are taking part in a series of research seminars and workshops across a broad range of subjects in science and the humanities. Japanese universities want to internationalise; British universities want to exploit those opportunities. While I was ambassador in Japan for four and a half years I saw a steady stream of UK higher education institutions coming through Japan and building those partnerships and relationships with their Japanese opposite numbers.
The political relationship between the two governments is also strong. We had a successful visit by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, to Japan in April last year in which he signed a joint statement with the Japanese Prime Minister which not only lists a wide range of areas where Britain and Japan want to cooperate but also illustrates how we think very much along the same lines on so many of the difficult issues facing the world. My job as an ambassador was to expand that relationship, to build that partnership and to build a sense of common purpose and I think that’s what we’ve done quite successfully.
When William introduced me, he was kind enough to say I’d seen it all. I don’t feel I have seen anything like it all but in over 35 years of being a diplomat, much of that time spent dealing with Japan and promoting British interests in Japan, I have seen the development of a very strong partnership between our two countries. That partnership is rooted in the sense of common purpose, like-mindedness and increasingly aligned thinking across all the difficult issues that we face in the world. That’s why I think this celebration is so important, because we have a strong friendship and we ought to celebrate it.
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