Committing to China

It was shorthand for cheap and nasty and, to be fair, was often borne out.

A lot of Japanese goods that made their way to New Zealand weren’t that good – for those of you old enough to remember, think of those first shipments of Toyota Corollas that turned to rust in months because they weren’t protected against New Zealand’s salty air.

But the change, when it came, seemed to occur almost overnight. One minute Japanese manufactures were risible throwaways – and then they weren’t.

We laughed at the seemingly childish infatuation the Japanese had with The Beatles (I had a Japanese-made lunchbox with very cheesy pictures of them on it and even, momentarily, a plastic Beatles wig) and there were Benny Hill’s toothy witless caricatures on TV to add to the hilarity.

And then suddenly we had to stop laughing.

Japan had moved faster, more incisively and with greater determination to become a world leading economy than anyone could have predicted.

I can vividly remember hearing the strident calls for more Japanese to be taught in New Zealand schools because, it was said, the nation was our trading partner of the future.

I equally remember my colleagues in the teaching profession scoffing at this because they came from English-trained classical backgrounds and had absolutely no concept of the importance of business or of Asia.

Without wanting to be overly provocative I wonder, 35 years on, how much has actually changed in New Zealand.

Overall we’ve done OK in Japan in that time but you can’t really say much more than that.

It’s our third largest export market which makes it very significant for us but frankly it couldn’t be described in today’s context as a bull market for New Zealand merchandise or services.

What we see in 2010 is a handful of companies that made a serious commitment to the market some years ago, largely in the food & beverage sector, and doing, by and large, a remarkable job of it.

Little in the way of technologies, manufactured goods, services or anything else from NZ finds its way to Japan.

Over the years the Japanese looked at New Zealand and invested in aluminium production and wood processing and a few other things besides but, when you look at the big ticket items in export trade, that’s about it.