Ports, regions and manufacturing systems: Automobile manufacturing in Kyushu, Japan

Abstract

The locations of seaports and manufacturing activities in Japan have changed considerably since World War II. Despite the geographic spread of economic activities over decades and the uneven development of ports, the cores of both systems have long remained in the same metropolitan areas. While co-location does not provide necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be offered to posit that a necessary relationship exists between the Japanese manufacturing system's geographic expansion and changes in the maritime transport network. A case study of automobile industry's recent development in the peripheral region of Kyushu identifies some drivers of these evolutions at the level of one particular sector. This suggests that, despite the development of high capacity transport infrastructure and manufacturing facilities in the Japanese periphery, the current manufacturing core is not yet threatened

Density economies and transport geography: Evidence from the container shipping industry

“…The port of Kobe was Japan's first container port with high standard container berths, or over-Panamax, since 1967. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, with the generalization of scale economies on containerization and the development of hub-and-spokes networks, the port of Kobe became the main gateway seaport in Asia, and was at the top of the Japanese (maritime) hierarchy (Guerrero and Itoh, 2016). The container handling volumes at Kobe port between the late 1970s and early 1980s made it one of the leading ports in the world.…”

“…However, the Hanshin earthquake acted as a catalyst of the downgrade of Kobe port (Guerrero and Itoh, 2016).…”

“…leading port of South Korea, accounting for 93% of the national total container traffic in 1995 and 73% in 2010 (Busan Port Authority, 2011)), the closest major hub port to Kobe. 9 After the Hanshin earthquake, the hub function of Kobe port as the northeast Asian gateway was largely replaced by Busan port, though the damaged facilities of Kobe port were fully and quickly recovered in March 1997 (Guerrero and Itoh, 2016). Busan's international transshipment traffic received a major boost as a result of the diversion of several trunk lines from Kobe port (Fossey, 1997).…”