Kenichi is a full-time PhD candidate in the Department of International History. He holds a BA in History from UCL and a MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation from the ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳. He also spent a year at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as part of the Erasmus Programme.
Kenichi was awarded a studentship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) to support his doctoral research.
Provisional thesis title: Made in Europe? How Japanese foreign direct investment and British automotive policy shaped the European Single Car Market, 1979-1999.
Supervisor: Professor Piers Ludlow
Kenichi’s research seeks to contribute to European integration history by exploring the ways in which Japanese foreign direct investment in the European car industry influenced the creation of the European Single Market. Through the use of unexplored multi-lingual archival material, he demonstrates how the arrival of Japanese automakers in Britain in particular introduced a novel intra-European dimension to the European Community’s (EC) attempts to respond to the challenge posed by in a number of key strategic industries. The emergence of so-called ‘transplant’ factories within the Community posed profound questions regarding the supposed economic nationality conferred to the manufactured goods of foreign-owned multinationals. As the EC sought to create a single European market by 1993, at stake was not only what constituted a ‘European car’ but also whether Japanese automakers could be regarded as genuine stakeholders within a wider 'European economy'. The thesis's exploration of the Thacher government's defence of Japanese corporate interests within the EC sheds a unique light on how Britain's pursuit of its perceived national interests contributed to the European integration process.
Kenichi’s research culminates in the highly idiosyncratic agreement reached between the European Community and Japan to manage Japanese carmakers' share of the European automobile market. This research builds on the nascent historical literature on the Single Market by depicting the agreement as a unique instance in which European integration was explicitly contingent on reaching a bilateral agreement with a Third Country. Central to the argument advanced is that the globalisation of the car industry during the 1980-90s did not operate above, or at the expense of the nation but rather necessarily interfaced with legal systems, political structures and socio-cultural ideas that remained undergirded by the nation-state.