This book is a translation of: Horaguchi, Haruo. Nihon Kigyo no Kaigai Chokusetsu Toshi: Ajia eno Shinshutsu to Tettai (Foreign Direct Investment of Japanese Firms: Investment and Disinvestment in Asia), Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppan Kai (University of Tokyo Press), June 1992. This book, Foreign Direct Investment of Japanese Firms (in Japanese) was awarded NIKKEI Best Book Prize in 1992.
This book has finally been translated into English. It is a monograph studying the withdrawal of multinational corporations in the 1970s and the 1980s. As of 1992, the theory of multinational corporations at that time followed the theory that oligopolistic large corporations would acquire overseas markets. There was little recognition that foreign investment was vulnerable to continued strategic changes, including market changes overseas. Multinational corporations cannot maximize profits in a simple way as economics assumes, such as taking the first derivative and setting it to zero. This book is fully devoted to explore how it is done.