Britain's prospective departure from the European Union will clearly send shock waves across Europe and throughout the Atlantic community. But what impact might it have in the Pacific? Are Japan and China too far away to meaningfully feel its reverberations?
To assess the impact of Brexit in Asia, it is important first to review the pre-existing structure of trans-Eurasian relationships. By far the largest Asian investor in Europe at the moment is Japan. Its region-wide operations are concentrated most intensely in Britain, which hosts over 1,300 firms, providing nearly 140,000 jobs to British workers. Japan's commercial gateway into Europe for a full century and more has been London, and the European headquarters of most major Japanese firms are located there. A few Japanese firms, such as Nissan, Toyota and Hitachi, have manufacturing operations in Britain, but the United Kingdom is most important to the Japanese corporate world as a distribution and financial center.
China's stakes in Europe are very different, both economically and geographically. London is, of course, a key financial center for China, but with a different, more geopolitical dimension than for Japan.