The author was invited as research student to Japan in October 1990 and received support from the Japanese government (Monbusho) in order to complete a doctoral degree at the Department of Geography of the University of Tokyo. Here he received his degree in March of 1995. As an European Union research fellow at the University of Manchester, and from 1997 at the Institute of Social Science at the University of Tokyo, he has been conducting comparative analyses on the locational adjustments of Japanese and European firms.
