This article, based on 30 interviews with firms, business associations, and EU institutions, explores the Europeanization/harmonization of Japanese firms’ lobbying strategies, and assesses how they have adapted to the constantly evolving EU public policy-making system. We provide an empirical investigation of interaction between traditional Japanese lobbying practices and the EU institutional environment in forming firms’ preferences for particular lobbying strategies in the automobile and electronics sectors. In short, a key objective is to highlight the variations in Japanese lobbying, with special attention to the firms’ efforts to blend into the EU policy-making process, on the one hand, and their embeddedness in traditional business culture, on the other. This article concludes that Japanese firms have restructured their political behaviours to suit the EU policy-making process; however, the degree of such Europeanization of lobbying strategies has significantly varied across sectors and firms owing to the ranging influence of several institutional factors.
