2018 Volume 38 Issue 2 Pages 79-90
While it is not an overstatement to say that the “Internationalization of restaurant chains” had been led by American restaurant chains over many years, it has entered a new phase in the 21st century, as the internationalization of Asian restaurant chains has expanded, being led by Japanese restaurant chains.
To date, however, the phenomenon of this internationalization has been discussed only within the scopes of globalization and the spread of food culture, and only extremely limited discussions premised on corporate behaviors have been reported. Moreover, such research has mostly focused on grasping the current status of particular restaurant companies. These investigations used a diverse range of perspective in assessing the current status, with most of them providing only superficial analyses. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to review the studies accumulated in this field so far.
In this study, we present four subjects for future investigations of these issues, referring to the perspectives employed in the research on the internationalization of retail, which is similar to the behavior of the internationalization of restaurant chains in many aspects.
