The Research Group on the Korean Automobile Industry was organized on June 29, 1994. The purpose of the group is to contribute to the development of research on the Japanese and Korean automobile industries. The group accomplishes this purpose through providing researchers on the Korean automobile industry with a place for mutual enlightenment, information exchange and academic-industrial communication, and through being a connection point of the cooperative research network with researchers in Korea.

The promoters of the group are Professor Takahiro Fujimoto of the University of Tokyo and Ryuji Fukuda of Sogo Kyoiku Kikaku Inc., and the conference place is at the Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo. The number of the members is thirty-six on July 15, 1996, and they are mainly researchers in private research institutes, managers of Japanese and Korean automobile producers, and foreign students from Korea. The clerical office is Fujimoto Research Room in the University of Tokyo, and its secretaries are Kiyoung Ko and Jaewhon Oh who are doctoral program students in the Division of Economics of the University.
The research meeting is held, on principle, once in every two-month. The meeting time is from six to nine o'clock on each meeting day. In the meeting, one of the group members gives a presentation, followed by members' discussion on the issues raised from it. The language of the meeting is principally Japanese, and if needed, interpretation into Korean or English is provided by volunteers.
There have been fourteen research meetings since the first meeting held on July 29, 1994. The main topics discussed so far were the marketing and supplier systems of the Korean automobile industry, the globalization of
the Korean automobile producers, the production management including the quality management, the government policies for the industry development, and so on. In many cases of those discussions, the experiences of the Japanese automobile industry were contrasted to the current situation of the Korean automobile industry.
In addition to topics on the automobile industries, general issues on the Japanese and Korean economies, e.g., the inter-relationship between the Japanese and Korean economies, were also discussed occasionally.