The locations of seaports and manufacturing activities in Japan have changed considerably since World War II. Despite the geographic spread of economic activities over decades and the uneven development of ports, the cores of both systems have long remained in the same metropolitan areas. While co-location does not provide necessary or causal connection, strong a priori grounds can be offered to posit that a necessary relationship exists between the Japanese manufacturing system's geographic expansion and changes in the maritime transport network. A case study of automobile industry's recent development in the peripheral region of Kyushu identifies some drivers of these evolutions at the level of one particular sector. This suggests that, despite the development of high capacity transport infrastructure and manufacturing facilities in the Japanese periphery, the current manufacturing core is not yet threatened.