Japan defense contractors get to grips with foreign buyers
UNTIL recently, public meetings between Japanese defense contractors and uniformed foreign military delegations would have stirred controversy in Japan, but this week’s aerospace show in Tokyo saw plenty.
With the nation stepping back from decades of state pacifism, Japanese defense companies are finally shedding their reluctance to sell arms abroad.
At the ShinMaywa Industries booth, Indonesian air force officials quizzed the company about its amphibious plane. In another corner of the Japan Aerospace 2016 show, Saudi Arabian military officers pored over military transport and patrol aircraft brochures handed out by Kawasaki Heavy Industries.
“The Indonesians are very interested in our plane,” said a ShinMaywa salesmen, as one of his colleague went through US-2’s specifications with the Indonesian delegation.
The US-2 is one of the home-built military platforms that the Japanese government has identified as a candidate for foreign sales after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in April 2014 lifted a ban on overseas arms sales.
The exhibition, which was last held four years ago in Nagoya, is the first major aerospace show since Abe came to power. The show drew some 800 companies as well as representatives from numerous of international militaries.
“We were visited by other foreign uniformed representatives apart from the Saudi military,” a salesman for Kawasaki said. “The exhibition is still mostly civilian, but it has more of a military feel than four years ago.”
By ending seven decades of military industrial isolation, Abe is hoping to widen arms production to lower costs through greater economies of scale and share the expense of developing new weapons with other nations. Japan’s population remains sensitive to any perceived reversion to the militarism that many still blame for wrecking the country during World War II.
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