TOKYO, July 18, 2022—The bureaucracy never gives up, that is, Japanese government officials, particularly the projects that the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry that the late prime minister, Shinzo Abe, and his grandfather espoused dearly. This time, METI would choose 20 technologies as top national technology areas, such as hypersonic aircraft, microprocessor chips, AI, medicine, space, energy, and deep ocean, the Yomiuri national daily reported on its website July 18, 2022.
What the newspaper described as the ‘specific vital technologies’ would be formalized as prime minister Fumio Kishida’s cabinet decision – or executive order – in September, allocating 500 billion yen ($3.5 billion) from the government’s ‘economic security fund’ through a government-private-sector body to be launched later to R&D entities that would undertake work, including governmental entities. R&D entities that pursue work must clear a set of confidentiality rules and violations would be subject to a fine of up to $4,000 or one-year imprisonment, it said.
Many if not all those R&D technologies overlap with what METI’s Agency of Industrial Technology and Science (AIST), the New Energy and Industrial Technology Organization (NEDO), and other METI-supervised governmental entities are currently promoting.
There has been hardly any advanced technologies developed from those governmental organizations that promoted new technologies jointly with the private sector. On the contrary, many undertakings have flopped or exhausted, including the 1974 ‘Sunshine Plan’ that sought to develop new, clean energy technologies, and the 1978 ‘Moonlight Plan’ that aimed to reduce and conserve energy consumption with heat-pump, advanced gas turbine and other technologies.
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