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TOKYO—On June 15, the Japanese government instituted an effective ban on vacation home-sharing in an about-face of its previous policy to accommodate the inflow of foreign tourists toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. Implementation of the Home Accommodation Business Law (abbreviated as Minpaku-ho) shows the ignorance and ineptitude of Japanese bureaucracy and lawmakers, who initially jumped on the bandwagon of U.S. vacation rental sharing services to ease the inevitable shortage of hotel accommodation during the summer Olympic games, only to be stung later by Japanese voters who had complained about noise and expressed general dislike of foreign tourists.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and its Tourist Agency introduced the Minpaku-ho, relevant ministry and agency ordinances and guidelines, making the regulations under the law to supersede the 1946 Accommodations Law governing western-style hotels and traditional Japanese inns. Home owners and businesses had been operating vacation home-sharing services at their facilities from the mid-2010, spearheaded by airbnb.

The new regulations do not ban vacation rental home outright but make it difficult and inconvenient to operate facilities as the maximum duration for operating them is limited to 180 days per year. The limit, according to the ministry, is to discourage errant businesses to operate home-sharing facilities without obtaining government permits – which is the case in the ancient capital of Kyoto, causing a whole bevy of problems to local residents including noise, littering, and violence.

The ministry argues that by requiring vacation home-sharing operators to be regulated under the law, away from the old Accommodations Law, ‘sound and serious’ operators – both home owners and businesses – are expected to be able to prosper to offer services needed by foreign tourists.

In fact, the Accommodations Law, which enables almost any party to obtain permits, did not restrict locations and other details of facilities: It was the reason why once world-famous ‘love hotels’ sprouted up in the hearts of prestigious residential districts of Tokyo and elsewhere.

Under the Minpaku-ho, service operators must post on the board outside their facilities their names and other details. The law also empowers municipalities to introduce tougher and details regulations than what it provides – as the city of Kyoto so demanded.

As of June 8, there were 2,707 applications to be registered as Minpaku operators, according to the Tourism Agency. Before the law took effect, tens of thousands of individuals and businesses were estimated to have operated vacation rental homes, mostly for foreign tourists. Literally all over Tokyo and big cities until then, there were what residents called the ‘nests’ of foreign tourists carting in and out large suitcases from the facilities.

For now, Kyoto residents may be breathing a sigh of relief thanks to the law. For Japanese bureaucrats and lawmakers that enforced the law while having proven with their about-face that they have become distant laggards of the modern internet and information society and are collaborators of big hotels, it’s not over. They need to address the problem of hotel roomshortages toward 2020 – and beyond.

Foreign tourists visiting Japan in 2017 grew 19.3 percent over 2016 to a record 28.691 million. The Shintaro Abe government wants to boost the number to 40 million by the end of 2020. Asian visitors, notably Koreans, Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong nationals, account for 3/4^thof the total visitors.

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Yuriage, Fukushima, Japan—Wrecked fishing boats, battered houses and toppled tombstones are nowhere to be seen seven years and two months after a giant tsunami swallowed much of this once sleepy fishing town. For centuries unknown, residents would pray to the sun rising on the Pacific Ocean horizon before the giant trembler struck the area, killing more than 1,000 people and leaving tens of billions of yen in damage. Now, the area luminesces with housing and business developments and belies that the future looks set to be better than before the earthquake. Except that
the vista is blocked double layer like with feudal era moats, by a seemingly endless seawall looming as high as 21 feet and a road being constructed half a kilometer inland that is going to be as high as the seawall when completed several years later.

Residents, most of them long-timers in the area, look eager to reestablish themselves in the area, which is famous for one of Japan’s best quality Akagai ark shell clams that sushi chefs vie for from across Japan. Fishermen sell part of their catches of Akagai, flounders and other varieties of fish at the Yuriage Asaichi market, which has become a popular tourist destination over the past few years. More fishing boats seem to be moored at the new harbor as farmers on tractors afar inland are seen busy tilling fields and so too are workers at more than half a dozen or so fish product processing factories near the harbor. And farther inland, new housing complexes have sprouted up proudly. Yuriage’s rebuilding work is headed for completion and residents are coming back.

But is this really necessary? Could it have been better not building the seawalls and the fishing harbor and condominium buildings, and instead, relocate people and businesses to higher-ground inland areas? After all, Japan is a country with rapidly shrinking population. Expensive social infrastructure being built is not likely to be put to active use over the coming years, and if so, why the country is building expensive infrastructure?

Yet, ‘reconstruction has reached a stage where people can see the progress for themselves,’ Shiro Yamada, mayor of Natori City where Yuriage is located, said in a March 6 interview with a local newspaper, Kahoku Shimpo. Yamada said there are now 9 fish processing companies operating at Yuriage’s fishery compound.

Before the quake, Yuriage residents totaled 5,700 forming a vibrant fishing-farming community, according to officials of the Natori City Office and Miyagi Prefecture government. Yamada said the city’s target is to keep the Yuriage population at more than 2,100 – a far cry from the pre-quake population. Natori City’s website shows that the Yuriage population in March 2017 – the most recent data – was 2,147, of which 36.75 percent were over 65 years old – and the population 石decreasing as old folks die and the inflow of young people remains slow.

Reconstruction, as Yamada insists, is progressing but has yet to be completed as the city and the prefecture are in process of building more public structures such as town halls, a sports arena, and a bicycle sports center, the facilities that Yamada hopes would lure young people back to Yuriage.

A macro view is that it has taken more than seven years since the March 11, 2011 earthquake for reconstruction work to the stage that people can tangibly see progress as Yamada says; residents have returned, as the mayor insists, but to less than half of the previous population and the growth is stalling; and for reaching the reconstruction stage to date, an unknown but a huge sum of taxpayer money has been spent raising questions as to how the aging and decreased population can pay back and how reconstruction projects have been decided and executed.

Asked by The Prospect recently, one Mr. Hishinuma of Natori City Office’s Reconstruction Coordination Division said the city does not have, for example, the overall cost data of a local highway – Shiogama-Watari Road – that’s now being built on a raised platform to avoid being submerged into a future tsunami. He said that reconstruction work jurisdiction is spanned over the city, the prefecture and the state in a complicated way that simple math cannot be applied to calculate the cost. Mr. Hishinuma also said jurisdiction for seawall and Yuriage fishing harbor construction work, which is nearly completed, is also stretched to the three authorities plus a local fishery association. A Miyagi City Office River and Ocean Division official, one Mr. Numasawa, told The Prospect an identical reply to the Natori official, saying that the prefecture has not tried aggregating budgets and expenditures of each authority plus the fishery association. ‘We do not calculate the total cost of reconstruction at Yuriage and other areas of Miyagi,’ he told me.

The two officials implicitly admitted that many administrative procedures overlap and result in producing similar documents drafted by prefecture, city and town officials, and therefore, leading to extra administrative costs. A possible example: In January 2018, the Natori City Office unveiled the 73-page ‘Yuriage District Inner City Reconstruction Plan.’ While it is not easy to confirm, Miyagi Prefecture is known to have drafted a similar document and ditto with the national government. Effectively, it amounts to wasting precious taxpayer money by producing similar documents and for the bureaucracy side, it means more work public sector workers.

During the six years of 2011-2015, the Japanese government budgeted and disbursed 26.3 trillion yen (USD239 billion) for earthquake reconstruction projects by collecting a reconstruction tax levy, sales of government-held Japan Post stock shares, trimming social welfare and other government expenditures. Japan would likely have to spend even more money for completing reconstruction, which is not expected in the near future, as the de-commissioning of Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi remains unknown pending the locating and extraction of missing nuclear fuel rods that almost triggered a meltdown.

In Minami Sanriku Town, about 100 kilos north of Yuriage, an old harbor which was washed away by tsunami was rebuilt, and swings, jungle gym, and other kid play equipment dot a manicured lawn park where no local children are playing. Nearby, a construction crane is humming, scooping gravel and soil to raise the platform for building a tall seawall. An old lady who was working in her garden said that when reconstruction workers are gone, visitors staying at local inns are expected to decrease. She said some inn owners did not reopen their facilities after the earthquake expecting fewer visitors to the region. Here too is confronted by old age and a shrinking population, and reconstruction work goes. For who?

If not all, much of earthquake reconstruction amounts to creating work for national and government officials. The Miyagi prefecture office is recruiting temporary, 3-year not-renewable contract civil engineers for a monthly pay of 219,444 yen to 280,241 yen, varying by age. The sums are believed to be about half of what regular – so-called career – workers are paid. Miyagi prefecture’s 2016 budget showed tight budget conditions resulting from the issuance of municipal bonds to pay for reconstruction.

Graphically, many municipalities hit by the earthquake – and Japan as a nation – are experiencing what Yubari City in the northernmost main island of Hokkaido had undergone several years ago: The city with population of 10,900 went into a national government receivership in 2007 for failing to repay municipal bond debt. As it continues to pay debt, the city axed all conceivable part of its spending, most notably halving city office officials’ pays including the mayor’s. Residents also suffered enormously as the city increased taxes, utility and other public service rates sharply. There’s no prospect of quick turnaround for its finances. Still, Yubari attracted national attention for axing city office officials’ salaries, which probably were higher than Yubari’s private sector pays before it went into a virtual bust.

If Yuriage and Yubari are tackling with their problems in earnest, there is a tiny island village in Tokyo with only 163 residents and as many as 24 village office employees and 6 village assembly representatives. Aogashima Village, about 350 kilos south of the city, has an annual budget of 1 billion yen (USD9 million). Village employees are paid the lowest salary among Japanese municipalities but highest per resident, according to a survey of Toyo Keizai magazine publisher. In recent years, dozens of inappropriate budget allocation cases for building what residents had argued as unnecessary – like the Yuriage infrastructure – surfaced, and one village official resigned.
About half of the 163 residents are migrants from other parts of Japan and engaged in public-sector works such as contract workers for the village office and teaching in grade schools, as well as construction sites. The 163 residents are relatively young and the ratio of people over 65 is also relatively small, according estimates based on Tokyo municipal government statistics. Since they are believed to be minor taxpayers, much of the village’s annual budget is transfer taxes from the Tokyo government and the central government.
Yuriage and Aogashima are classic cases of an old adage: If you want to lead a stable life in Japan, become a public servant and create jobs for yourself, and upon retirement, run for legislative posts.

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By the end of June 2018, Shinzo Abe’s cabinet would piece together a new pro-growth program that it hopes would streamline Japan’s human resources policy by n unprecedented scale and scope: Revisions of numerous decades-old regulations relating to workplace practices such as work hours, discriminations against non-regular workers and gender equality, plus, as already written, shifting to proactive-immigration..

The bottom-line of the work style reform program is to address (again, as written earlier) deepening labor shortages, acutely felt for real already by large to small businesses and set to get more serious over coming years as the country’s population is projected to sink below 100 million from 127 million now over the next couple of decades. With that in the backdrop, the Keidanren (the Japan business federation) had been prodding the prime minister to act, and in September 2016, the government launched a policy council, the Council for the Realization of Work Style Reform made up mostly of Keidanren-friendly representatives and Abe cabinet members.

The program is part of the ‘Abenomics’ initiative that Abe launched in 2013 to bail Japan out of the deflationary spiral by achieving an yet-to-ben realized 2-percent inflation target with rigorous monetary policy accommodations, fiscal mobilization, and structural reform and deregulation.

Nominal worker pays and the closely-watch job availability ratio (1.0 is an even level, and below that means there are more jobs than workers want) have been increasing over those intervening years, but the Japanese people are lukewarm to welcoming those improvements and instead many argue that the pay rises are being offset by rising taxes, healthcare , childcare, pension contributions and other public costs.

Mollifying the public angst and frustration about work is vital for securing quality workforces and sustainable growth, OECD had told Japan, and that’s one reason Keidanren proposed the program to Abe. Working in tandem, the Abe government and Keidanren had decided that Japan needed to streamline and update its decades-old (or centuries-old) labor practices to one that befits the modern era.

Lifetime employment and worker seniority are labor policies having been practiced for more than four centuries in Japan. It’s the foundation that have generated a stable stream of loyal and quality workforces albeit perhaps short of creativity and drove Japan to the global economic and trade stardom in the 1980s. In drafting the work style reform program, government and Keidanren officials have identified creativity as the No. 1 worker property and relegated the centuries-old traits behind. They recommended that Japan introduce a ‘discretionary work’ system as the benchmark of new work regimes for workers engaged in R&D, programming, media producers and other so-called skilled professionals whose performances should be measured with results, not by hours worked.

Abe had argued with government data that this ‘high professional’ scheme would help boost productivity of skilled workers while helping reduce work hours. Yet, in response to revelations that the data was fabricated by government officials, compounded by the ‘karoshi’ work-to-death of an employee of Nomura Real Estate Co., the arm of Nomura Securities Co., he was forced to withdraw it from labor law amendment bills in 2017. Effectively, the legislation lost its luster.

A year after the pandemonium, workers and businesses alike are doing the soul-searching for what work life reform is about. A number of companies responded to questions by the Prospect that they were in the midst of debating and executing reforms in phases but said that there were little they can disclose at this moment.

One thing that can be deduced from talking with workers, perusing media reports and so on is that fewer Japanese workers look happy than in the past, yet work places where coordination, cooperation, and cohabitation are emphasized – ironically, they are the Japan until the mid-1980s – are brimming with willing workers.

Back during Japan’s go-go era of 1950s to 1980s, workers volunteered to work overtime, odd hours and tolerated commuter trains into which station ‘pushers’ squeezed passengers into packed cars. But this is the 21^stcentury so people won’t accept such conditions, yet there are workplaces that weigh on work reforms with the objective of enhancing worker happiness, much of it done in close collaboration of management and workers.

Uematu Co., Ltd. of Fukui (http://www.uematu-works.co.jp) is one. It’s a fabric dying manufacturer with 45 employees. It doesn’t have time cards, and trust employees to be in charge of manufacturing, quality control, R&D, and pretty much every part of corporate management. Uematu’s corporate credo, according to its website, is to ‘contribute to the well-being’ of its employees). And its management philosophy is to ‘offer value to customers based on the spirit of altruism’ and ‘nurturing the team work with employees who are cheerful, understand the spirit of goodwill, and praise other people.’

Of course, Uematu employees do not work overtime, and even so, it’s highly popular product, anti-pollen masks, priced at 650 yen ($6.00) a piece, is selling like hot cake.

Such a private-sector initiative should be what motivates Japanese workers to enjoy both work and private life, instead of rigid rules based on laws and regulations.

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Country To Become a Chinese Province?

The year 2018 should be remembered as the dawn of accepting foreign workers for Japan, and the country’s administration effectively became a Chinese province as floods of Chinese visitors acquire permanent residency and come to exercise intrinsic influence through legislatures and public offices.

When the first-generation Japanese boomer generation fades into the twilight from around 2030, Japan’s population is projected to shrink to barely 100 million from 126 million in 2018 – while foreign nationals and immigrants are set to grow to nearly 10 percent of the shrinking population from 2 percent now.

At the core of Japan’s immigration policy change, to one that encourages foreign labor from centuries-old one that admits foreigners with reluctance, is the country’s acute labor shortage. Labor shortages are as such that many businesses are extending retirement ages to 65 from 60, and retailers that are experiencing even tighter conditions are shortening store hours and hiring senior citizens who are over 70 and sometimes over 80. Japan’s unemployment rate was 2.4 percent in February with only 1.66 million workers, or de facto negative supply, out of work as economists have predicted no end in sight in tight conditions.

So, by the 2018 summer, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet would recommend relaxing or effectively lifting current regulations allowing unskilled foreign workers to work in Japan for up to five year, to 10 years, and submit legislation to amend the Immigration and Refugees Law to parliament this fall. The policy change effectively allows simple foreign labor – dish washers, construction workers, etc. – to work and live in Japan as ‘engineers.’

The policy shift, the first since the founding of Japan more than 5,000 years ago, overlaps with the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games: As a key economic stimulus, Japan wants to double the number of foreign tourists to Japan from 23million in 2017 by 2020 and even more after the games positioning tourism as one of the next key economic growth areas.

Fine, yet what’s likely to occur over the next few decades would be the dominance of vital workplaces by foreign labor, particularly Chinese who account for over 1/3rd of more than 2.4 million foreign certified workers and a higher percentage of undocumented foreign residents. In Tokyo’s Ikebukuro entertainment district, Chinese restaurants and shops line up streets, with Chinese workers there reportedly working with expired worker visas or overstayed their tour visits to Japan. The Toshima Ward office, where Ikebukuro is located, is known to be accepting children of undocumented foreign residents on the basis of racial equality and child care policies.

Of the ward’s population of 285,000 in 2017, nearly 10 percent were foreign nationals and when undocumented foreigners are included, the ratio is believed close to 20 percent. And of those, half of them are believed to be Chinese. It is easy to speculate how the data would look like in 2020 and thereafter. The Chinese would come to represent even more than now, and by then, like what’s seen in many American legislatures – state, city and rural assemblies – the Chinese should become visible in Japanese politics and government offices. An official of Toshima Ward office, One Mr. Yasui, told me that other than that the office has foreign workers, he cannot comment for reasons of privacy protection.

Maybe nothing wrong about that in the modern world, but long-term, it sets the ground for Japan to look like a Chinese province, its leader, not Abe definitely, visiting Tienamen Square to kowtow in front of the Chinese leader, who could be Xi Jinping then.

It’s how China thinks the bilateral relationship should be, as had been so for centuries after China found country of Yamato (name before Nippon or Japan) 2 or 3 B.C. extending silk-looming, pottery, metallurgy and other advanced technologies in exchange for . That historical father-son relationship was broken only twice and briefly: Japan-China war in 1894-1895 and Japan’s occupation of Manchuria and invasion into Shanghai, Beijing and other cities in the run-up to Ward War II.

Perhaps because of its emergence as a major economic power that has boosted many Chinese people’s wealth topping that of the Japanese, Beijing has been mum in recent years about wartime atrocities believed committed by the Japanese imperial army, almost contrasting with South Korea that demands wartime apologies and compensations from Japan and building comfort women statues in the United States and elsewhere.

That belies China’s silence. China certainly has not forgotten about the Japanese military atrocities, and in fact, Chinese victims and their kin every now and then demand Japan’s apologies, yet the Beijing government does not bring it up as a key problem standing between the two countries. As Wang Yi insisted ‘economic cooperation’ from Japan during this week’s bilateral foreign ministerial meeting, the first in eight years. Clearly, China thinks it is better to pursue a forward-moving diplomatic policy and acquire Japanese technologies and other concessions than stalling on the wartime atrocities.

So it’s hardly a surprise that the Japanese Justice Ministry, police and labor authorities that are charged with immigration and undocumented foreign national issues take lenient approach toward Chinese visitors and residents. At Narita International Airport outside Tokyo the other day, Chinese tourists arriving from Shanghai on a low-coast carrier were herded to the immigration gate but the Japanese immigration officials gave only a perfunctory glance at the visitors’ passports and rubber-stamped them – while visitors from other countries were screened closely and some of then grilled with questions before being admitted.

After clearing through the gateway necessities, Japan is an anything goes destination for the Chinese, freer than their home country or the United States. Police and local governments are accommodative to the Chinese whether they are legal residents or not, and they can always seek protection of long-time Chinese residents living in Ikebukuro, Shinjuku and other areas that have become undeclared China towns where Chinese gang groups are known to operate. In fact, police are said to forgo swoops of China towns for fear of revenge while nabbing Vietnamese, Thai, Philippines and other nationalities.

The result is surging legal and undocumented Chinese residents in all parts of Japan, which one can confirm by spotting new-generation Chinese restaurants dotting almost every Japanese urban area that hire many undocumented Chinese.

Of about 2.4 million foreign national residents in Japan, as tallied by the Ministry of Justice as of 2016, 700,000 were Chinese. The real number of foreigners, told a Japanese foreign ministry senior official the other day, is at least twice as many, and the Chinese account for the largest portion. The number is bloated by the Chinese tourists missing from official government data, he said, speculating that something like one percent of Chinese tourists arriving in Japan do not go back to China. Over the past decade, 10,000 to 70,000 Chinese tourists might have overstayed their legal stays and remain in Japan, and that number is growing to the tune of increasing foreign tourists to Japan, he agreed.

Perhaps by 2030, Japan would be flooded with Chinese, something that the Beijing government is not doing with intent but may be happy to observe as Japan gives a semblance of a Chinese province. So China is not only receiving wartime compensations without making overt demands to Japan but managing Japan as a geographically near tourist destination, for a win-win result for the two countries but to the horror of the United States.

What seems to have been reverberating as a domestic political affair haunting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is screaming to ripple over to his Mar-a-Lago golf plays with Donald Trump and could give Trump a windfall opportunity to make inordinate demands to sell American autos in Japan.

Tadao Yanase, who served as Abe’s policy secretary late 2012-August 2015 and currently the international affairs vice minister of economy, trade and industry (METI) , the second highest METI administrative post, could become a game changer of Japan’s auto trade policy that to date has been that the country’s market is fully open to imports based on most-favored nation status to all exporting nations including the United States.

Yanase, who worked as deputy general manager of the METI auto division in the 1990s, is under public scrutiny for his comments to Japanese media, presumably defending Abe, that ‘as far as my memory, I did not meet’ officials of the Ehime Prefecture and Imabari City offices – contradicting to the memoranda of the city officials meeting with Yanase April 2, 2015 at the prime minister’s official residence.

At an April 12 news conference, Ehime Gov. Tokihiro Nakamura confirmed the memoranda and the content as existing and accurate, according to Japanese media reports.

The memoranda, according to the reports, recorded that Yanase as saying that a veterinarian university building project applied by Kake Gakuen group (http://www.kake.ac.jp/about/index.html) was what Abe had to approve, not the government administrative branch, meaning that Abe and his wife Akie were directly involved in the project, in possible violation of laws and politicians’ ethics.

The public believes Ehime and Imabari, not surprisingly, so Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party is preparing to summon Yanase as witness to the Diet (parliament). And whatever Yanase has to explain in Diet testimony, public doubts about him won’t go away as he repeatedly said, ‘I do not remember’ about the meeting with Ehime and Imabari officials in his Diet testimony in July 2017 – when the Kakei issue had surfaced.

Impacts auto trade?

As deputy general manager of the METI auto division in the mid-1990s, Yanase was one of the henchmen who drafted Japan-U.S. bilateral texts while he had been with the division that stated that Japan would relax regulations on motor vehicle inspections, take proactive steps to encourage Japanese dealerships to sell imports, and automakers would purchase foreign auto parts, among many policy measures.

European automakers benefited most from those measures with their share of the overall Japanese auto market now topping 10 percent but Detroit makers’ shares contracted miserably, prompting them to abandon Japan save portions of Fiat-Chrysler.

If auto trade surfaces as a topic of the Trump-Abe one-on-one later in April and if historical protocols are practiced, Yanase would be the key Japanese administrative representative to talk with Trump administration counterparts to assist METI minister Hiroshige Seko, who’s likely to meet USTR Robert Lighthizer.

Making little headway in his attempt to win Chinese concessions on the bilateral tariff-raising spat, gossips swirling around in Tokyo is that the Trump administration may ask Abe to be good house for a smooth U.S. re-entry into the Trans-Pacific Partnership 11 framework, the Asia-Pacific regional free trade framework that omits China, India and the United States and signed in March (but not ratified yet) to avoid being isolated in the region.

Through much of the 1980s, China had been the dozing dragon the industrialized world could ignore as a giant, yet cheap low-tech goods manufacturing center.

Over the intervening short decades, China has morphed into a Star Wars era juggernaut: The world first saw Chinese manufacturing prowess with doubt, then incredulity and lingering suspicions as the country steadily made tech improvements. Now, the western economies are witnessing that the once oil-smeared Chinese manufacturing facilities are reborn as leading-edge tech giants for many modern gadgetry and services from smart phones to banking.

Come 2020, the Chinese would make forays into the century-old bastion of western technology: hydrogen cars.

On Feb. 28, 2018, I visited the annual Smart Energy Week exhibition in Tokyo. It’s an event for materials and parts and components for renewable energy — solar, wind, geothermal and hydro power — as well as fuel cell (hydrogen), batteries, power grid technology and government policies. Representatives of material and components makers, software developers, and automobiles and other end-product manufactures.As many as 1,580 companies from 33 countries are exhibit, according to the show’s organizers.

The exhibit and speaker events at the Tokyo Big Sight messe halls looked more vibrant with more overseas exhibit and visitors than the Tokyo Motor Show held at the same venues a few months earlier that looked increasingly like a local exhibit. If more Chinese booths and visitors flooded the halls than a few years ago was not a surprise, large groups of visitors from India, Mongolia, many Southeast Asian and African countries added to multilateral colors to the event. Another conspicuous thing was a near total dearth of U.S. exhibitors and visitors. A female clerk of Canada’s Ballard told me, ‘Oh, Americans probably are not interested in spending money for new renewables technology. They may want to focus on EVs and other existing technologies.’

As the global news media attention seems to be zeroed in on EVs and battery technologies of Tesla and European automakers, Chinese suppliers of EV parts and components I interviewed at the exhibit said that their high time of the photovoltaic business will be over soon. No matter how much you make technological improvements, there’s a limit to PV panel’s electricity generation property, they argued. ‘You can cover the entire planet earth with PV panels but that’s not enough to satisfy global power needs unless you can store power in batteries and other methods,’ a marketing rep of a Shanghai-based company Refire told me.

In a shy of three years time, Chinese companies have acquired technologies to manufacture fuel cell components that convert hydrogen into electricity to power heating equipment, cars and other industrial products. How they got wind of their skills — Trump suspects industrial espionage for sure — aside, wha’s impressive is the velocity of Chinese R&D to emulate fuel cells, the most advanced of them known to have been developed by Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and their suppliers.

Refire is among dozens of Chinese manufacturers for fuel cell units and related devices. Furui Hydrogen, also based on Shanghai, manufactures hydrogen tanks that tolerate pressures of 70 mega pascal, the pressure level expected to become a global standard for hydrogen storage tanks large and small. ‘The Chinese R&D speed is very fast; they are intent about catching up to global levels for hydrogen infrastructure technology,’ an engineer of Iwatani Corp. of Japan, a top gas and hydrogen maker, told me.