Pleiades had this interesting story today: The Japanese might have committed atrocities in the second world war. They might have hit first with Pearl Harbor, but there's one thing the Japanese have sworn off since the 1970s and that is the business of exporting arms. Then again, it hasn't really needed to resort to such means until now.
The huge engineering and technological might of Japan may be poised for a new lease of life as the country prepares to ditch a self-imposed ban on arms exports that was introduced in the mid-1970s.
The controversial decision, which is likely to encounter bitter opposition from the country's mainly pacifist middle classes, could deliver significant economic benefits to Japan and lead to a realignment in the global defence industry.
A ruling party MP said that the greatest significance would be the conversion of Japan's robotics industry from civilian to military use as the world's defence spending is directed to remote-control hardware, such as drone aircraft.
Lifting or toning-down the 33-year old embargo would unleash some of the world's most advanced heavy engineering companies into the international weapons market, one of the few areas of manufacturing where Japan's immense technical resources have, for purely political reasons, not produced a dominant global player.
It really comes down to the fact that there won't likely be an export-led recovery anytime soon, and it's difficult to expand domestic demand when everybody has everything and the population is generally aging. Everybody already has any and every gadget under the sun, multiple watches, and some people have multiple cars. Japan is a land of material plenty where people are trying to sell even more things but you can just see it's a really hard sell.
So it seems the Japanese government is about to unseal one of the options they mothballed when times were better just to pay the bills. Let's face it, USA, the EU, China, North Korea, Russia and India all profit greatly by selling guns to African despots who then run interminable Civil Wars. Nobody's discussing it out loud, but most of the African civil wars of the last 40 years were fought with weapons sold to them by these nations. Oliver North's Fruitfly thing doesn't just pop out of nowhere - it's a product of a highly organised trade in arms all over the world that ends up with civil wars and child soldiers in Africa.
Apart from the glaring ethical issues above, there's no practical reason not to re-join in the international arms trade. Even the ethical problems of it boil down to something like: it's either your kids who starve to death or somebody else's kids who get shot, so you choose somebody else's kids getting shot.
Still, given the amount of plenty in Japan, it seems a little harsh to make that call, but Japan has been in the doldrums for a while now, and the GFC has ravaged the economy even though they didn't have a debt problem. Thus it seems they're willing to go to where they weren't before. It's as if they've lost a layer of luxury.
People will discuss this in terms of whether Japan is going militaristic again, but I think that would be missing the point. Make no mistake, Japan is doing this to pay its bills. It's that dire in the GFC when the benevolent Pacifist uncle decides to deal guns.
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