Letter from Chiba: Challenges Tapping into Japan's Innovation.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

BY STEW MAGNUSON

CHIBA, Japan -- The crowd around the booth at the DSEI Japan defense industry trade show was there to try their luck with the gacha-gacha machine.

Tamagawa Seiki Co., a Tokyo-based maker of small motors and measurement systems, was handing out coins and letting visitors crank a knob until a plastic-encased trinket popped out.

Based on gumball machines, gacha-gachas have been a craze in Japan for decades. For 400 yen--about $3--players can receive a toy, keychain or some other item.

Inside Tamagawa's plastic capsule was a small prize, along with a slip of paper with the company name, logo and a QR code that would lead them to its website.

By day three of the conference, the company had given away about 300 of the capsules.

Clever!

It had been three and a half years since the inaugural DSEI Japan trade show in the fall of 2019, and a lot had changed. COVID-19 postponed the show twice. But the trade show finally went on, and it was bigger than ever. Organizer Clarion Events reported that the exhibitor numbers had grown by 65 percent over the last conference, which it bills as the nation's only dedicated defense trade show.

It's not that surprising. Trade shows in their second iteration are expected to grow. But there was more to it than that. Japan's government in December released three strategy documents on its new defense posture, as well as announcing massive increases in the Japan Self-Defense Forces budget.

Its current goal is to reach 2 percent of GDP by fiscal year 2027, a significant milestone since it wasn't too many years ago that pacifist policies that had existed since the end of World War II were put aside.

And as Kim Jong Un reminded the citizens of Japan, the country lives in a dangerous neighborhood.

On the second day of the show, North Korea launched a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile that fell into the Sea of Japan.

Not coincidentally, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol came to Tokyo and sat down for meetings and a photo op with Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida as a sign of detente for the two nations, which are still struggling to resolve issues arising out of Japan's occupation of the Korean peninsula before and during World War II.

The press reported that U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel had urged the two to get together. The United States needs its two staunch allies in the region talking, sharing intelligence and creating an informal alliance against the bigger, long-term threat, which is...