Japan Vows to Share More High Technology : Trade: The nation promises to open its doors and take a ‘leading role’ in the international transfer of scientific knowledge.
Japan pledged Tuesday that it will unlock its technological doors to outsiders, induce private enterprise to share more of its technological achievements and welcome more foreign researchers.
Releasing a report by a ministry-appointed study group, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry acknowledged that more than 52,000 Japanese researchers study science and technology in the United States, while only 4,400 Americans study high-tech subjects in Japan. It also said that this nation, whose high-tech firms send chills through boardrooms around the globe, is still importing more technology than it is selling to others.
Hidetoshi Nishimura, director of the machinery and information industries section of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, said that situation is “not normal.” And on Tuesday, for the first time, MITI promised to correct it.
The report, submitted by a panel of leading scholars and businessmen from such firms as Sony, FANUC, Toyota, Hitachi, Sumitomo Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Fuji Xerox, warned that Japan is creating fears abroad that it might monopolize key technologies. A continuing refusal to share technology, the report added, could spur “concerns over national security” in other countries, “giving rise to disturbing trends.”
“Japanese endeavors to promote technology exchanges in high tech . . . will help assure the nation’s own economic security in the long term and help circumvent bilateral economic frictions in the short term,” the report said.
The ministry declared that Japan must step up its spending on basic research--a field in which it has made few contributions--and promote joint international research and development projects supported by government assistance. Japanese foreign investors, for their part, must set up research and product-development centers abroad, not just manufacturing plants, the report added.
MITI also will assist in the creation of databases in English allowing foreign countries to know what technologies are available in Japan, Nishimura said.
A “mind reform” on the part of private corporations will be necessary, he said.
Although foreign critics lambaste Japan for retaining a tight grasp on home-grown technology, Nishimura said Japan’s reluctance to share its achievements with others is due in part to a cultural tendency toward “the virtue of modesty.”
He said the ministry would put both policy and financial incentives behind a drive to “create an environment for technology transfers.” He called the new policy “the first specific measure” adopted under MITI’s “Vision for the 1990s,” a blueprint for more harmonious economic interaction abroad and a better quality of life at home.
“The time has come for Japan to take a leading role in the transfer of technology that, until now, has been done by Western nations,” Nishimura said. “For a country producing 15% of the world’s gross national product, we think it is our duty.”
For MITI’s own research projects, Nishimura said, the ministry intended to promote foreign participation “from the start.” He cited a recently inaugurated MITI project to develop highly automated “intelligent manufacturing systems” in which firms from both the United States and Europe are participating in defining concepts that will be followed in research.
The MITI study group also advocated more international technological exchange among firms in the aircraft and space industry, in which Japan is not prominent.
The latest statistics available--for Japan’s fiscal year 1988--showed that Japan suffered a global deficit of $500 million in technology trade, paying $2.1 billion in fees for foreign technology while selling only $1.6 billion of Japanese know-how. With the United States alone, the imbalance was more than $800 million in the red.
Japanese sales, moreover, paled in comparison with American global technology exports of about $9.2 billion in the same year. That year, the United States recorded a surplus of some $7.4 billion in technological exchange, Nishimura said.
He said there was no way to estimate what Japan’s surplus might be if the nation’s companies were more willing to license their technology.
Some improvement already has occurred, however, he said. Whereas in 1971 Japan’s earnings in licensing fees were only 20% of the amount paid for foreign technology, the nation exported the equivalent of nearly 80% of its technology imports in 1988, he noted.
But in the value of new technological licensing contracts, the trend was heading in the other direction.
From 1972 to 1986, the value of new contracts to export technology consistently exceeded the value of new imports. But export technology contracts fell below imports again in 1987 and 1988. Nishimura said he could not explain that phenomenon.
