Japanese Space Enterprise

JN February 1987 about two hundred space scientists and technicians Igathered for a party at the rocket facility on Tanegashima, an island just south of Kyushu, to celebrate the final launch ofJapan's N-rocket, built partly under the guidance of McDonnell Douglas Corporation. The Americans expressed satisfaction at the success of the rocket but also a certain sadness that, their work now complete, they would be moving on asJapan proceeded to the more autonomously produced H-rocket.1 TheirJapanese partners compared these Americans to the foreign technical advisers of the Meiji period (oyatoigaikokujin) who, among other things, helped Japan establish a shipbuilding industry around 1900. A little more than half a century later, this industry, for an uninterrupted period of several decades, made half the commercial ships in the world. That the same Japanese companies which first built those ships in the Meiji period are now making rockets, raises the question of whetherJapan can gain, say by the year 2050, a similar market share in the products of space enterprise. No longer teachers and pupils but equal partners, the American and Japanese technicians at the Tanegashima party expressed the common hope that their cooperative relationship would be long lasting.2 This prompts a second, and more immediate question of whether Japan's rise as a participant in space ventures will occur through international cooperation or through the autonomous route of domestic production (kokusan). A strong expression of the pro-kokusan position, assertingJapanese technological superiority, has been given by Karatsu Hajime, a former director of Matsushita Telecommunications Company. He responded as follows to an early 1988 incident in which problems with U.S. -made chips delayed a launch of Japan's Hi rocket

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