Japan rewrites Economic Security Promotion Act to fund overseas ports

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The government plans to submit a bill to revise the economic security promotion law during the current session of parliament that began on Wednesday. japantimes.co.jp

A solar farm in Nakai, Kanagawa Prefecture, in March 2016. Japan gets about a tenth of its electricity from solar panels despite having nearly no domestic production of photovoltaics (PVs). japantimes.co.jp

Sonic the Hedgehog, Castlevania's Alucard and the weak yet lovable Slime from Dragon Quest are just some of Japan's iconic gaming franchises celebrating midlife anniversaries in 2026. japantimes.co.jp

A Ukrainian rises in the traditional world of sumo japantimes.co.jp

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Japan is preparing the first major revision of its 2022 Economic Security Promotion Act, and the direction is less “defensive posture” than “portable industrial policy toolkit.” According to The Japan Times, the government plans to submit a bill in the current Diet session that would let Tokyo directly back Japanese companies’ overseas projects deemed strategically important—seaports critical to logistics, AI-relevant data centers, and subsea optical cables.

The headline change is financial engineering dressed up as national security. The revision would relax rules governing the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), allowing the state-backed lender to provide funds through subordinated investment structures. JBIC can take a first-loss position so that private investors can participate while being insulated from the most painful downside. In modern “public-private partnerships,” the state socializes tail risk, private capital collects the upside, and everyone pretends this is still a market signal.

Tokyo’s stated rationale is the usual geopolitical mood board: Russia’s war in Ukraine, China’s economic leverage, and intensifying competition in AI and other “cutting-edge technologies,” the Times reports. But state-directed capital allocation via balance-sheet guarantees has a habit of outliving the emergency that justified it. When governments discover they can allocate credit without calling it nationalization, they rarely unlearn the trick.

The bill also expands the law’s surveillance-and-compliance perimeter. Japan plans to add the medical sector to areas covered by a system designed to prevent foreign cyberattacks on “core infrastructure operators,” per The Japan Times. This is how security policy metastasizes: first ports and cables (plausibly strategic), then hospitals, then anything with a network connection and a lobbying budget.

To complete the ecosystem, Japan will establish a new think tank under the industry ministry-affiliated Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). The Times says it will pull in experts from diplomacy, intelligence, defense, economics, and technology to generate “agile” proposals and collaborate with foreign institutes. When a government builds an in-house idea factory staffed by security professionals, it’s rarely to recommend deregulation.

Japan’s pitch is that it must compete in a world where other states subsidize, screen, and steer. The answer to fearing state capitalism is—apparently—state capitalism, but with better branding and more careful accounting. The resulting exportable model is simple: call it “economic security,” put taxpayers behind the losses, and let the private sector claim it’s doing “investment.”