Aerospace Industry Japan

Japan is preparing to ask the Bush Administration to soften its bid to change the terms of a controversial agreement for joint U.S.-Japanese development of the new FSX fighter plane, intended to be an advanced version of the American F-16, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The message will be delivered by Japanese Vice Minister of Defense Seiki Nishihiro, who is flying here today to meet with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Brent Scowcroft, the President's national security adviser.

The Bush Administration has notified Japan officially that it wants significant changes in the controversial plan for the joint development of the advanced FSX fighter plane before it sends the accord to Congress for its approval, White House officials said Tuesday.

The Bush Administration indicated Wednesday that it has ordered a reexamination of a deal negotiated by the Pentagon last year under which the United States would help Japan to build an advanced fighter plane.

Shoe on the other foot--and causing discomfort. Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will develop a fighter plane in cooperation with General Dynamics, and the prospect has aroused controversy in Washington. The new plane, called the FSX, will be a derivative of General Dynamics' F-16. It is not the first fighter plane Japan has worked on.

Scant attention was paid over the past decade when Japanese industry forged ahead with the task of making mundane commercial products out of "new materials"--high-technology compounds spun off from U.S. defense research. But now the technology, improved and refined by Japanese makers of golf clubs, industrial ceramics and fishing rods, is about to circle back to its originators as an innovative wing design for a jet fighter.

Japan and the United States signed an agreement to begin a multibillion-dollar joint venture to develop a state-of-the-art jet fighter for Japan's air defense. The agreement, signed Tuesday, calls for St. Louis-based General Dynamics Corp. and three Japanese companies--Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. and Fuji Heavy Industries Ltd.--to jointly develop the new fighter based on the General Dynamics F-16.

A former official of the Commerce Department charges in a new book that a Japanese plan to "modify" the General Dynamics' F-16 fighter is really a scheme to obtain on the cheap, "all drawings and technical data" on the plane and use them "as a vehicle for building a world-class aerospace industry" in Japan. Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr.