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The story
A story from ITmedia reporting that “Rakuten has set up an inquiry form in response to the ‘attack drone’ reports, but has no plans to reply” sparked reactions on 5ch’s News Express+ board.
Threads mixed lighthearted worries about the fallout for the Rakuten Eagles and Rakuten Card with debate over fostering domestic drone technology and assessments of Mikitani’s management decisions, sending the discussion in many directions.
Rakuten Sets Up Inquiry Form Over “Attack Drone” Reports — But “Won’t Be Replying” – ITmedia NEWS –
August 19, 2026, 9:40 AM
By Yuka Okada [ITmedia]
Source: itmedia.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
They'll probably just rename it the Rakuten Drones.
What about Vissel Kobe? (Rakuten also owns this J-League soccer club)
They won't even listen lol
It's basically a spittoon lol (somewhere to dump complaints and ignore them)
They probably won't even look at it lol
Seems like the right call.
I wish the bear-protection crowd got the same treatment.
Can't be caving to complainers.
The June 4th Rakuten-Tiananmen Incident! (a pun inserting "Rakuten" into "Tiananmen")
They'll send a drone strike lol
Feels like they'd just drone-deliver a Rakuten Card to you unsolicited
The people against it sure seem to really want us using Chinese-made ones instead.
Market share, usability, and precision — it's all Chinese-made.
Face reality.
If Rakuten licenses the tech and manufactures them, the parts will probably still end up Chinese-made anyway, no? Turning that into defense equipment is scary.
Japan doesn't need that kind of technology.
I wouldn't even want to let them use electricity.
He's clearly the type who runs wild on nothing but vanity and stubbornness.
Being a crony capitalist (a businessman who profits off political ties) is about as sure a bet as it gets.
Background and Key Points
Rakuten Group, led by CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, is Japan’s dominant e-commerce and mobile carrier, whose businesses include Rakuten Ichiba (its shopping mall), Rakuten Card, Rakuten Mobile, and two sports clubs — the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles (NPB baseball) and Vissel Kobe (J-League soccer). Japan’s evolving legal framework for drones has been a live policy issue since revisions to the Civil Aeronautics Act and rules under the Unmanned Aircraft Systems framework tightened operating requirements, while separately the government has pushed to reduce reliance on Chinese-made drones (notably DJI, which dominates the civilian market) for security reasons. ITmedia is a mainstream Japanese tech-news outlet, and its report that Rakuten opened a public contact form for “attack drone” reports but announced upfront it wouldn’t respond to submissions is what triggered the thread — the company’s blunt “we’re listening but not engaging” posture read to posters as an unusually candid, almost dismissive customer-relations move for a company this size.
The thread didn’t converge on outrage at Rakuten; it split over domestic drone policy. One camp treated the episode as a chance to champion Japanese-made drone technology and reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers; others pushed back that Chinese manufacturers already lead on market share, usability, and precision, and doubted Rakuten could avoid Chinese components even if it built drones domestically — with a few flatly opposed to Japan developing this technology at all, including for defense applications.
What’s easy to miss is what “attack drone” actually refers to here: nothing in the source article or thread specifies whether this concerns a real weaponized-drone report, a security demonstration, or a mislabeled news story — the posts riff on it (Eagles-to-Drones jokes, Rakuten Card “drone deliveries”) without ever clarifying the underlying incident, so readers shouldn’t assume Rakuten itself builds or deploys weaponized drones.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Rakuten Sets Up Inquiry Form Over Attack Drone Reports — “Won’t Be Replying” <…"noindex,nofollow" />.”
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