The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) will request ¥7.7 trillion across its general and special accounts in its budget request for fiscal year 2027, targeting growth areas like AI, semiconductors, and robotics. The figure is roughly 2.5 times last year’s initial budget, and on 5ch, criticism that the money will just be “skimmed off by middlemen” and that the move is “15 years too late” mixed with comments pointing out the gap in investment scale compared to other countries.
METI’s draft budget request for fiscal year 2027 has come to light. It will seek a combined ¥7.7 trillion between its general and special accounts, advancing priority policies in growth fields such as AI, semiconductors, and robotics, as well as strengthening the supply capacity of naphtha (crude gasoline).
The requested amount is about 2.5 times the size of the FY2026 initial budget (¥3.0693 trillion), and exceeds the combined total of that budget plus the FY2025 supplementary budget (¥2.2009 trillion) by roughly ¥2.5 trillion. In addition, the ministry is also making “item requests” that don’t specify a concrete figure. To concentrate investment in growth fields, the special “Strong and Prosperous Japan Investment Framework,” which places no ceiling on requests from individual ministries, accounts for about ¥4.5 trillion — more than half of the total.
Within the investment framework, about ¥1.4 trillion is being requested for AI, semiconductor, and robotics-related projects. This will fund the development of infrastructure for “physical AI” — AI that controls robots — as well as programs to support the adoption of AI-powered robots.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
Blue-collar jobs are getting the mass layoff rush.
Both military and civilian sectors are going to need autonomous/unmanned tech going forward.
The US and China are just too strong.
That's Japan for you.
So it got exposed as just middlemen sucking up subsidies, and they simply renamed it?
The shock of "zero subsidies for anime/game creators" — is this the distortion at the heart of the Cool Japan strategy? #ExpertTopic
Article by: Tane Kiyoshi
Anime writer / game writer
Mon, March 23, 2026, 7:01 AM
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/c821d18b24f06849346c13ed3da7fdaec49a69e5
Of the Cool Japan money, creators got ¥0.
Which semiconductors are you even investing in?
Focus on agricultural robots instead — that's a field desperate for labor.
And don't you dare touch military stuff — Japan's nowhere near that level right now.
The US, South Korea, and China are where they are now because they poured absurd amounts of money in.
Japan and Europe left it to the private sector and said "you handle it," which is why they're weak in this field.
The AI drones Rakuten imports are made in Germany.
Germany even has a software company with a market cap bigger than Toyota's — it's only Japan that doesn't.
Granted, Germany won't step in even if its banks are in trouble.
China, meanwhile, has announced a new five-year plan to gut humanities departments and go all-in on STEM.
Japan can't pull off that kind of brute-force move, so the gap just keeps widening.
The US government only started investing in AI recently too.
They're just jumping on the winning horse of an industry the private sector already made successful — it's not like government support is what made it succeed.
The layoff rush is a white-collar thing — wages on the front lines/shop floor are about to go up.
Everyone piles on the Finance Ministry, but METI is really the ministry that symbolizes everything wrong with Japan right now.
All it does is cut jobs and kill off industries.
We're short on labor right now, so it's necessary, isn't it?
If you're going to cut taxes, then government investment should be scaled back, right?
Apple treats Japan as a major market, and a lot of its parts and materials suppliers are Japanese companies, so the least they could do is build a manufacturing plant in Japan.
Just raking in profits here while investing it all in the US and other countries is way out of line.
https://news.mynavi.jp/techplus/article/20240131-2873604/images/001.jpg
imec Leuven's ecosystem
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/66d7411326ba25266a3bb86a/2e58ef57-12d2-4cff-9926-a54b8c951ecc/Screenshot+2024-10-29+at+3.31.14%E2%80%AFPM.png
Then it'll take several more years of accumulating yield-rate know-how and such to win customers' trust.
Even once they catch up to the cutting edge, they'll have to keep competing, so they really do need to pour in money like water.
Does Japan even have that kind of financial stamina left?
It's ¥100 trillion.
During the Q&A after his speech, Colby cited Germany's major increase in defense spending as an example when discussing other countries' defense budgets, and argued that Japan "should follow suit" to reach the 3.5% of GDP defense spending level the US is asking of its allies. (Kyodo)
https://www.sankei.com/article/20260810-MIDVJTCEZNIANFGS7WP47PU6KU/
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Budget Request] METI to invest ¥7.7 trillion in growth fields like AI and semiconductors.”
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