Abacus | Bans on Chinese drone tech won’t stop Japan’s industry from taking off

Japanese drones have traditionally relied on Chinese electronics, and will therefore take a kick from falling in line with the US directive

But as commercial drones become an ever more important part of the workforce given Japan’s ageing population, the smart money is on Japan’s tech mojo to rise again

Reading Time:4 minutes

DJI’s new crop protection drone T30 at a launch ceremony in Shenzhen, China. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 7:00am, 7 Jun 2021Updated: 7:00am, 7 Jun 2021

On the list of world-famous inventors, there aren’t a lot of Japanese names, but Japanese firms are well-known for their skill at improving products, and taking them to manufacturing. In the 1970s and 1980s they dominated the auto industry, audio-visual technology, car navigation, batteries, chipmaking and cameras.

They were able to “ride the wave” in consumer goods that everyone wanted to get their hands on, until manufacturing moved to China and the hangover from the 1980s led to a banking crisis in the mid-1990s. A financial and psychological slump followed until Shinzo Abe, during his second spell as prime minister, came along with Abenomics in 2012.

Whether history is kind to the brand of reflationary policies Abe crafted along with Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda remains to be seen, but it is undeniable that Japan was pulled out of what seemed like a terminal decline, with numerous industries revitalised. A surge in manufacturing, design, innovation and creativity, skills that seemed lost for twenty years, came back. I’ve noticed this especially in the nerdy tech stuff I love: cars, robotics and things that can fly.

It had surprised me, as sales of consumer drones took off during 2016-2018, that with their prowess in electronics, motors and batteries, Japanese manufacturers were so slow to design and manufacture quadcopter consumer drones. It wasn’t that the demand was not there—at the height of the interest in the toy, electronics retailers in Japan such as BIC Camera and Yamada Denki were full of Chinese products from DJI, Ryze Tech, and French Parrot drones – but curiously nothing from Japan had made it to market.

In the commercial drone sector, it was a slightly different story. With its rapidly ageing workforce Japan is finding that commercial drones are becoming just as important as the workload-reducing robots we read about: machines that can autonomously clean buildings, assist in lifting heavy objects, or helping nurse the elderly and get them mobile. In some industries the deployment of a flying robot, or something more advanced than the flying cameras consumer drones tend to be, makes a lot of sense.

A drone is used to harvest apples in Japan. Photo: Neil Newman

The following applications are seeing the fastest growth in drone usage:

Agriculture: crop supervision, where a farmer can remotely monitor crops rather than having to take a look in person. Computer analytics and robotics can even be used to perform soil and irrigation analysis, plant and fertilize by shooting seeds and nutrients into the soil from the air, and manage harvesting. Perhaps soon an airborne robot can pull fruit straight from the tree. Pest control can also be remotely managed, which may be as simple as chasing off birds, boar and racoons, to pinpointing pesticide spraying.

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