I grew up in Hiroshima. It is a place with automobile plants, shipbuilding towns, and a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force base. The sites where things are made and the sites that defend the country were not special industries to me. They were part of the everyday scenery.
I believe manufacturing is still Japan's strength. In 1980, Japan became the world's largest automobile producer, and in 1988 its share of the global semiconductor market exceeded 50%. In the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking, Japan held first place from 1989 to 1992. This is a country that rose from scorched earth to that height in a few decades.
Today, Japan ranks 30th in the same ranking. And in the meantime, the attackers have acquired AI. The work of mapping an internal environment and designing an attack path, which once took skilled specialists days, AI now compresses into hours. The defenders are still relying on foreign-made tools and manual work.
Factories cannot stop. So even when people know a control system is old, they cannot touch it. That is where the attacks arrive, now that the barrier of expertise has fallen. When one factory stops, production stops, the supply chain stops, and business partners stop. It means the strength this country has left comes to a halt.
This is not a matter of effort or awareness. It is a matter of structure. And structure does not change unless someone goes and changes it. That is why we, as a Japanese company, are replacing the premise. Not to block every attack, but to build in the assumption that things will break, and to ask how quickly function can be restored. Precisely because the equipment cannot be stopped, how many minutes it takes to bring it back when it does stop decides whether a business lives or dies. Not a repair shop called in after the accident, but a partner that sits beside management in ordinary times and decides together what to restore, in what order, and within what time. That, I believe, is what a foundation that keeps functioning through any crisis means.
There is a landscape I want to see ten years from now.
The industries that support society are able to choose domestic protection. The state of wanting to choose but having no options is over. And the idea that you do not fall, or that if you do fall you get back up on your own right away, is no longer specialized expertise but common sense for management.
This is not a story about our one company growing large. It is about companies that take on this field emerging one after another, people gathering, capital flowing, and technology accumulating. It is about creating that soil. If others come along to do the same in other fields, that is something we welcome.
Beyond that, I believe an era is coming in which AI and technology take on much of the work, and people can turn to what they truly want to do. But that society cannot stand unless it rests on foundations behind the scenes that do not stop. Someone has to take that on.
Not stopping is not a matter of defense. Because there is a premise that the factory will run tomorrow, companies can invest in new equipment and people can take on new challenges. An organization that loses that premise goes on the defensive and stops moving. What we want to build is the ground on which industry can step forward with confidence.
We build the foundation that keeps the industries society depends on running through any crisis. We will not let this country's industries fall.
Kosei Oka, Representative Director
