Japan bets on aerospace to regain production
Kato Manufacturing, based in the blue-collar enclave of Gifu Prefecture, in central Japan, is a microcosm of the country’s industrial evolution.
The family-run metal shop, which was started 128 years ago, originally made simple farming tools for what was then a largely agrarian society. When Japan morphed into a manufacturing giant, churning out automobiles and electronics for the world, Kato supplied the metallic equivalent of skeletons: sculpted frames and housings that gave products their shape.
Now, as Japan aggressively tries to regain some of its manufacturing might in the face of competition from lower-cost countries like China, Kato is producing parts for airplanes. The company recently installed new metalworking machinery and hired a half-dozen workers to accommodate orders from domestic aircraft makers.
“Airplanes, rockets — they’re a symbol for manufacturing,” said Keiji Kato, the company’s president and the fourth generation of the family’s leadership at the firm. Kato Manufacturing is a small piece of Japan’s vast bet on aerospace, a being billed as an instrument of multibillion-dollar government national pride and industrial renewal, effort to replace lost manufacturing a chance for Japan to restore jobs and to lift up the country’s some of its former glory. At a short industrial heartland, centered in test flight of the aircraft from an airport Gifu and neighbouring prefectures. in Nagoya, Japan’s economy Sony and Panasonic have closed minister declared “the start of a new consumer electronics factories here era for Japan’s aviation industry.” in the last decade. While the car But breaking into the aerospace industry has been more resilient, sector will be difficult. The country officials worry that the region’s last produced a passenger aircraft industrial base is becoming dangerously more than 40 years ago, at the end of narrow. the propeller era. And Japan has
Developing aerospace is more never produced a civilian jet plane, than just a bid for economic growth. although it has assembled some military The most public symbol of this models. effort, the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, is