This article republishes a passage originally posted on October 1, 2015.
Using a Sankei Sho column as its point of departure, it traces how China’s high-speed rail development, initially supported by Japanese and European technology transfers, later came to be presented as “indigenous innovation,” ultimately shutting Japan out of the bidding race.
Through the Japan-China competition over the Jakarta high-speed rail project, it questions Japan’s ODA policy, technology transfer, and lack of strategic caution.

2019-04-21
What kind of secret deal was made is not clear.
At any rate, the two countries that had long received enormous amounts of ODA from Japan managed to outmaneuver Japan completely.

The following is a passage I published on October 1, 2015.
Recently, when I was speaking with an elite employee working for one of Japan’s leading major corporations, the subject of newspapers came up.
I asked him, surely you do not subscribe to the Asahi, do you?
No, not that.
Then which one?
The Yomiuri.
I see.
But that paper, too, in some respects is not very different from the Asahi.
I told him about a time when a friend asked me, after giving up the Asahi, whether he should choose the Yomiuri or the Sankei.
The Sankei is no longer at all the newspaper that people imagined it to be thirty years ago.
I now consider it the most decent newspaper in Japan.

The following is from today’s serial column in that very Sankei, the Sankei Sho.
The bold emphasis is mine.

“It feels as though we are being whipped from behind and chased forward.”
China’s top leader, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, was astonished by the speed of 200 kilometers per hour.
It was October 1978, and he was riding the Shinkansen for the first time during his visit to Japan, on his way from Tokyo to Kyoto.
Deng, eager for modernization, went on to say:
“What we need now is to run fast.”
Perhaps he was already imagining Chinese bullet trains speeding across the land.
Japan gladly extended a helping hand to make Deng’s dream a reality.
With technical assistance not only from Japan but also from France and Germany, the development of high-speed rail spread across all of China.
China’s high-speed rail story began as a heartwarming success story.
But afterward it came to take on the character of a picaresque novel.
China eventually began claiming that the high-speed rail technology it had improved after being taught by others was “independently developed.”
Even the rear-end collision and derailment accident in Zhejiang Province in 2011, which caused more than 200 casualties, did not make it hesitate.
Instead of thoroughly investigating the cause, China hurried to expand overseas.
The climax came in the Japan-China battle for the Jakarta high-speed rail project on the island of Java in Indonesia.
After repeatedly reversing its policy, the Indonesian government rejected Japan, which had been conducting environmental and other surveys for three years, and adopted the Chinese proposal.
What kind of secret deal was made is not clear.
At any rate, the two countries that had long received enormous amounts of ODA from Japan managed to outmaneuver Japan completely.
Can a country with greater problems than Japan in ensuring safety really be trusted with the operating system?
And from the outset, was it not unrealistic to plan completion within three years, while the president was still in office?
Future developments remain impossible to predict.
For Japan, however, now cast out of the story, it is no longer any concern.