Belgium’s defense minister says his country plans to strengthen communications and information-sharing with Japan amid concerns over China’s military buildup.<\/p>\n
Defense minister Theo Francken spoke to NHK in Brussels earlier this month. He is scheduled to visit Japan starting on Monday.<\/p>\n
Francken said Belgium will put a defense attache in Tokyo for the first time ever to “have more collaboration, more cooperation, on a lot of security matters.”<\/p>\n
He welcomed the Japanese government’s decision in April to ease, in principle, restrictions on the overseas transfer of defense equipment, including lethal weapons.<\/p>\n
Francken said Japan’s defense industry is growing, and that a lot of Japanese companies are making dual-use products and investing in technology and innovation.<\/p>\n
The minister referred to China’s tightening export controls on its rare earth metals to companies not only in Japan but also to those in Europe.<\/p>\n
He stressed that it is of paramount importance to have more diversification, adding that big companies in Belgium are doing deep-sea mining.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Belgium’s defense minister says his country plans to strengthen communications and information-sharing with Japan amid concerns over China’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35061,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[740,7,721,4252,5599,144,5598,5602,5603,5604,5601,833,5600,5605,1593,1165],"class_list":["post-35060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-belgium","tag-asia","tag-belgium","tag-biz","tag-japan","tag-japan-broadcasting-corporation","tag-news","tag-nhk","tag-nhk-world","tag-nhk-world-premium","tag-nhk-world-tv","tag-nhkworld","tag-nuclear","tag-public-broadcaster","tag-radio-japan","tag-tech","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/117187294102607839","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}