Japan Gets Serious About Flying Cars

The country’s once-famed government skunk works has set its sights on aerial taxis and trucks. It has some catching up to do.

- Matthew Campbell, Jie Ma, and Kiyotaka Matsuda

Japan often appears stuck in yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. Flip phones remain common. Yahoo! remains a wildly popular website. Tokyo of the 1980s may have inspired the futuristic cityscape of Blade Runner, complete with flying cars, but the fax machines that were cutting-edge when that film came out remain ubiquitous in Japanese offices today.

Ensuring that Japan doesn’t fall behind the technological curve has been the job of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, a powerful agency housed in a squat modern office block in Tokyo’s orderly government quarter, a few blocks south of the jagged moat surrounding the Imperial Palace. The building is orthogonal in every respect, a uniform stack of concrete threaded with long, featureless corridors. The bureaucrats here guided Japan’s postwar economic miracle, a boom that gave the world the transistor radio, the Walkman, the Prius— and almost no transformative innovations since. None of the automakers championed by METI— still better known abroad by its previous acronym, MITI—is today on the leading edge of autonomous driving. Japan’s faded tech companies can’t lay claim to either smartphone or internet greatness.