Japan Press Weekly

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2012 May 9 - 15 [POLITICS]

Don’t buy exorbitantly priced F-35s, use the money for disaster recovery!

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

The F-35 fighter aircraft that Japan decided to purchase from the United States cost about 19 billion yen per fighter, according to a Pentagon report to U.S. Congress.

The report estimates that the total cost of the 42 F-35 fighters Japan plans to buy would be about 800 billion yen or 10 billion dollars. However, the final cost remains uncertain because this is just the interim report and cost overruns are expected.

Many defects in the F-35 fighter aircraft have been discovered during its development process. Therefore, it has been expected from the beginning that the defects will cause delay in F-35s coming into service and drive up the per-fighter-price.

Nevertheless, the reason the Japanese government hastily decided to purchase U.S.-made F-35s is that Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko’s government wanted to curry favor with the Obama administration.

The Noda-led government has so far come up with an estimate of somewhere around 15 billion yen per F-35 fighter. Defense Minister Tanaka Naoki has publicly admitted that the fighter “would be unaffordable” for Japan if the price sharply rises. The government should cancel the plan to buy such overly priced defective aircraft.

What the government should do instead is to focus its energy on post-disaster recovery. It is absolutely impermissible that the government is planning to impose a heavier consumption tax rate even on the disaster-hit victims while sticking to its intent to purchase the costly F-35 fighter jets. Give top priority to allocating budgets to help recover from the 3.11 debacle and improve people’s livelihoods!