A senior figure in Japan’s drone industry is pushing for Japan and Taiwan to align their drone rules and deepen manufacturing cooperation, arguing that mismatched regulations and Japan’s limits on defense work are holding the sector back. Kakuya Iwata, executive director of the Japan UAS Industrial Development Association, made the case in an interview with Nikkei Asia published July 4.
Iwata said the two sides already share close manufacturing ties, and that their strengths line up. Japan is strong in components such as motors, while Taiwan has the room to scale production for export orders.
The barrier, he argued, is that the two countries certify and regulate drones differently, and that Tokyo’s restrictions on defense cooperation with Taipei keep military and dual-use work from maturing.
The Pitch Is Complementary Strengths for a Non-Chinese Supply Chain
The logic rests on a fit that looks clean on paper: Japanese component depth paired with Taiwanese manufacturing capacity, aimed at export markets that increasingly want drones built without Chinese parts. Iwata framed it as each side covering the other’s gap.
Japan brings a mature regulatory base and precision manufacturing. It legalized Level 4 flights, meaning beyond-visual-line-of-sight over populated areas, back in December 2022, and its makers have pushed drones into medical delivery and inspection work.
Taiwan brings volume and urgency. The island has spent the last few years standing up a domestic drone sector aimed squarely at replacing Chinese hardware, and it is courting the same overseas buyers Japan wants to reach.
Different Rulebooks Are the Real Obstacle
The problem is not appetite, it is paperwork. Iwata and a Taiwanese analyst both pointed to a certification wall that keeps the two industries from plugging into each other, even as the political will grows.
Teng Hung-yuan, an analyst at Taiwan’s Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, told Nikkei Asia that differences in drone certification, electrical safety, and communications standards make cross-border cooperation harder and complicate any government buying the other’s systems.
He noted the United States already offers Taiwanese firms a path through its Green UAS program, and that no equivalent bridge exists between Taiwan and Japan.
Green UAS is a cybersecurity and supply-chain certification run by AUVSI, aligned with US defense procurement rules, and now recognized as a route toward the Pentagon’s Blue UAS cleared list. That template is real and moving: in June, Taiwan’s ITRI became the first Green UAS evaluation body outside the United States. There is no such scaffolding tying Taipei and Tokyo together yet.
Japan and Taiwan keep no formal diplomatic relations, a legacy of Tokyo’s 1972 switch to Beijing, which is part of why defense-drone cooperation stays cautious. Ties have warmed anyway, with senior Taiwanese officials making private visits to Japan over the past year.
China Is the Force Pushing Tokyo and Taipei Together
As Taiwan News reported, the real engine behind all of this is one country: China. DJI’s grip on the global market and Beijing’s tightening export controls on rare earths and key components are pushing Tokyo and Taipei to build supply chains that need nothing from China. Not a single part.
Washington has spent two years building non-Chinese alternatives through the NDAA, the Blue UAS list, and Green UAS. Taiwan turned that same anxiety into an industry. Its “zero-red” push, drones free of any Chinese parts, runs through a national-team alliance and a purpose-built hub in Chiayi County backed by a multiyear government investment worth over a billion dollars.
Taiwan is racing to build that scale. The island has set a goal of producing on the order of 180,000 drones a year by 2028, up from a base that is still small by global standards, and it has said openly that it cannot hit that number without foreign partners and buyers.
The demand is not theoretical. Taiwan exported well over 100,000 drones in 2025 to buyers including Poland, the Czech Republic, and the United States, markets shaped by the war in Ukraine and the scramble for hardware that does not route through China. Japan, watching Chinese makers get frozen out of the US, sees the same opening.
Japan has its own homegrown push to point to. Domestic maker ACSL has reported rising demand as Chinese drones get shut out of American buyers, and Tokyo has written a homegrown drone industry into its defense plans. What Japan does not have is Taiwan’s manufacturing scale, which is the whole reason Iwata is looking across the strait rather than only inward.
Taiwan has already signaled it wants to be that supplier. Late last year it launched a drone-diplomacy push to sell military-grade drones and uncrewed vessels to Asia-Pacific partners, Japan among them. Iwata’s call is the industry-side echo of that same handshake, this time coming from Tokyo rather than Taipei.
The Japan UAS Industrial Development Association is the largest drone group in the country, with more than 28,000 members and over 270 accredited training schools. That reach is exactly the kind of civil-industry base that could anchor a cross-border supply chain, if the rules let it.
DroneXL’s Take
Let’s be straight. This is not a story about two friendly neighbors. It is a story about a shared fear of China. Strip that fear away and the cooperation does not happen.
Whoever untangles cross-border certification first takes the prize, and the prize is the European market that Ukraine reshaped. The bottleneck is not technology, and it is not political will. It is certification paperwork. The boring thing is what decides who wins.
Photo credit: Presidential Office photo
