Canada overlooks a major market in western Japan

Don Cayo was the 2011 winner of a fellowship for Canadian journalists that is offered by the Foreign Press Centre of Japan. He travelled to Japan last month as their guest.

OSAKA, Japan

It?s hard to imagine that savvy Canadians, regardless of whether they work in government or in private enterprise, would be content to ignore the huge economic potential of a big international player like, say, the whole of South Korea or two-thirds of India.

Yet that?s the size of the opportunity that is all but slipping through Canada?s fingers in the Kansai region of western Japan. In any compilation of who?s who among international suppliers and customers doing business in this intensely productive part of the world, we Canadians don?t even rate a mention at the bottom of the list.

Yet, although this region may have only 0.3 per cent of Canada?s land area, it has well over half as many people and half the gross domestic product.

Kansai also punches above its weight among the other regions of Japan. Although it contains only about one-twelfth of the land area of the country, it is home to nearly 20 per cent of its universities and 21 per cent of its research institutes. Its thousands of companies specialize in two high-growth areas ? environmental technology and medical advances ? and the region is similarly strong in its track record for collaboration between researchers and businesses, and for filing patent applications. It?s also an active trader, more dependent for its prosperity on international suppliers and markets than on the substantial Japanese domestic market.

Canada is heavily engaged in trade with other regions of Japan. The country is B.C.?s second-largest trading partner, purchasing almost 14 per cent of our total exports. Until it was recently knocked into third place by fast-growing China, Japan was also the second-largest trading partner for Canada as a whole.

Yet Canadians? collective response to all this activity seems to be a yawn.

Although Premier Christy Clark has promised to try to make good with an official visit in the spring, those who pay attention to these things saw it as a snub that she over-flew Japan to go straight to China and India last month on her first, and so far only, trade mission trip.

But even if she had decided to stop in Japan, she wouldn?t have been able to conveniently land here. Because, while almost a hundred flights a week link Kansai International Airport to the United States and several hundred more fly in and out of other parts of the developed world, the former scheduled flights to Vancouver and Toronto have been scrubbed.

As well, the consulate Canada used to maintain in Osaka was closed several years ago and, although it was recently replaced with a less prestigious trade office, this appears to be so low profile that only one of the many business leaders interviewed for this series of stories on Japan seemed to know it existed.

When the people who were helping with logistics on this assignment sought to arrange an interview with Osaka?s Canadian Chamber of Commerce, they drew a blank and concluded that it was inactive.

Kansai is a long way ? almost as far as you can get and still be in Japan ? from the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami area, so it suffered no physical damage at all. Nor did its economy take much of a hit, says Noriko Mimura, manager of the investment promotion division of Kankeiran, a federation of Kansai regional companies. Aside from a brief blip caused by disruptions of the supply chain from factories in the east that were damaged or washed away, production in this region barely faltered.

However, nor did Kansai get the economic boost it expected as a result of a shift of production from the devastated east to the untouched west, says Katushiro Miyamoto, a professor at the graduate school of economics at Kansai University.

Initially after the quake, quite a few businesses were gearing up to bolster their operations here, Miyamoto said, but the reality of power supply problems set in ?and people realized there is no point shifting production to Kansai region.?

The power issue stems not from nuclear plant damage, but from the reluctance of local governments, who?ve been spooked by the damage at Fukushima from the tsunami, to allow them to continue producing. The problem is particularly acute in Kansai, because the region is even more dependent on reactors than is the rest of Japan. Fully half the power here was nuclear-generated, compared to about 30 per cent nationwide, so the impact of legislated conservation measures was felt more keenly by industries here.

Canada is too late into the game to compete as a supplier of liquid natural gas to meet the short- or even medium-term demand in Kansai for a buffer to produce energy while the future of nuclear is being decided and other sources of supply are being developed. We have a lot of gas, but no way to get it to the Japanese market before 2015, when the nation?s first LNG terminal is expected to open in Kitimat.

dcayo@vancouversun.com

Blog: vancouversun.com/economy

? Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Source: http://feeds.canada.com/~r/canwest/F56/~3/ypYIps_OOIg/story.html

call of duty elite dragonfly courtney stodden drake take care herman cain accuser herman cain accuser election day