Japan are looking hopefully in the direction of Johnson!s war in Vietnam for a road leading back to prosperity.
The immediate source of attraction to such. businessmen is. the U.S Army Procurement Agency [APA] in Yokohama City. One of the businessmen who calls there daily was reported by Kyoko Baba in the July 15 Japan Times as. saying: “We are counting on it very much ever since we heard that there will be special procurements of about $100
million worth of goods for the Vietnam war. We are all suffering from the present business depression, you know."
Baba quotes the judgment of the July 16 weekly Asahi that although procurement orders have been increasing of late, the total amount is nevertheless too small to be compared with that of the special orders Japan received around the time of the Korean war, "Yet some businessmen are heginning to dream about a Korean=war-= type special procurement boom. Because of the present business depression, even those companies which had shown no interest in this type of business before, including top Japanese makers, have begun to send their representatives to the APA office in Yokohama. Those companies hope that the U.S. forces may come up at least with a large amount of emergency orders in the future. Above all, APAts payment-in-cash method is most attractive to Japanese enterprisers who are badly in need of money today."
Asahi indicates its own feelings in the matter: "We feel a chill in our spine when we see those merchants going in and out of the procurement office with the intention of getting fat on Vietnamese blood,"
At present the U.S. is procuring for the troops in Vietnam such items as sandbags, barbed wire, insect control nets, jungle shoes and jungle combat uniform material,
The Nihon Matai K.K. has already made 500,000 sandbags for the Vietnam war but reports that this is a small amount. During the Korean war, Japanese makers supplied the U.S. forces with 200,000,000 sandbags,
During the Korean war, Sumitomo Electric Industry and Kobe Steel supplied the U.S. army with 600,000 coils of barbed wire, After that it received few orders from either the U.S. procurement office or the Japanese police. So it gave up its facilities for producing barbed wire. However, one of the subsidiaries of Kobe Steel is able to fill orders and sold the U.S. 80,000 coils in June.
The Nitto Spinning Co, landed an order that has kept its. Fukushima plant on a three-shift-a-day basis since June. The profitable deal. was for 35,000 square meters of insect-control glass=-fiber net. A company official, no doubt alert to the public relations problem said, "It isn't desirable to cooperate with war. However we accepted the order because insect nets are not weapons,"
A Marubeni-Iida trading company official met the same problem with a different explanation for accepting an order for 10,000,000 yen worth of dynamite. "We know there are various criticisms on such special procurements. But it is purely a business deal. It is the U.S. forces that decide whether those goods purchased should be used in South Vietnam or not."
Baba closes his article by citing the view of Professor
ele
. Noriyoshi Imai of. Hosei University that a Vietnam boom will not develop although some sectors of the Japanese industrial world have benefited from the Vietnam war. ...., “When Japan enjoyed such a boom. during the Korean war," . said the professor, "Japan's annual.export totaled only $800. metion It
was natural that receiving special orders of over $800 million annually could create a-boom then. At present, Japan exports annually . $7,000 million. Even $100 million of special purchases for the. Vietnam war cannot stimulate Japanese economy today which, moreover, is suffering from a serious business depression."