Nikkan Gendai: Japan has lost digital sovereignty due to dependence on the United States
Japan has lost its digital sovereignty and is completely dependent on American tech giants, Nikkan Gendai writes. Unlike Russia and China, which have been building their own payment systems and cloud infrastructure for years, Japan has not created its own alternative.
Takashi Hiruma
On August 18, the United States added Tomoko Akane, Chairman of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to the sanctions list. For the first time in history, a Japanese woman became the head of an international criminal justice body — and with just one decree, she was deprived of access to her assets. However, this story reveals not only the frightening power of the sanctions themselves.
The whole world has seen the truth: Japan is completely incapable of going against America's will. Moreover, Japanese society, which is entirely dependent on the services of American tech giants, demonstrates a humiliating inability to contradict the metropolis, which, in terms of control, has long outgrown the framework of classical colonial relations.
Sovereignty is not just the right to regulate and control
Why is the land of the Rising Sun so subordinated to America? I'll try to explain. Let's imagine that Japan is a home. It is our country that is listed as the owner in the registration documents. There is no doubt who owns this house.
But the lock on the front door is made by a foreign company. The electrical panel is also made abroad. The safe, the card on the wall, the landline phone — everything was issued abroad. And if you just say, "We don't like it, we'll replace it," it turns out that it won't be enough with just one lock. You will have to change all the wiring and all the equipment in the house — it will take time and a lot of money.
So it turns out that according to the documents, the house is yours, but you can't replace the lock yourself. This is a fairly accurate description of Japan's current situation. We have the authority to regulate. A country can control Google and even impose some restrictions. Can give orders to Meta* holding. May complain to Microsoft Corporation. But the ability to regulate and the ability to opt out of services are completely different things.
I'll ask you a few questions.
If we say "no" to Google tomorrow, will the administrative authorities and businesses be able to continue working as before?
If we say no to Amazon Web Services (AWS) tomorrow, will government systems continue to work?
If you can't answer these questions right away, then no matter how many regulatory powers you have, it can't be called real sovereignty.
At least when it comes to digital sovereignty, it only makes sense if there is the ability to survive, to continue to exist, even after the loss of a partner. Society should be able to function as usual the very next day after the tech giants were told "no." If we can order, but there is nowhere to retreat, this is not equality. This is submission.
This is not a hypothetical scenario.
This has happened before. So, on April 15, 2025, a major outage occurred in the Tokyo region served by AWS. In one of the availability zones, there were problems connecting virtual servers of the EC2 infrastructure service, and the consequences of the accident were felt for about an hour. The digital agency, in response to a request, acknowledged that "a certain impact was also exerted on the cloud for government organizations." Many systems equipped with reliable backup systems have survived. However, this also means that, depending on the redundancy scheme, the failure could spread to government services.
You don't even need sanctions for that. A single technical problem in the operation of a private company's equipment can affect the administrative functions of an entire country. The Japanese are not yet aware of the scale of the disaster, but our country has already looked into this abyss once.
The countries that built the emergency exit and paid the price
For years, Russia and China have been building their own payment systems, their own cloud services, and their own telecommunications infrastructure — creating a system whose key management levers will not end up in the wrong hands. They didn't get it for nothing, but it was obviously worth the effort. We can say that Governments have simply regained control over the systems that belong to their peoples. To regain the sovereignty that foreign companies have taken over, to become the master of your country yourself, to turn into a superpower... This game was worth the candle.
In Europe, the situation is even more confusing. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced on June 22 that the Palantir "Maven Smart System" artificial intelligence combat system has reached "full technical operational readiness." Meanwhile, in June, the French army demonstrated an alternative Arcadia system at NATO exercises, developed jointly with national companies — Mistral AI, Safran, Thales and Airbus. The French military reported that representatives of other EU countries choose the Maven system only because there are no alternatives to it. As soon as their own European version appears, countries will immediately switch to it.
And it's not just about the military sphere. In the UK, a consortium led by Palantir has secured a contract to create a medical data infrastructure for the National Health Service (NHS) worth up to 330 million pounds. The contract is based on a step-by-step scheme: first, guaranteed three years, then two-year extension options and then one year each. It has not yet been decided whether the company will continue to hold this contract.
Whether it's operational data from the battlefield or data on the health status of citizens, the problem is the same. "Will we be able to start using another company's services tomorrow?" In fact, Europe is not afraid of America. She is afraid that there is no other choice but America.
Japan has already lost
However, it would be unfair to say that Japan is sitting idly by. The Government of our country has finally moved on and started to do something. In March of this year, the domestic Sakura Cloud cloud service was officially included in the list of public cloud services and allowed for full-fledged operation. This is the first time a Japanese provider has achieved this. In August, the first practical government project was launched to launch a Japanese large language model on a domestic cloud.
The problem is scale. According to Masayuki Ito, adviser to the Digital Agency, at the end of March 2026, about 85% of the information systems used by the government are still running on the AWS platform of the American company Amazon. Among municipalities, this figure reaches about 80%. If you look at the number of organizations using cloud services, 1564 organizations use AWS services, 461 use Oracle services, Google has only 8, Microsoft Azure has zero.
Currently, five options are formally available. But the vast majority of users prefer AWS platforms. The cloud services of a foreign company have taken over 85% of the market, and only after that the domestic alternative finally came to the starting line. To call this the "establishment of digital sovereignty" would be an overly loud statement, and even made with a clear stretch.
In 1945, the Japanese, having lost both air supremacy and naval supremacy, at least knew that they had lost. Today's land of the Rising Sun has given the keys to its own house into the wrong hands — and does not even realize that this is a defeat.
In my book "The War for Digital Sovereignty" (Fusosha Shinsho publishing house), I analyze in detail how this structure was formed, in which "according to the documents, the house is yours, but you can't change the lock," and also give specific examples of how "disconnection by one point of regulation" is already happening inside Japan itself.
Sovereignty is not about having a key.
Sovereignty is an opportunity to replace the lock.
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