What Taro Kono Discovered in India’s Startups May Matter More Than Another Summit

The old friendship between India and Japan has found a new vocabulary of AI, space, startups, semiconductors and talent. What began as a relationship shaped by geopolitical trust is now being tested in the practical arenas where economic power is created and protected.

The new India–Japan story is being powered by what their innovators are capable of building together. Before sitting across the table from Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in New Delhi, Japanese lawmakers had already spent time inside India’s technological ecosystem in Bengaluru, visiting the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Space Research Organisation and Bharat Electronics Limited. Japan’s parliamentary engagement with India began not with protocol, but with laboratories, space technology and defence electronics.

A delegation of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, led by House of Representatives member Taro Kono, visited India from September 18 to 22 under the Ministry of External Affairs’ Distinguished Visitors Programme. Kono, who has previously served as Japan’s Foreign Minister, Defence Minister and Digital Minister, was joined by fellow lawmakers including Karen Makishima, Kenji Nakanishi and Sako Yamamoto. Japanese Ambassador to India Ono Keiichi was also present during the New Delhi engagement.

The September 21 meeting with Misri covered political and economic matters of mutual interest, including defence, economic security, trade, investment, technology, innovation, supply-chain resilience and people-to-people ties. The breadth of that agenda is more revealing than any single item on it. The India–Japan relationship is acquiring a vocabulary that belongs as much to economic strategy as to traditional diplomacy.

The Journey From Bengaluru to Delhi

The choice of Bengaluru before New Delhi was not merely logistical. It placed Japanese lawmakers inside institutions that represent different layers of India’s technological rise.

At IISc, they encountered the research ecosystem. At ISRO, they saw a space programme intricately connected to private enterprise. At BEL, they encountered the industrial side of technology. Taken together, the itinerary offered a more tangible picture of India’s capabilities than a sequence of formal meetings could provide, also highlighting how Japan’s understanding of India is itself changing. 

The older economic relationship was strongly associated with manufacturing, infrastructure and long-term industrial investment. Those foundations remain significant, but a newer layer is emerging around artificial intelligence, space, advanced technology, startups and supply chains.

Kono’s own reaction in India captured that shift. He pointed to the dynamism of the Indian startup ecosystem and remarked that there are more than 500 startups in the country’s space sector. He also said Japanese startups could learn from India’s startup culture, which is a significant observation as it supercedes an older assumption about the direction of economic learning. India is not simply being presented as a destination for Japanese capital but being viewed as a source of entrepreneurial models and commercial experimentation that Japanese firms can engage with.

The 10 Trillion Question

The scale of the economic ambition gives this transformation a harder edge. India and Japan have set a target of JPY 10 trillion in private Japanese investment into India over the coming decade, following the earlier JPY 5 trillion public and private investment-and-financing target for 2022–2026. Japan’s official framework also links this investment ambition with industrial cooperation, trade, the India–Japan Industrial Competitiveness Partnership and efforts to strengthen supply chains. The number is large, but the more revealing question is what kind of investment it is expected to attract.

As of October 2024, Japan’s Embassy in India and JETRO counted 1,434 Japanese companies operating in India through 5,205 business establishments. That is already a substantial industrial footprint, but the figures also show why the next phase cannot simply mean adding more companies to an existing list. The objective is to deepen what those companies produce, where they source, how much technology they develop locally and how closely their Indian operations connect with wider Asian supply chains.

There is evidence that Japanese manufacturers are already looking at India through this longer lens. In JBIC’s 2024 survey, India received a 58.7% vote share among Japanese manufacturers identifying promising countries for medium-term business expansion, up from 48.6% the previous year. India retained the top position for the third consecutive year in that survey. While it does not guarantee investment, it is helpful because companies still weigh regulation, infrastructure, costs and market conditions. India is being considered not merely as a large market, but as a location from which Japanese companies can build their next generation of international operations.

Economic Security Has Become the New Language

In the new geopolitics, dependence is a vulnerability, resilience is power, and trusted partnerships are becoming infrastructure. The July 2026 India–Japan summit had already pushed this logic into formal policy. The two governments adopted a Joint Declaration on Economic Security covering project-based cooperation in semiconductors, critical minerals, information and communication technology including AI, clean energy and pharmaceuticals. They also issued a joint statement on artificial intelligence and advanced cooperation on energy resilience, changing the meaning of economic cooperation.

For India and Japan, supply-chain resilience sits at the intersection of commerce and national security. Japan brings deep industrial experience, advanced manufacturing capabilities and established global corporate networks. India brings scale, an expanding technology ecosystem, a large domestic market and a growing manufacturing base. The attraction of the partnership lies partly in the possibility of combining these different strengths without reducing the relationship to a simple investor-and-recipient model.

The parliamentary delegation’s discussions in September show that this agenda is no longer confined to summit documents; instead, it is becoming part of the political conversation at multiple levels.

From Japanese Capital to Indian Talent

Kono spoke about the interest among young Indians in coming to Japan and argued that they should be encouraged not only to study there but also to work there. He also suggested that Indian startups should explore Japanese markets and resources, while Japanese startups should be encouraged to expand internationally, including into India, creating the possibility of a more reciprocal economic relationship.

Capital can establish a factory, but talent can connect two innovation ecosystems for decades. An Indian engineer working with a Japanese technology company, a Japanese startup entering the Indian market, or researchers collaborating across universities can create relationships that survive changes in individual projects. That is why people-to-people cooperation belongs inside the economic-security conversation rather than outside it.

Japan has been confronting demographic and labour-market pressures, while India has a large pool of young professionals and technical talent. The challenge will be to turn this complementarity into durable institutional pathways rather than temporary programmes. If that happens, human mobility could eventually become one of the less visible foundations of the bilateral economic relationship.

The Partnership Is Moving Beyond Defence

Kono’s argued that India and Japan should build their strategic partnership beyond foreign affairs and defence, mentioning academia and employment alongside economic cooperation. This does not refute the significance of defence cooperation. In fact, the September 22 engagement between Kono and India’s Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh focused on strengthening defence-technology cooperation, joint exercises and regional security cooperation. The significance lies elsewhere, as the relationship is expanding horizontally.

Defence technology now sits alongside AI and broader security concerns, while strategic security is increasingly intertwined with critical minerals, manufacturing with supply-chain resilience, and universities and employment pathways with the wider economic relationship built around investment. This is what makes the India–Japan partnership distinctive in its current phase. Its foundations are gradually evolving into economic and technological mechanisms that operate below the summit level. The relationship is consequently becoming harder to define through any single ministry or sector.

A New Architecture Is Being Built in Plain Sight

In Bengaluru, Japanese lawmakers saw the institutions and enterprises where technological capability is being created. In New Delhi, they entered the diplomatic machinery responsible for translating that capability into strategic cooperation.

Between those two cities lies much of the emerging India–Japan story.

The two countries have already created a framework around economic security, AI, energy resilience and private investment. They have an established Japanese corporate presence in India, a growing interest in startup cooperation and an expanding conversation around talent mobility. The next question is whether these strands can be connected tightly enough to produce enduring economic resilience.

That will require more than political goodwill. Investment targets must translate into commercially viable projects. Supply-chain partnerships will need competitive economics. Technology cooperation will require research links, intellectual-property frameworks and skilled people. Talent mobility will depend on institutions capable of turning interest into careers. The opportunity is therefore substantial, but so is the work required to realise it.

The old friendship between India and Japan has found a new vocabulary of AI, space, startups, semiconductors and talent. What began as a relationship shaped by geopolitical trust is now being tested in the practical arenas where economic power is created and protected.

India and Japan are no longer discussing strategic partnership only in terms of what they can protect together. They are beginning to ask what they can invent, manufacture, finance and sustain together. And in an era when the security of a nation can depend on a chip, a mineral, a battery, a research laboratory or a skilled engineer thousands of kilometres away, that may be where the next chapter of India–Japan geopolitical trust will actually be written.