With a highly developed economy, Japan is one of the world's most innovative countries. Japan is the 6th largest trade partner with Europe, and its second-biggest trading partner in Asia and, together, the EU and Japan account for about a quarter of the world's GDP. The EU-Japan’s Economic Partnership Agreement entered into force on 1 February 2019, creating the largest open trade zone in the world.
ICT has long been one of the most active areas of EU-Japan Science & Technology cooperation, both at policy and project level. The cooperation between the EU and Japan in Research and Innovation (R&I) is governed by the Agreement on Science and Technology S&T Cooperation, which came into force in 2011. As part of the agreement, the EU and Japan have established common R&I projects with EU funding, in the technical domains that InDiCo covers. These R&I projects will be used as a foundation to further develop collaboration in ICT standardisation, with solid grounds existing given the involvement of Japanese standardisation players such as TTC and ARIB in 3GPP and oneM2M.
The European Union and Japan share values of democracy, human rights, and market economics. On 17th of July 2018, both the EU and Japan agreed to recognize each other's data protection systems as 'equivalent', which will allow data to flow safely between them. This step is claimed to be creating the world's largest area of safe data flows. This in turn calls for harmonized security approaches and measures and therefore increased collaboration for ICT security standards.
