Robert Cooper's own account confirms a joint Cooper-Kahn visit to Japan's ICOT and the University of Tokyo while building the Strategic Computing proposal, framed as broad reconnaissance rather than threat assessment
Describing how he and Robert Kahn built the case for the proposal that became Strategic Computing, Robert Cooper said, in his own 1993 Charles Babbage Institute oral history: "I went and talked to everybody. Bob Kahn and I went around and talked to every major microelectronics company, every major computer company in the United States... We went to Japan and talked to the major people in all of the big companies in Japan. We visited the ICOT (?) program, the fifth generation computer program. We visited the University of Tokyo."
This independently corroborates, from Cooper's own side, that Japan's Fifth Generation program was a real input into Strategic Computing's planning — consistent with claim-fifth-generation-project-inspired-darpa-strategic-computing-initiative and claim-kahn-1982-proposal-cited-japan-quintuple-spending-as-sci-rationale. But Cooper frames the ICOT and University of Tokyo stops as two entries among many on a broad information-gathering tour that also covered every major U.S. microelectronics and computer company — not as an alarmed threat-assessment mission, and without any accompanying statement of belief or disbelief in a Japanese threat. The transcript's only other mention of Japan is a positive, unconnected aside: asked whether anyone does well at getting new technology into systems — a problem Cooper had just said the United States handles badly in commercial enterprises and the defense establishment alike — Cooper answers that the Japanese "do pretty well" at the long-range planning the United States "don't do very well."
The visit's existence is now confirmed from both ends of the funding story this vault has assembled: Kahn's own September 1982 proposal cited Japan's planned spending explicitly in the paperwork (claim-kahn-1982-proposal-cited-japan-quintuple-spending-as-sci-rationale), while DARPA's own public 1983 planning document never mentions Japan at all (claim-darpa-1983-strategic-computing-plan-omits-japan-fifth-generation). Cooper's own recollection of the fact-finding trip fills in the middle: Japan was genuinely scouted, not merely invoked. Feeds the funding branch of moc-1980s-us-japan-tech-panic.
Source
“I went and talked to everybody. Bob Kahn and I went around and talked to every major microelectronics company, every major computer company in the United States, and we talked to the senior guys in those companies. We went to Japan and talked to the major people in all of the big companies in Japan. We visited the ICOT (?) program, the fifth generation computer program. We visited the University of Tokyo.”
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