Japan has approached TSMC to build a fab in Japan in collaboration with local chip manufacturers, reports the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri.

The idea is to boost the capabilities of the local IC companies and to give Japan access to the latest chip technology for national security applications.
 
Ironically, 14 years ago Japan was talking about setting up a multi-company collaboration to compete with TSMC, called the Advanced Process Semiconductor Foundry Planning Company.

“Japan has 11 integrated device manufacturers at the moment but their fab capacity is not big and they can’t compete with TSMC which has 60,000 wafer-per-month fabs,” the CEO of the APSFPC, Hirokazu Hashimoto, told Electronics Weekly at the time.

Backed by METI and supported by Hitachi, Renesas and Toshiba the idea was to raise $6 billion to build a joint fab capable of running  65nm and 45nm processes.
 
It was seen as the last chance for Japan to stay at the forefront of semiconductor manufacturing but foundered as companies wrangled about the details of the processes to be installed.

The new plan to get TSMC to set up a fab in Japan is likely to suffer the same fate as the agreement for TSMC to set up a fab in Arizona – Japan will pay for it but the fab won’t get TSMC’s best process.