George Freeman, minister of state for science, technology and innovation, said in an interview last week that he was in Japan to put out the message “that we’re coming to the Pacific as much as to America”.

The UK announced last week that a new global research fund to deepen scientific collaboration between Britain and “international R&D powers” like Japan will open with an initial £119 million (US$144 million) in UK government funding.

Freeman said Japan and the UK were looking to “maybe put some money in together, establish closer links between our laboratories and create some fellowships”. He mentioned Japan’s Mitsubishi group as a potential participant in an Anglo-Japanese fellowship under which “people come from Japan into the UK and from the UK into Japan”.

Freeman said UK startups and large Japanese companies could mutually benefit from such exchanges. While “we don’t have companies like Mitsubishi and Toyota and Fujitsu”, he said, “we have a lot of startups, a lot of venture capital”.

Part of Freeman’s vision is for British startups to gain better access to Japan’s “industrial excellence”.

The minister is particularly keen to team up with Japan in space, a frontier that has long been dominated by the militaries of Russia, the US and China.

Now that commercial pursuits such as positioning small satellites for the internet are expanding, “there’s an opportunity for … smaller space nations to come together”, Freeman said.

He proposed that these countries work together toward the sustainability of space. “One of the biggest problems in space now is debris,” Freeman said.

The minister also touched on the significance of allies strengthening their ties now that Russia is bogged down in Ukraine. “You know,” he said, “after Ukraine, it’s clear there’s been some flexing of industrial muscles. Russia is holding Europe to ransom by turning off the gas, with China threatening to do the same on semiconductors.”