In August 2026, shops started disappearing from Rakuten Ichiba, the online shopping mall run by Rakuten Group. A mail-order catalog company. A café in the basement passage under Shinjuku Station. A small leather workshop in Osaka. Every one of them gave the same reason: Rakuten Group had been reported to be helping a German defense firm sell strike drones to Japan's Ministry of Defense. Where you sell had turned into a statement of what you stand for.

Five months, then gone

The first to move was Catalog House, the Tokyo publisher behind the mail-order catalog Tsuhan Seikatsu. It had opened its Rakuten storefront only in March 2026, listing a dozen or so of its bestsellers, handheld vacuums and pillows among them. A staff member told Tokyo Shimbun the point had been to widen distribution.

On August 17, Kyodo News and the Nikkei reported that Rakuten was teaming up with Helsing, a German defense company. The next day, Catalog House pulled its store. It had been there five months.

The reason it gave was its own corporate philosophy. Every issue of Tsuhan Seikatsu carries a cover line about current affairs, often about Article 9 of Japan's constitution, and the withdrawal notice quoted one of them: "Article 9 is what lets us go shopping." Article 9 renounces war and the maintenance of armed forces. Since the constitution took effect in 1947, its interpretation has been argued over continuously, and opinion inside Japan remains split.

Catalog House also keeps a written code it calls its product constitution, which commits the company to avoid selling things like nuclear missiles, nuclear submarines, fighter jets, tanks, artillery and firearms. According to Tokyo Shimbun, president Kotaro Otsuka raised the withdrawal at an internal meeting on the morning of August 18, arguing that staying would damage the company's image. No executive objected.

A café and a wallet maker followed

BERG, a beer-and-café spot in the basement at the east exit of Shinjuku Station, has operated in its current form since 1990. It sells coffee beans and house-made ham. It joined Rakuten Ichiba in February 2026, closed the online branch on August 20 and announced it on the 23rd. The situation, it said, no longer sat with its antiwar stance. Its own web shop stays open.

On the 24th, Gattsu, a company in Ibaraki, Osaka, that makes the leather brand Quatro Gats, announced it was leaving too. It is a small workshop that has released wallets carrying peace themes for years, with names like NO NUKES and PEACE IS THE WAY, timed to Japan's anniversary of the end of the war.

In its explanation, the company does not attack Rakuten. There is a case, it writes on its site, that defense capability protects a country and the lives inside it, and with wars actually being fought right now that argument cannot be waved away. It states plainly that it has no intention of criticizing people who shop on Rakuten or the other businesses selling there.

Its question, it says, was never whether Rakuten is right or wrong. It was what kind of company Quatro Gats wants to be. Leaving cuts revenue. It went ahead anyway, to close the gap between the words printed on its products and the decisions made in its accounts. It also notes it joined Rakuten Ichiba during the pandemic, when it needed a new sales channel, and that this was the right call at the time.

What Rakuten actually signed up for

Reuters reported that Helsing had signed a preliminary deal earlier this year that would put its systems in Japanese government hands, which it credited to a local broker it declined to name. Rakuten is that partner. It develops nothing and builds nothing; it is the desk that gets a deal through. Domestic production is on the table further out.

Hideaki Mukai, chief of staff to Rakuten's CEO, told Reuters that widening startup participation in Japan's defense industry is an important opportunity for the country's defense capability. Rakuten, he said, wants to use its own experience and network to bridge structural gaps like complicated procurement systems and government agencies that are hard to reach.

This is not Rakuten's first contact with the sector. In May 2025 it worked with Brave1, the Ukrainian government's defense tech agency, to help Ukrainian companies enter Japan. The Defense Ministry's fiscal 2026 budget allocates 100.1 billion yen (about $630 million) to buy the drones and unmanned boats for SHIELD, a layered coastal defense posture. The purpose and scale of this particular procurement, though, have been reported as undecided.

Helsing was founded in Munich in 2021, starting with AI software for reading battlefield data before moving into strike drones, which it supplies to Ukraine with German government funding behind it. In July 2026 it raised $1.8 billion, making it the best-funded defense tech startup in Europe.

Strike drone, or interceptor?

Japanese coverage split on what to call the thing. The Nikkei, which broke the story, wrote strike drone, and Jiji Press and Reuters matched it. Kyodo News instead reported an interceptor drone, and the papers carrying its wire copy, along with ITmedia, ran the same word in their headlines. Something that shoots missiles down, and something that flies into a target. Those are different weapons.

Helsing's own description is unambiguous. Its site calls HX-2 a strike drone: an electrically propelled X-wing precision munition with a range of up to 100 km, carrying onboard AI that keeps working under electronic warfare and jamming. With the company's reconnaissance and strike software, one operator can run several as a swarm. Deployed along a border at scale, it adds, HX-2 acts as a shield against invading ground forces.

Rakuten confirmed as much. On August 19 it told ITmedia that reports describing it as supporting the introduction of the strike drone HX-2 were not inconsistent with the facts. Rakuten describes the drone's purpose as being operated remotely from a safe area inland and guided precisely onto targets approaching the coast, to deter and block a landing.

The Defense Ministry's own budget documents list small attack UAVs and radar-site defense UAVs as separate line items under SHIELD. Attack and intercept are distinct procurement categories in Japan too. HX-2's use is described in a defensive frame, but as equipment it belongs to the first category. The Japanese headlines saying "interceptor" had blended the two.

How far does a seller answer for the mall's other business?

More than 50,000 shops sell on Rakuten Ichiba, according to Rakuten's own figure as of November 2024. The three that left are all small or mid-sized. Measured in revenue, this is a rounding error.

What the operator of a mall does in a separate business has nothing to do with its tenants, who pay a fee for floor space. That holds. Where you set up shop is also where you hang your name. That holds too.

Quatro Gats lists the counterarguments in its own statement. Can there be peace without the means to defend it? What does leaving a shopping mall have to do with world peace? What about Google, what about Amazon? The company answers none of them. It says it made its choice with the questions still open.

Europe has been running a version of this argument for years, over whether defense industries belong inside ESG investment or outside it, and in August 2025 the EU narrowed the definition of weapons automatically excluded from its climate benchmarks to those banned by international treaty. What happened in Japan is the same question arriving through the platform economy.

What gets decided by the end of September

The Ground Self-Defense Force is running field tests on HX-2, and Reuters reported they run to the end of September 2026. Adoption depends on the result. Rakuten has put up an inquiry form about its defense business, which states outright that it does not reply.

Posts criticizing Rakuten and declaring boycotts piled up on social media, though no figure shows how large that was. Whether more sellers follow the three is not something anyone can say as of August 25. What is clear is that all three gave up a sales channel. Quatro Gats is the one that wrote it was choosing to let revenue fall.

In your country, when a shop chooses where to sell, does the company that owns the floor space get looked at too? Or is business just business?

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