Originally Posted by
Gnadenburg
The military reason was they are relatively short-ranged submarines needing controversial forward basing ( Guam etc ). The national reason was pork barrel spending. The Japanese subs couldn't be built in Adelaide whereas the French sales team claimed their submarine design could.PM Abe was bitterly disappointed, betrayed and let down by Australia not choosing their submarines.
Japanese actually didn't care, they weren't all that interested in selling to us or not. The Soryu's was one of the first major attmepts to sell japanese hardware and they didn't know how the game was played, they also wouldn't give the AUS government the detailed performance specs of the subs as they were considered a national secret