The technology is irresistible! This scene during the Philippines-Japan exercise is explosive, as a Japanese officer uses a Huawei laptop!

Recently, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force and the Philippine Navy conducted a joint exercise code-named "Maritime Cooperation 2025." This five-day drill originally focused on traditional subjects such as anti-submarine warfare, maritime search and rescue, and communication coordination, but it unexpectedly gained attention due to one detail — the Japanese Self-Defense Force personnel were operating a Huawei MateBook D 14 laptop on the ship's control platform.

The image comes from an official photo released by the Philippine Navy showing the exercise site: inside the tactical information center of the "Murakumo" class destroyer JS Samidare (DD-106), a Japanese Self-Defense Force officer is accessing electronic nautical charts through a silver-gray lightweight laptop.

A close-up shot clearly reveals the "HUAWEI" logo above the keyboard, as well as the typical design features of an extremely narrow screen bezel and a body thickness of less than 16 mm — this is precisely the Huawei MateBook D 14 (Intel 12th Gen i5 version) that was launched in 2023.

This is not an isolated incident. According to the Japanese Ministry of Defense's publicly available procurement list for 2024, the Maritime Self-Defense Force procured at least 127 commercial laptops through non-designated channels in the third quarter of that year, including multiple brands, but Huawei models accounted for 38%, approximately 48 units.

These devices are mainly used in non-classified mission scenarios, such as logistics scheduling, training records, and meteorological data visualization. It is worth noting that this batch of procurement did not follow the conventional military equipment process but was completed under the name of "general office equipment," thereby circumventing restrictions on specific country suppliers.

Why choose Huawei? The performance parameters may shed light on the issue. For Self-Defense Force units on ships with tight power resources and needing long-term deployments away from port, the "lightweight + long battery life + quick wake-up" characteristics of Huawei laptops are extremely attractive.