Japanese gov/corporations have a natural aversion to directly dealing with customers at scale.
They’ll want a proxy layer of third party corporations, which can then deal with the minutia of exposing it to end customers. Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Olympus have SDKs and partnerships, they just don’t want to deal with the individual customers.
If I had to put it another way, it's in their DNA to outsource scaling problems to middlemen.
The country's whole economic structure is a pyramid of sub-contracting companies that live and die on absorbing the scaling/operational risks for the bigger fishes.
They’ll want a proxy layer of third party corporations, which can then deal with the minutia of exposing it to end customers. Canon/Nikon/Fuji/Olympus have SDKs and partnerships, they just don’t want to deal with the individual customers.