For this baby boomer there’s gonna be a mental pause seeing a squad of top line fighters with meatballs on their wings.
Yeah, it used to strike me as odd years ago, seeing F-104 Starfighters in both Japanese and German livery. More recently, the F-16 variants built by Japan have struck the same chord. Then I'm reminded of Patton's caustic comments about the French focusing on the "last war" and shake it off.
I hope the boneheads in Congress and the Pentagon can see this as an opportunity to keep the F-22 design fresh, rather than treating it like an exotic, low-production hangar queen. We've already lost a few of the small number that were produced; this is a chance to replace those airframes with someone else paying to re-start the production line.