Fresh from winning support from a handful of foreign countries for Japan's new security laws, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is now pursuing broader international backing for the changes. He has meetings planned with a range of foreign leaders in coming weeks.
Broad support is seen as key as Abe tries to persuade skeptics at home — and in China and South Korea — about empowering the Self-Defense Forces to fight overseas, a change without precedent since World War II.
While he says the laws will strengthen the alliance with the United States and boost defense cooperation with friendly nations such as Australia in the face of an increasingly assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea, critics argue they violate the war-renouncing Constitution and could drag Japan into U.S.-led conflicts.