A year ago this month, the Japanese government published three core documents for the country’s security designs: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy and the Defense Buildup Program.
These documents form the basis for policy, priorities and resourcing for Japanese security practices for the coming years, and for many, they raised the question of what sort of revolutionary changes might happen in 2023.
While those documents were broad in scope, there was nothing truly groundbreaking contained in them. Rather, they were an institutionalization of initiatives and actions that had been in the works for years, and 2023 offered concrete evidence of this point. This past year has seen many milestones reached, but all along a roadmap that has been in place since Shinzo Abe was prime minister.