Japan has made progress toward a goal outlined in its 2022 National Security Strategy of bringing defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product, the country’s defense chief said, with the defense-related budget for fiscal 2024 expanding to 1.6% of GDP.

Defense Minister Minoru Kihara said late last week that defense-related spending in the fiscal year through March 2025 would total ¥8.9 trillion ($57 billion), approaching the gold standard 2% of GDP level that many Western nations have targeted.

As a percentage of GDP, spending will rise by 0.2 percentage point year on year — though this claim has been complicated by the weakening yen.

Kihara told a news conference Friday that the Defense Ministry’s budget made up ¥7.7 trillion of the outlays, while the remaining ¥1.2 trillion came from the budgets of other ministries and agencies such as the Japan Coast Guard.

Japan in late 2022 embarked on an ambitious program to bolster its defenses, as outlined in three key national security documents. One key aim is the 2% of GDP goal, which the government hopes to accomplish over five years through fiscal 2027 by allocating a total of ¥43 trillion for defense-related spending.

Asked about his views in the second year of this five-year program, Kihara said that the budget process for “drastically expanding” the nation’s defense capabilities was “progressing smoothly.”

“We will work with the relevant ministries and agencies to steadily realize the drastic reinforcement of (Japan’s) defense capabilities,” he added.

But Kihara’s optimism aside, there are caveats for the newly released figure — namely that it is based on the baseline fiscal 2022 GDP, when the purchasing power of the yen was much stronger than it currently is.

If the fiscal 2024 defense budget were compared with the government’s GDP projections for the same year, the ratio would still be roughly 1.4%.

Although the comparison is not out of the ordinary — it is based on past Defense Ministry practices since defense acquisitions typically take many years — it will almost assuredly make defense spending appear to be a larger chunk of GDP than it actually is.

This could make the Japanese figure difficult to compare with those of other countries, including NATO members that have set a 2% target. The Defense Ministry said in its 2023 white paper that “it is not possible to accurately compare” Japan’s defense budget with those of other countries “due to a number of factors,” including the lack of an internationally unified definition of a defense budget.

Still, the white paper denominated defense outlays as a percentage of GDP compared with fiscal 2022 for several other countries, including 2.85% for the United States, 3.09% for Russia and 1.19% for China, though critics say Beijing has been far from transparent in releasing its spending figures.

Until the release of the 2022 trio of security documents, Japan had long maintained an informal cap on defense spending of around 1% of GDP as part of its exclusively defense-oriented security policy under its pacifist Constitution.

But calls for bolstered defense spending in Japan have grown amid China’s rapid military modernization and its ongoing moves near democratic Taiwan, as well as nuclear-armed North Korea’s unprecedented flurry of missile launches in recent years.

The government, however, will face a number of hurdles to reaching the 2% goal, a Defense Ministry expert panel said in February, noting that the planned ¥43 trillion in defense outlays for five years up to fiscal 2027 may be insufficient amid price surges and the weakening yen.