This year has already proven a busy one for the Fumio Kishida administration on security diplomacy.
The Japanese government has held senior-level meetings with Australia, France and the United States, and most recently, had talks with South Korea this week. On top of it all, the administration is working with other partners on North Korea's recent missile launches and the crisis in Ukraine.
The level of security multilateralism we are witnessing from Japan would have been unimaginable 20 years ago — and politically impossible 40 years ago. Many might argue that barriers to this sort of security cooperation were the result of pacifism and Article 9 of the Constitution. But such an argument ignores the political realities that kept multilateralism out of reach for Tokyo.