Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is gradually drawing an outline for his administration’s foreign policy.

In his New Year’s address, Kishida said he “will advance ‘realism diplomacy for a new era,’ taking as its three pillars the importance of universal values, efforts to resolve global challenges and efforts to resolutely and fully defend the lives and livelihoods of the Japanese people.”

He first used a form of the phrase “realism diplomacy for a new era” in a structured way in a speech he made a week earlier, on Dec. 22. “A policy group called Kochikai, where I was nurtured as a politician, has long upheld what we call realism diplomacy,” he said.