As part of his April 24th visit to Indiana University, the Hamilton Lugar School’s 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI)* was honored to host Vice President Motohiro Tsuchiya (Keio University) in its multidisciplinary “Japan Politics and Society” speaker series. Dr. Tsuchiya serves as Vice President for Global Engagement and Information Technology at Keio, where is also a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance.
Dr. Tsuchiya’s robust full-day agenda in Bloomington began with a series of morning meetings with IU’s Vice President for Information Technology/Chief Information Officer (CIO) and administrators in IU’s Office of the Vice President of International Affairs, as well as a tour of IU’s Cyberinfrastructure Building. Following a hosted lunch with faculty and administrators leading IU’s research, teaching, and programming on cybersecurity and global policy, Dr. Tsuchiya toured the historic Lilly Library. His afternoon and evening schedule was organized around a series of engagements with the deans of the Hamilton Lugar School, the chair of its Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and 21JPSI and several of its faculty affiliates.
In addition to participating in several of these meetings, 21JPSI Founding Director Adam Liff also had the privilege of hosting VP Tsuchiya for an afternoon public lecture/audience Q&A on “Japan’s Changing Cybersecurity and the Future of U.S.-Japan Relations.” Around 50 students, faculty, staff, and community members turned out to hear Prof. Tsuchiya’s discuss the growing prominence of cyberspace within Japan’s national security debate.
Prof. Tsuchiya began his public remarks with an overview of the gradual evolution of Japan’s policy debate and response to emerging security threats in cyberspace. The Government of Japan’s (GOJ) initial efforts to establish cybersecurity-relevant organizations, which he called “Japan’s Cyber Defense 1.0,” saw the government react to a series of hacks and 9/11 by establishing an IT Security Office and National Information Security Center (NISC). The second phase, “Cyber Defense 2.0,” entailed the introduction of an Information Security Strategy and growing awareness about the importance of a more proactive posture in cyberspace. Following the long-serving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s (2012-2020) return to the Kantei, the “Cyber Defense 3.0” phase saw Japan pass a Cyber Security Basic Law.
The present phase, which Prof. Tsuchiya labeled “Cyber Defense 4.0,” has been defined in large part by lessons learned from Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a conflict in which cyberspace has figured prominently. This fourth phase is marked by growing urgency in Tokyo and more widespread understanding about the importance of more robust cyber defenses to ensure national security. Most notably, Japan’s 2022 National Security Strategy called for “active cyber defense” (ACD) and related legislation is now being considered in the National Diet (Japan’s parliament). Nevertheless, the past three years have also demonstrated the thorny constitutional questions raised by related proposals—especially as it relates to Article 21’s protection of the “secrecy of any means of communication.” If passed into law, this bill would improve public-private cooperation and empower the authorities to penetrate and neutralizing attackers’ servers in advance, inter alia.
In addition to the political and policy debate, Prof Tsuchiya also highlighted various practical challenges that efforts to bolster Japan’s cyber defense face. He devoted significant attention to the vulnerability of the submarine cables through which 99% of Japan’s international communications still flow and highlighted several recent cases where foreign vessels have “accidentally” severed cables. As such, in addition to concerns about cyber or physical attacks on data hubs and centers, Japan and its partners must also devise countermeasures to efforts to simply cut the submarine cables on which Japan depends so heavily.
How could Japan more effectively bolster defense in the vast and complicated cyber domain? Prof. Tsuchiya called for Japan to improve its own capabilities while also pursuing greater international cooperation and new cyber alliances—centered on but not limited to the U.S.-Japan partnership. He closed his remarks with an open-ended question about what “Japan’s Cyber Defense 5.0” would look like, and called for it to remain a central focus of national security debates within Japan and in the U.S.-Japan alliance context.
Following his remarks, Prof. Tsuchiya answered a series of thought-provoking questions from an enthusiastic audience of both Japan and cyber security-interested students, staff, community members, and faculty, including the Co-Director of IU’s Cybersecurity and Global Policy Program.
*The 21st Century Japan Politics and Society Initiative (21JPSI) was launched at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies in 2018. Under the leadership of Founding Director and HLS faculty member Adam Liff and with significant financial support from the Japan Foundation, 21JPSI aims to invigorate and expand research, teaching, and programming on contemporary Japanese politics, society, and international (esp. U.S.-Japan) relations, and to educate, raise awareness, and debate policy responses to the various political, social, and foreign policy challenges that Japan faces today. For more information about 21JPSI, please visit https://jpsi.indiana.edu/. To be informed about its future public events, please sign up for our event announcement mailing list.