Japan’s current National Security Council (kokka anzen hoshō kaigi 国家安全保障会議 ) was established in 2013 by Prime Minister Shinzō Abe. The new body, which replaced the old Security Council, was intended to serve as a coordinator between the many different ministries and agencies which are relevant to Japan’s security policies. It is currently headed up by Shōtarō Yachi, who had already served as a foreign policy advisor to Abe during his first run as prime minister (2006-2007), during which Abe had already unsuccessfully attempted to create “his own NSA”, predictably modeled after the United States’ NSA.

While it is not unusual for Japanese policymakers to take their cue from the US or to model themselves on American structures, why was the older Security Council deemed to be inadequate? What may have enabled Abe to go ahead with creating this new body may have been the Algerian hostage crisis of January 2013, which involved 17 Japanese nationals being taken as hostages, 10 of which did not make it out alive. Even though Abe interrupted his South Asian tour and returned to Japan in order to give his full attention to the hostage situation, the general perception at this time was that the government’s response was neither swift nor centralized enough.

So the perceptions surrounding the Algerian hostages crisis, and the perceived need for a swifter and better coordinated response to such crises, created extra pressures that leveled a path towards establishing the new body. But, perhaps more importantly and from Abe’s point of view, it fits into Abe’s longer term goals of attempting to facilitate a revision of the Constitution, and the conversion of the Self-Defense Forces into more conventional and traditional military forces (see Kitaoka, 2013).

Since its establishment, the NSC has not had to deal with any crisis as acute as the Algerian hostage crisis. Its staff of roughly 70 members, considerably smaller than the 300-head staff of its US counterpart, has been dealing with the coordination of responses to lesser crises, such as the December disappearance in Indonesian airspace of the AirAsia jet, the search for which involved Japanese navy ships.

In short, it remains to be seen whether the new National Security Council represents an improvement over its institutional predecessor.