Two days before Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced his resignation, Japan finally set about launching his flagship, the Digital Agency.

Due to the need to create such an organization and give it political capital that may disappear by the time a new leader is elected, the world’s third-largest economy left the project embarrassingly late.

Japan will pay the price of reputation for decades of foot drag. The more successful government agencies are in the country’s digitally hesitant bureaucracy and economic modernization, the more surprising the shortcomings it uncovers and the later its efforts will appear.

However, people near the Cabinet Office say that the urgency of the birth of a digital agency masks the fear of being passed on to Kan’s successor. Japan knows that both the private and public sectors are not ready for cyberwarfare, and strongly suspects that potential enemies, especially China, are ready for cyberwarfare.

It’s interesting that Ciaran Martin, the founder and former head of the UK’s National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC), joins the board of directors of a small Japan-based cyber defense consultant with the highest level of Japanese ears. To the moment. government. Other advisors of the company, Japan Cyber ​​DefenseIncludes former top officers in Japan and former Chief of Staff in Taiwan.

Martin’s addition as an adviser is in line with the government’s efforts to put together a complete cyber defense strategy by December and a changing perception of the risks facing the country, according to his new colleague. NS Ransomware attack The closure of America’s largest oil pipeline in May was only the latest in a global attack on critical infrastructure, said a Japanese cyber defense executive. But it was a particularly timely illustration of what the vulnerabilities of today’s nation would look like to the people around Suga, many of whom are likely to remain in the next administration.

These real-life shocks say that those who have seen the slow progress of Japan’s public and private sectors are now essential in building a coherent cyber defense strategy.

At some level, Japan appears to have moved to a new stage of heightened…