The Japanese government urgently invests 10 billion yen to strengthen cybersecurity.

Japan’s cabinet approved an emergency ¥10 billion (about ₩85 billion) allocation from this fiscal year’s budget reserve to strengthen cybersecurity, with ¥4.1 billion for police “mobile cyber defense” access to attacked servers, ¥3.8 billion for Digital Agency system security, and ¥2 billion for AI-based vulnerability scanning of government and other systems. Digital Minister Sho Matsumoto said AI has already surfaced previously undetected flaws such as PHP vulnerabilities, underscoring pre-attack inspection. The move follows a string of incidents: the Personal Information Protection Commission said breaches since April exposed about 260 million personal records including duplicates; a July intrusion into the Government Solution Service internal network leaked data on more than 246,000 civil servants; Times Car lost 6.6 million user records in September; SoftBank unit IDC Frontier’s corporate cloud was hit by ransomware; and GMO Internet Group said last month hackers demanded a $1 million ransom. The spending signals Japan is prioritizing detection and response capacity over purely preventive controls as breach disclosures mount. Watch whether the AI scanning program expands beyond government systems and whether incident reporting accelerates across agencies and private operators.