H.E. Mr. Fujii Hisayuki, State Minister for Foreign Affairs, H.E. Ambassador Kanehara Nobukatsu, Executive Director of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, Ladies and Gentlemen, konnichiwa.
Let me begin by expressing my gratitude to the Sasakawa Peace Foundation for convening this Symposium. For many years, this institution has served as a bridge between academic, policy, and diplomatic communities, advancing Japan’s global thought leadership on international peace and security.
It is a special pleasure to speak with you today and reflect on Japan’s longstanding commitment to the United Nations and peace operations—and especially on the past decade of partnership in capacity-building and training.
Japan, as you just heard, is the third-largest financial contributor to the United Nations, including to peacekeeping and special political missions. It is also the largest voluntary donor to my department, the Department of Operational Support. Arigato gozaimasu. These contributions, in both resources and in principle, have made Japan an indispensable partner of the United Nations.
The year 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the United Nations. As we look back on eight decades of multilateral engagement, this is also an opportunity to look ahead—to ask how we can strengthen the institutions of peace, adapt our tools to the current geopolitical environment, and build resilient partnerships for the future.
The maintenance of international peace and security, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, remains our shared mandate. But it is not the UN Secretariat alone that bears this responsibility. It also belongs to other bodies of the Organization, like the Security Council; to Member States of the United Nations and their permanent missions in New York; to policymakers in national capitals; and to academic institutions and think tanks, like Sasakawa, which shape the ideas and networks through which global cooperation takes form. Multilateralism must be continually renewed, through adaption, innovation, and principled commitment.
Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, peace operations have stood as one of its most visible and vital interventions. While the principles that underpin them remain constant—namely the pursuit of peace, the protection of civilians, and support for political solutions—the world around us has changed dramatically.
Today, we are seeing the increasingly fraught challenging use of emerging technologies, the rise of powerful non-state armed groups, and the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation. Peacekeepers are facing asymmetric threats, including the use of improvised explosive devices that place their lives and those of civilians at even greater risk. And in many settings, we are witnessing a dangerous erosion of consensus around the use of multilateral tools to resolve conflict.
These dynamics not only endanger human life and destabilise entire regions, but also generate ripple effects across the globe. For Japan, which relies on the Middle East for over 90 percent of its crude oil, such instability is a reminder that conflicts, far beyond one’s borders, can have immediate and direct implications at home.
These crises reveal a deeper reality: in today’s interconnected world, no country can remain unaffected. They also reaffirm the urgent need for effective, credible multilateral action, and for sustained investment in partnerships that can meet the complexity of our current peace and security challenges.
And yet, amidst these mounting global challenges, there are stories of resilience and recovery that reaffirm what UN Peacekeeping, when properly supported and resourced, can achieve.
Over the past seven decades, peace operations have shepherded political transitions, protected civilians, strengthened national institutions, and laid the groundwork for recovery and development.
More than 100,000 military and police and civilian personnel from 119 countries currently serve in 11 peacekeeping missions under the UN flag. Together, they provide a vital anchor of security in some of the world’s most volatile environments.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence of peacekeeping’s impact lies in the places we no longer read about in the headlines. Countries that were once associated with war, unrest, and humanitarian crises and that have transitioned towards stability, democracy, and development. Their absence from the news cycles, in many ways, is the quiet success story of UN peacekeeping.
Take Timor-Leste, for example, where I had the honour of serving as Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT). The UN was mandated to support the government in consolidating stability, enhancing democratic governance, and facilitating political dialogue. Our efforts included supporting elections, building governance and security capacity, advancing human rights, and completing investigations into past violations.
The peaceful presidential and parliamentary elections of 2007 and 2012, conducted with UN support, were a testament not only to the resilience of the Timorese people, but also to what coordinated international assistance can achieve. This success was made possible through the unified support of the Security Council and the contributions of Member States, particularly Japan.
Japan played a vital role in Timor-Leste’s peace and recovery. Engineers from the Japanese Ground Self-Defence Force rebuilt critical infrastructure—roads and bridges still referred to today as “Japanese roads” and “Japanese bridges.” My predecessor Mr. Sukehiro Hasegawa, and many Japanese UN officials, ambassadors, experts, and diplomats, such as my friend Iwao Kitahara, who is here with us today, also contributed to institution-building, education, and police reform, leaving behind a legacy that extended well beyond the duration of the mission.
Indeed, what follows after a mission ends goes largely unnoticed, though it may be its most important outcome. Since the closure of UNMIT in 2012, Timor-Leste has continued to hold peaceful national and presidential elections in 2017, 2018, 2022 and 2023—without the presence of a UN mission. This is the long arc of peacekeeping: not just the moment of intervention, but the enduring transformation that follows.
Cambodia offers another powerful example. Following years of devastating conflict, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) was deployed to help restore peace, supervise free elections, and establish administrative structures for national stability. Like in Timor-Leste, this was achieved with Japan’s support. Japanese peacekeepers served as military engineers, electoral observers, and civilian police officers. They did so under the capable leadership of Mr. Yasushi Akashi, then Chief of Mission of UNTAC, who I consider my own ‘Sensei’ in peacekeeping.
Today, Cambodia no longer hosts peacekeepers: it contributes them, including through the UN Secretariat’s largest uniformed peacekeeping capacity-development and operational support initiative, the Triangular Partnership Programme.
Finally, in Namibia, the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) supported the country’s path to independence, overseeing free and fair elections in 1989 and supporting the creation of a new national government. Namibia had been a particular concern of the UN since its earliest days in 1946, following a long and difficult history of colonial rule under Germany and South Africa. With the support of UNTAG, Namibia achieved a peaceful transition to independence in March 1990.
Today, Namibia is not only a stable democracy but also an active UN Member. In September 2024, it co-facilitated the drafting of the Pact for the Future with Germany, a formal colonial power—an illustration that peacekeeping is not just a response to crisis, but a foundation for meaningful international cooperation.
What, then, can we take away from these three peacekeeping mission examples?
First, peacekeeping must not be seen as a standalone intervention. Peace operations are among the United Nation’s most time-tested tools that contribute to the UN’s effectiveness. They go beyond troop deployment: they build the institutional and social foundations that enable peace to take root, long after the mission has concluded. As Namibia’s experience reminds us, this kind of transformation requires time, commitment and patience. It’s the reason peacekeeping success should be assessed in the long term.
Second, peacekeeping is made possible by Member States and sustained through partnerships. Multilateral cooperation is not just a feature of UN peacekeeping—it is its backbone. These partnerships foster mutual learning, strengthen capacities, and ensure that countries move forward together, leaving no one behind.
Among the Member States that have helped advance peacekeeping over the years, Japan stands out as a model of active engagement and long-term commitment.
Since the enactment of its International Peace Cooperation Law and its first deployment to UN peacekeeping in 1992, Japan has consistently translated policy into practice, upholding the highest standards of conduct and professionalism. In over three decades of participation, Japanese peacekeepers have maintained a remarkable record of zero misconduct, including zero cases of sexual exploitation and abuse—a standard that reflect Japan’s ethical approach to international engagement. Thank you again.
Japanese military officers serve with distinction in the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), contributing to efforts to support the peace process, protect civilians, facilitate humanitarian assistance, and report on human rights violations.
At UN Headquarters in New York, Japanese officers also serve in a variety of functions, including in the Department of Peace Operations, which manages and directs peacekeeping missions; in the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, responsible for monitoring political developments and overseeing special political missions; and in my own Department, where we work to ensure that peacekeepers around the world are properly deployed, properly equipped, and properly sustained. We provide the rations, fuel, accommodations, technology and medical support necessary to deliver on their mandates. In all this, Japan’s contributions have been indispensable.
Over the past decade, Japan has also been the driving force behind one of the UN Secretariat’s most impactful capacity-building initiatives: the Triangular Partnership Programme (TPP). Launched following former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s pledge at the 2014 UN Leaders’ Summit on Peacekeeping, the TPP originally focused as you heard on providing heavy engineering training in East Africa. It has since expanded to include not just engineering, but also medical, C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers (C4), Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR)) and camp security technologies training, as well as telemedicine support, all delivered globally.
Crucially, the Programme has not stood still. It has continually evolved to meet new peacekeeping needs, including through training on counter-improvised explosive devices (C-IED) and environmental management. It has also built a strong training-of-trainers culture, ensuring that its materials can be adapted and expanded by Member States to meet their own national needs.
In just ten years, including two years of the coronavirus pandemic, Japan’s contributions through the TPP have helped train 30,000 individuals deployed to United Nations and African Union peace operations. The programme received the Secretary-General’s award for innovation for its Telemedicine Project, which enhances access to medical care in high-risk, remote areas. And it continues to thrive thanks to Japan’s expert contributions, particularly through the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force, whose personnel support both course delivery and programme operations.
The impact of this training is measurable. In 2018, Viet Nam became the first Southeast Asian country to host TPP engineering training courses. Soon thereafter, it deployed an engineering unit of 10 TPP-trained personnel to the UN mission in Abyei—its first engineering contingent in any peacekeeping operation. I had an opportunity to visit UNISFA where the Vietnamese contingent was deployed in 2023 and meet with the Vietnamese contingent. I was deeply impressed by their preparedness and pleased to hear reports that their performance had improved following the TPP training.
This is the lasting value of the TPP: while many training programmes report on immediate output, such as the number of courses delivered or individuals trained, the TPP is increasingly focusing on long-term impact. We are expanding our efforts to follow up with trainees, Troop Contributing Countries, and field missions who receive our graduates to better understand the long-term effects and benefits of TPP training.
You will hear more about this from Mr. Ito shortly during the second part led by Director General Morikawa, but I wanted to personally share the Viet Nam example, because it illustrates the tangible value of the Triangular Partnership Programme—an initiative made possible thanks to Japan’s steadfast support and leadership in peacekeeping.
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, experiences like these show us what is possible when peacekeeping is not static. It evolves, and must continue to evolve, to remain effective in a rapidly changing world. They also prompt a larger question: how do we take these lessons forward?
Just over a month ago, the United Nations, Member States, and peacekeeping partners gathered in Berlin for the 2025 Peacekeeping Ministerial. It was a pivotal moment for reaffirming collective support for peace operations as a cornerstone of multilateralism.
More than 1,000 participants from 135 Member States and 11 regional and international organisations came together to commit to a stronger, more agile, and responsive peacekeeping system.
Japan, which co-chaired the preparatory meeting in Montevideo, played a leading role. Represented in Berlin by your own State Minister, present here today, Foreign Affairs, His Excellency Mr. Fujii, Japan joined other Member States in pledging concrete support across four key areas: firstly, uniformed capabilities; secondly training, capacity building, and partnerships; third, safety and security of peacekeepers; and finally, technology.
These pledges form the building blocks for a more resilient, innovative, inclusive, and impactful peacekeeping system. But they must also be backed by sustained financing.
The question, then, will become how to translate these ambitious goals into tangible outcomes on the ground. The answer lies in partnerships and effective capacity building.
Japan’s leadership continues to stand out in this regard. Through initiatives like the TPP, which I discussed earlier, Japan has helped foster a dynamic ecosystem for training and operational preparedness. We are pleased that Japan renewed its support to the TPP in Berlin, helping ensure its continued expansion and evolution in response to new peacekeeping challenges.
Peacekeeper safety and security remain central to our agenda. Alongside the TPP, we also work through the UN Mine Action Service and the Division of Healthcare Management and Occupational Safety and Health of my department to support peacekeepers before and during deployment to protect their physical and mental well-being.
This includes the rollout of basic and advanced first aid training to Troop Contributing Countries, the implementation of quality healthcare standards, and the development of new materials for our Field Medical Assistants Course. The impact is notable: last October, one course graduate saved the life of a fellow peacekeeper who had been shot by Al-Shabab in Somalia. This is one among countless examples of how training investments have a direct impact on the safety of peacekeepers on the ground.
We also continue to upgrade our Level I and Level II hospitals in high-risk missions and improve the medical rescue chain through innovative solutions, such as Telemedicine.
These efforts demonstrate a broader point: as the demands of peacekeeping shift, so too must the UN’s ability to support Member States.
But innovation cannot be driven by the UN alone. It is through international cooperation, with Member States like Japan, that we can shape the peacekeeping of tomorrow.
In the spirit of the Osaka EXPO, where Japan is inviting the world to innovate, empower, connect, I believe we must similarly come together to reimagine the future of peacekeeping—one that saves lives, supports communities, and sustains peace.
On this note, let me conclude by reflecting on the longstanding partnership between Japan and the United Nations—a partnership that has endured for over seven decades. In the past ten years, this collaboration has taken on new forms, such as the TPP. These types of partnerships demonstrate that dialogue and trust lead to real, measurable impact.
Today, more than ever, these partnerships must be protected, strengthened and expanded.
The United Nations’ upcoming 80th anniversary, and the 10th anniversary of the establishment of TPP, offers a moment for reflection—a chance to renew and revitalise peacekeeping, and to recommit to the UN Charter’s principles of peace, security, development, rule of law, and respect for human rights. None of this can be achieved alone. It must be done in concert with Member States and the communities that we serve.
I therefore wish to thank the people and Government of Japan for their enduring contributions to the cause of international peace and security, and to thank you all, for the honour of addressing you today.
Arigato gozaimasu.
