Towards the Japanese Agentic State

The Agentic State vision is getting traction in Japan.

Takashi Asanuma — Senior Advisor to the Minister for Digital Transformation and former Vice-Minister for Digital Transformation at the Digital Agency of Japan — published an in-depth analysis of the vision paper and Ukraine’s roadmap through the lens of Japanese public administration.

His contribution explores how the twelve layers of our original vision paper map onto Japan’s existing foundations, from the My Number system to base registries and the government cloud, and why the shift is not about adding AI but about rebuilding government around understanding situations and acting — with humans retaining oversight and accountability.

A Japanese translation of the vision paper is under way, and the conversation is continuing — see also Asanuma’s essay on X: “エージェント型行政（Agentic State）の現在地”.

From Tallinn to Tokyo, the question is the same: how should government work when AI agents can act? Progress is happening fast to find out the answer.