One of the recent controversial issues related to the Japan's Development Cooperation Charter (DCC)is “aid securitization”. The 2015 Charter is the first charter which allowed the armed forces or members of the armed forces in recipient countries to be involved in development cooperation if they are for non-military purposes. While most of the academic articles on DCC discuss the background of its establishment and its amendments, analyze their characteristics and the process of the amendments, or compare the past charters (1992, 2003, 2015), very few focus on the implementation of them, particularly in the context of aid securitization. This paper analyzes how the new clause on armed forces of the 2015 Charter mentioned above had been applied for projects since 2015. The research target is the Development Project Accountability Committee (DPAC) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which was established in 2011 consisting of several independent experts on development cooperation from academia, NGOs, business societies and journalism to ensure the accountability of the Japanese ODA. The projects involving the armed forces or members of the armed forces are reported to DPAC regularly to discuss whether they are for non-military purposes in transparent manner.

This paper reveals that more than 130 projects had involved armed forces or members of armed forces in recipient countries since 2015 and the Japanese government monitors each project to check their involvement and to ensure the projects not to be implemented for military purposes. On the other hands, two challenges are identified. One is the monitoring term, whether present “one year” and “three years” after the project are enough timing to fulfill this clause of the charter. The other is the “grey zone” between military purposes and non-military purposes. Even in the projects which do not involve armed forces or members of armed forces, hot discussion has been made over the grey zone at DPAC. Independent monitoring other than the governmental one should be necessary to check aid securitization and to advocate for the next amendment of the charter.