Tokyo's sectionalist bureaucracy is the biggest obstacle to creating a centralized national security apparatus, said Yuriko Koike, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's national security adviser.

Koike, 54, named one of Abe's five special policy advisers at the Sept. 26 launch of his Cabinet, set up a panel of experts last week to discuss creation of a national security body.

"If you ask me what is the biggest obstacle (to creating such a regime), it would be the walls surrounding each ministry," Koike said in a recent interview with The Japan Times.