Intelligence Elsewhere: Spies and Espionage Outside the Anglosphere

10 A Reconstruction of Japanese Intelligence: Issues and Prospects

C H A P T E R 1 0 A Reconstruction of Japanese Intelligence Issues and Prospects Ken Kotani O n April 4, 2009, the Japanese government mistakenly announced that North Korea had launched a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile. The false news was distributed around the world. This incident does not mean that Japan always has a tendency to cry wolf, but it is true that Japanese intelligence has been much more vulnerable to these types of incidents compared with other countries. After World War II, Japan failed to build an overseas intelligence apparatus or develop an institutionalized intelligence community, something regarded as an imperative for modern states in developing and building a proper security and foreign policy. Instead of developing these tools, successive Japanese governments have been able to rely on US intelligence gathering, a situation that is fostered and maintained in the United States–Japan Alliance. Another factor that made the development of an intelligence community in Japan problematic was the country’s pacifist Constitution, specifically its prohibition of overseas military operations. These factors resulted in a vulnerable and late-developing intelligence function within the Japanese government. A number of times during the Cold War, the Japanese government did actually try to establish intelligence service and antiespionage laws, but the plans usually faced strong opposition from liberal public opinion and bureaucratic / 181 / 182 / Ken Kotani sectionalism in Kasumigaseki (the administrative district of Tokyo), and all attempts eventually failed. Following the Cold War, the government was shocked enough by the North Korean ballistic missile test, which was fired over Japan in August 1998, to restart a discussion of Japanese intelligence reform, which continues to this day. This chapter focuses on Japanese bureaucratic and cultural issues influencing the country’s intelligence development by reviewing a number of different reform discussions after World War II. A Brief History from World War II to the Cold War During World War II Japan had a strong intelligence apparatus and antiespionage laws. Intelligence was managed by intelligence sections of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy. They were able to collect a significant amount of foreign intelligence through their human networks in Siberia, Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia, and to also intercept and break some diplomatic and military signals traffic of the United States, the United Kingdom , the Soviet Union, and China.1 Although the intelligence agencies could collect valuable intelligence, the operations staffs sometimes neglected the fruits of this intelligence gathering, which resulted in a number of disastrous defeats, like the Battle of Midway in 1942 and the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944. The estrangement of operations staffs from intelligence was mainly caused by long-standing Japanese bureaucratic bias, which gave policy and operations much higher status than intelligence, a bias that carried over in postwar Japanese bureaucracy. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the intelligence organizations were dismantled by the Allies. In those dark days of Japanese defeat and surrender , a rumor spread that officers who had been engaged in intelligence work would be sentenced to life imprisonment; and due to the rumor, the intelligence officers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy destroyed most of their secret documents and have kept their silence since the end of war.2 This systematic destruction of Japanese intelligence caused a discontinuity between prewar and postwar intelligence that stood in sharp contrast to the Allied support of General Reinhardt Gehlen’s organization in West Germany. In the early part of the 1950s, Japan tried to set up a new intelligence body starting from scratch, under the auspices of the then–prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida; the chief cabinet secretary, Taketora Ogata; and Jun Murai, chief of the security section of the National Police Agency. These men were intent on establishing for Japan a central intelligence machinery similar to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).3 They understood that the lack of central intelligence machinery in the Japanese government during the war caused serious bureaucratic infighting about information sharing between the Imperial Japanese Army, Imperial Japanese Navy, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, the press bitterly opposed the plan, and Yoshida was obliged to A Reconstruction of Japanese Intelligence / 183 compromise, establishing the Research Center (later, the Cabinet Intelligence Research Office) in the Cabinet Office headed by Murai in April 1952.4 The center was given a staff of...