Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community by Richard J. Samuels (review)

Special Duty provides, to date, the only comprehensive, single-volume study of the Japanese intelligence community available in English in decades. In this way, it would be the "go to" book on this subject by default, but Richard Samuels, the author of several other highly acclaimed works on Japan's evolving politics and military security policies, has far exceeded this low bar by producing a superb volume that stands out for its seamless integration of a wide range of Japanese- and English-language sources into a book that will surely be seen as the definitive study of this topic—in any language—for years to come.

Special Duty comes at an important time in Japan's evolution as a significant military "middle power" in the region and globally. At the time of this writing, the Japanese government is fine-tuning a soon-to-be-released new national security strategy document that will address active debates over the need to develop missile strike capability and other security enhancements in response to increasing threats. More and better intelligence capability would be central to these expanded missions, building further on significant improvements in Japanese intelligence capabilities and reform of intelligence institutions that are described robustly in Special Duty.

As one specialist has recently argued in her related work, one should no longer be speaking of Japan "rearming" but, rather, Japan "rearmed."¹ In a similar vein, Japan has long possessed highly advanced capabilities in areas such as signals intelligence (SIGINT) and, more recently, in satellite imagery (IMINT). In addition, however, important new institutions and capabilities have emerged only recently as part of what this reviewer has described elsewhere as "Japan's security renaissance."² It therefore is high time for a new volume on Japanese intelligence that both describes these new institutions and capabilities as well as explains how they came to be as they are.

Samuels introduces six traditional elements of intelligence—collection, analysis, communication, protection, covert action, and oversight—in his preface and first chapter, and then shows how each element has developed over time in sections of subsequent chapters. In this sense, he follows the conventions of the literature on intelligence studies. In addition, though, Special Duty offers an engaging narrative about how Japan initially rose to great-power status in the late nineteenth century, how it sought to address (successfully and unsuccessfully) the many challenges it faced in this new role, and how these challenges and Japan's responses to them have evolved to the present day. Themes from his earlier books, and his mastery of that material, are evident in this cohesive narrative.

Special Duty will appeal to at least three different audiences, not all of whom may necessarily want to read the full volume. Historians and students of imperial Japan and the growth and ultimate defeat of its expansionist ambitions will benefit from a concise summary of previous scholarship in English and Japanese on the intelligence piece of that story, combined with additional insights gleaned from interviews and documentary research. Scholars and practitioners of contemporary intelligence studies will value the framing of the first chapter of Special Duty within the broader literature of intelligence studies and the final two chapters that set out the current organization of Japan's intelligence community and the challenges it faces presently and will face in the near-term future in the context of deepening security threats. And scholars and students of Japan's evolving military security policies will find richness in the detailed description of the evolution of the intelligence aspect of Japanese security policy over multiple time periods, together with a degree of explanation for this evolution based on changes in Japan's shifting external security environment. Conveniently, Samuels provides a short summary of his main argument and take-away points in a short opening preface that then allows a reader to proceed directly to chapters of particular interest...