Japan set to launch intelligence bureau in Takaichi's security push

By Alastair Gale

 

Japan is set to launch a new National Intelligence Bureau to bring together its fragmented system of collecting and analyzing information related to national security and public safety, marking a milestone in Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s efforts to make the nation more resilient to internal and external threats.

 

The bureau, headed by veteran police official Kazuya Hara, 58, will be responsible for coordinating intelligence gathering and distilling it for a new National Intelligence Council headed by Takaichi and staffed by other cabinet members. Both new entities are set to be officially launched on Friday.

 

For decades, an array of organizations linked to the National Police Agency and government ministries have been relied on to provide intelligence to political leaders with little oversight or coordination. The new bureau is designed to manage the same channels of information and ensure they collectively gather specific intelligence sought by the council.

 

 

“Protecting Japan’s national interests requires the timely collection and high-quality analysis of information, high-level integration of that information, and sophisticated, well-judged decision-making,” Takaichi, a security hawk, said in a speech to parliament earlier this year.

 

Takaichi has cited challenges posed by China, Russia and North Korea to explain why Japan needs to better defend itself from outside forces. Cybersecurity is one area in which Japan is trying to improve its resilience after a series of high-profile attacks last year.

 

The latest intelligence reforms are part of a series of legal changes Takaichi is seeking to make related to national and economic security. In June, her administration launched an equivalent to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, or CFIUS, in an effort to broaden and intensify reviews of investment from overseas.

 

Takaichi’s other goals include enacting anti-espionage legislation and creating a foreign intelligence agency similar to the Central Intelligence Agency in the US that can collect intelligence overseas.

 

The lack of anti-espionage legislation makes it hard for Japan to catch spies and exchange them with other countries that have detained Japanese citizens accused of spying. Over the last decade or so, China has detained more than a dozen Japanese nationals on espionage or national security-related allegations, according to the Foreign Ministry.

 

The New York Times recently reported that dozens of Russian spies expelled from European countries had relocated to Japan.

 

A major reason why Japan lags many other developed nations in its intelligence capabilities relates to the country’s militaristic past. Before and during World War II, Japan had highly effective domestic and foreign intelligence gathering operations run by special police divisions known as Tokko and Kempeitai. Their aggressive methods, including the use of violence, made them widely loathed by the public. 

 

Both were disbanded after the war when Japan embraced democracy and civil rights. Since then, successive governments have been wary of tightening monitoring of the population. In 1985, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party failed to pass legislation barring the detection and collection of state secrets because of concerns about personal rights and freedoms.

 

Left-of-center opposition parties have opposed the latest move to create the intelligence bureau, arguing that it could infringe on personal privacy and increase government power without democratic oversight.