Defence Japan's intelligence challenges

Tokyo's dark record from World War Two was always a consideration. In the 1930s and '40s, Japan had famously infiltrated agents across Asia in advance of their conquering forces. During wartime, anti-spying paranoia against everything foreign at home, even against people who spoke a foreign language in the war's closing years, created an escalating climate of fear. It was a legacy that post-war Japanese voters were reluctant to see revised, fearing a return to militarism, neighbourhood informants, and other mass spying against the population. Under the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan made significant progress in reforming foreign intelligence collection and slowly expanded HUMINT (human intelligence gathering) abroad. But domestic "counterintelligence," said Samuels, "was a sort of stepchild to many of these reforms." For this reason, since the 1950s, counterespionage investigations have been conducted not by a powerful agency, such as the FBI or Britain's MI-5, but by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Its Public Security Bureau (PSB) can be effective but lacks sufficient human resources, according to a former senior Japanese intelligence official interviewed in Tokyo by SpyTalk, asking for anonymity in exchange for talking freely about such sensitive matters.

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