On May 27, the upper house of the Japanese National Diet approved a law to establish a National Intelligence Council (NIC) and a National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) after the lower house approved the law on April 23. This initiative, led by Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae, comes as Japan faces what it perceives as a increasingly complex international environment facing modern threats that the current Japanese intelligence and defense apparatus is not equipped to handle.
That said, the new law is nothing radical or new of the Japanese intelligence community. The law is part of a long series of reforms and restructuring dating back to the end of World War II, where Japan constantly struggled to develop competent intelligence services while battling bureaucratic compartmentalization and public fears of militarism. The creation of the NIC and NIB is a step in the right direction and a natural result of the improvements made thus far in the Japanese intelligence community. However, for this law to bring meaningful and lasting change, Japan will need to do more than restructure and invest in intelligence capabilities where they have traditionally been weak.
The creation of the NIC and the NIB is the first of a a set of reforms in three stages to the Japanese intelligence community. The NIC is designed to serve as intelligence command centerchaired by the Prime Minister and composed of cabinet officials. The NIB would serve as its secretariatcomposed of civil servants who manage daily operations. The NIB would be given overall coordinating authority to unify the efforts of Japan’s disparate intelligence organizations and break down the bureaucratic silos and turf wars that characterize the intelligence community’s operations.
These developments reflect the establishment of the National Security Council and the National Security Secretariat of Japan in 2013, which made great strides toward strengthening cooperation among Japanese intelligence agencies and disseminating intelligence products to the Cabinet and the Prime Minister. It should be noted that the NSC and NSS are mainly political coordination unitsand their intelligence coordination efforts are only a stopgap measure until the Japanese government manages to separate political and intelligence functions. The creation of the NIB and NIC promises to enable such separation and lay the foundation for Japan to create a central intelligence agency.
However, the NIB and NIC will not be quick and definitive solutions to Japan’s bureaucratic struggles. The Ministry of Defense (MOD), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the National Police Agency (NPA) have all struggled persistently with problems of sharing intelligence and fighting for the competence and prestige of their respective intelligence agencies.
In fact, the NIB’s predecessor, the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO), was only created after a compromise ensured that the office’s director always be selected of a member of the National Police. The CIRO’s dominance over the NPA had become problematic to the extent that the CIRO, and by extension the NPA, had operational control over the MOD’s signals intelligence units, while the MOFA had operational control over the MOD’s human intelligence collection, generate resentment from the military and defense officials. The NSS, while contributing to inter-institutional cooperation, presented numerous MOFA officials in leadership positionswho also share a legacy of distrust and competition with the CIRO and the NPA. As a result of these lessons, both ruling and opposition parties in the National Diet stressed the importance of not reserving leadership of the new NIB to any particular agency.
Another major obstacle to implementing these new intelligence reforms is the public’s persistent fear of democratic backsliding and a innate distrust of militarism. After the end of World War II, Japanese policymakers found that attempts to strengthen military and intelligence capabilities were politically costly, with the Japanese public viewing such efforts as a slippery slope toward authoritarianism and militarism. This fear has evolved a strong priority given to governance and democratic standards.
Reforms to Japan’s intelligence community typically come shortly after intelligence failures, as international events and a changing world highlight the inadequacies of Japan’s military and intelligence in self-defense. Recent growing tensions between China and Japan provide such an opportunity for reform, but Japanese public opinion remains concerned.
The second stage of Japan’s comprehensive intelligence reform involves the adoption of a anti-spy lawraising concerns that the Japanese government could undermine the civil liberties of its citizens by conducting counterintelligence operations. Opponents of current intelligence reforms argue that insufficient guardrails are in place to ensure transparency and maintain oversight of intelligence agencies, which Japan has done often had difficulty with.
The third and final stage of Japanese intelligence reform touches on another persistent problem, that of intelligence collection and analysis. More specifically, MOFA plans to strengthen its collection capacities. While Japan is rated as competent when it came to collecting and exploiting signals, images, and open source intelligence, its HUMINT, counterintelligence, and covert action capabilities left much to be desired. Once again, these shortcomings are a natural consequence of the antimilitarist sentiment of Japanese public opinion.
HUMINT and Japan’s covert operations have been called passive and underdeveloped; at the same time, its inability to effectively practice counterintelligence gave Japan a reputation as a “the paradise of spies”. Such a propensity for intelligence leaks creates friction between Japan and its allies, as intelligence sharing is limited by fear of inappropriate investigation of authorizations and failure to protect state secrets. Although details remain scarce, the Japanese government has expressed its intention to reorganize legal frameworks and institutions at the very least support reinforced HUMINT and counter-espionage actions, while the future of covert actions is still under deliberation.
The creation of the NIB and NIC does not constitute a radical departure from the status quo, but rather another step in a natural progression of the Japanese intelligence community that spans several decades. The timing of this step, however, is most certainly linked to geopolitical demands, mainly great power competition between the United States and China. The implementation of major reforms in the Japanese military and intelligence community has led China to a considerable degree of dismay. Meanwhile, Washington has spent many years encouraging Japan to strengthen its capabilities to improve prospects for intelligence sharing and mutual defense cooperation. Additionally, with the Trump administration’s “America First” policy, Japan may be incentivized to strengthen its intelligence apparatus in order to reap the benefits of the alliance with the United States.
At the same time, such policies could lead Japan to choose to develop an “autonomous defense” capability. The risk of a U.S. abandonment or an agreement in which Beijing and Washington agree to jointly manage Asia requires Japan to weigh the costs of such a comprehensive change in its defense policy against the threats present in Japan’s geopolitical environment.
For now, with intelligence reforms, it appears that Takaichi has chosen to reject movement with China and is betting on a scenario in which Japan continues to grow with the United States or in which Japan remains alone.