WIREDGOV

Japan has had enough of being a ‘spy paradise’: lacking key elements of intelligence capability and enduring society-wide vulnerability to foreign espionage and influence.

Japan’s intelligence reform is significant on three levels. It reveals how Japan’s approach to security is becoming more self-reliant and autonomous. It will facilitate diversification of Japan’s partnerships, reducing dependence on the US-Japan alliance. Perhaps the most historically important aspect will be how it catalyses Japanese society’s readiness to reconcile the imperative of national security with longstanding hesitation about granting their government special powers to deliver it.

The first of the reform’s three stages is well under way with the law to establish a National Intelligence Council (NIC) as the command centre for intelligence activities and a National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) passing the Upper House on 27 May 2026 with the support of opposition parties (the ruling LDP lacking an upper house majority). This law imposes a hierarchy on relationships among government institutions responsible for direction, collection, assessment and analysis by strengthening centralisation and elevating this function in the bureaucratic hierarchy, placing the new bureau on par with the National Security Secretariat.

Enacting an ‘anti-spy’ law is the second stage (planned for later in 2026), and will be more contentious. Counter-espionage and counter-subversion will operate within Japanese society so have to respect concerns that intelligence and security action could be abused for political advantage. Foreshadowing this, according to Japan’s national broadcaster NHK, ‘Committees in both the Lower and Upper houses have passed a supplementary resolution to ensure personal information and privacy are not unnecessarily infringed. It also states that the government should not gather information in a way that undermines political neutrality.’

Some of the threats targeted by the new law are mediated through the expanding and somewhat borderless digital domain, with hostile foreign influence using social media to target the Japanese population on a cognitive level. Every democracy wrestles with the legitimacy of links connecting domestic dissent and foreign sources of inspiration. Japan has to do it with a population grown accustomed to liberties enjoyed under state institutions that jettisoned the practice of countering ‘dangerous thought’ several decades ago.

Despite public protests against the reform, the case for tighter counter-espionage legislation will be sufficient to pass some version of this legislation. The current system has too many vulnerabilities. As pointed out by one expert, Japan's 2014 Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, ‘only applies to information that has been actively designated as secret by a government agency. It does not criminalise acting as a clandestine agent for a foreign power or accepting payment from a foreign intelligence service.’ In addition to emerging challenges like foreign influence noted above, there are mounting concerns about electoral interference and transnational repression that would require new legislation anyway. Japan’s shift to accept larger numbers of foreign resident workers also expands the task of monitoring threats from groups or individuals connected to conflicts going on outside Japan.

Japan’s proximity to China, Russia and DPRK place it in an advantageous position to collect information that would benefit the UK’s own situation awareness

The third stage of creating a fully-fledged foreign intelligence service is expected to happen in 2027. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs collects information overseas, but diplomats are forbidden from seeking material in the way intelligence services conventionally would, in other words, recruiting agents through a covert approach. Japan’s network of Defence Attaches has grown but lack the legislative framework enabling their full potential. With ‘economic security’ becoming a more salient aspect of geopolitical competition impinging on national security, there is naturally a need for more information coming from the commercial world and financial institutions, which is hard to gather from a desk in Tokyo.

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