“In my position, it would be most unwise.” His real-world counterparts are said to be more lax. “I never travel in the streets of Tokyo,” Mr Tanaka tells Mr Bond from his office in an underground railway. Japanese officials admit that their would-be hackers are hobbled by strict privacy laws that limit what they can do on domestic networks, and by self-imposed constraints on offensive action.Įspionage, in any case, requires secrecy. But most of that is for parrying intrusions from China and North Korea, rather than actively stealing secrets.
Cyber-security spending jumped by over a third between 20, to 85bn yen ($770m), and the number of cyber-warriors will grow from 150 at present to 500 in five years. Nor is it easy for Japan to hack phones and computers. “But you don’t get good intelligence”, he points out, “unless you get them close.” Its armed forces have submarines, ships and planes that are good at hoovering up Chinese and North Korean radar and other signals, says the former American official. In theory, tech-savvy Japan should be better of when it comes to electronic espionage.
Depressingly, some see that as an encouraging sign. Since 2015 nine Japanese nationals have been arrested in China for espionage. One retired officer tells Mr Samuels that too little has changed: “We do, but not a lot of it, and not as covert action.” And perhaps not all that well. But in 2015 Shinzo Abe, Mr Koizumi’s successor, rejected his own party’s plans to create a “Japanese-style CIA”. According to Mr Samuels, Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister of the day, told his colleagues in 2005 that Japan had “destroyed its intelligence capabilities” and needed more “ninjas”. Police have stymied reform by leaking proposals, and their bureaucratic skirmishing with diplomats and soldiers has, at times, been crippling.Ī related problem is that politicians’ and bureaucrats’ risk-aversion does not lend itself to the messy business of old-fashioned human intelligence. Cops have always led the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO), the main intelligence agency, and held important jobs in almost all others. Part of the problem is that the police run the show. But despite growing threats, change has been slow. When the long-serving national security adviser retires on September 13th, the country’s top spy chief will replace him. Japan now boasts first-rate spy satellites. As part of the same process of pacification, Japanese intelligence was shrunk, divided into squabbling units and focused narrowly on communists at home and trade secrets abroad. The American occupiers forced Japan to disband its army and renounce war. But that came to an end with Japan’s defeat in the second world war. The history of Japanese espionage is filled with derring-do, from sabotage in Tsarist Russia to stealing secrets in Latin America. In a new book-“ Special Duty: A History of the Japanese Intelligence Community”-Richard Samuels, a professor at MIT, explains why that is so. When Banyan asked a former American intelligence official for his judgment on Japan’s spies, the answer was simple: “pretty woeful”. In reality, Mr Tanaka would scarcely have a licence to snoop, let alone kill. Mr Tanaka is a suave, Suntory-sipping spook who runs a ninja school in a remote castle, and helps Mr Bond storm the bad guy’s volcano lair. “For a European, you are exceptionally cultivated,” enthuses Tiger Tanaka, a Japanese spymaster. But on a visit to Japan in 1967, in “You Only Live Twice”, he opts for sake-served at 98.4☏ (36.9☌). It is rare for James Bond to pass up a martini.
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