Reimagining Possibilities (2001–2013)

This chapter talks about how the world and, in particular, the regional balance of power made comprehensive intelligence reform imaginable for the first time. The immediate precipitant for this reimagining arrived after a conspicuous U.S. intelligence failure one sunny late summer morning in September 2001. This chapter has examined how the civilian and military institutions of the Japanese intelligence community were actively reimagined in the first decade of 21st century. The ruling party and the government all were motivated by shifts in the strategic environment to undertake extended deliberations regarding reform of the intelligence community. This chapter outlines how involved the ruling party and government are on rearranging its roles and missions, introducing and optimizing new technological capacity, and coming up with ways international collaboration might be enhanced.

Accommodating Defeat (1945–1991)

This chapter explores how the accommodation by Japanese leaders to U.S. power and to the public's widespread aversion to security affairs shaped and stunted the Japanese intelligence community during the Cold War and beyond. Japan's intelligence failures in the Asia-Pacific War contributed to the new strategic environment that, in turn, drove the subsequent transformation of each element of Japan's intelligence community. The subordination of Japanese foreign and security policy to U.S. priorities set strict limits on the shape, pace, and direction of intelligence reform. In the nearly half century from 1945 to 1991 during which Japan was a junior partner to its conqueror, Japan's degenerated intelligence community became an undersized, compromised, and organizationally handicapped operation. Analysts have called Japan's Cold War intelligence community “a stark transformation from the past” marked by sharp “discontinuity.”