Japan’s Stifled Spying World
Richard Samuels, a professor at MIT and renowned Japan expert, has written the definitive history of Japan’s intelligence community — or lack thereof. In covering the origins and expansion of a modern intelligence capacity, he culminates in the tactical triumph of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But America’s “day of infamy” proved a strategic disaster for Showa Japan, leading Japanese planners to think they could defeat the US. After surrender in 1945, the shadow of militarism never receded from the view of Japanese public opinion, which, together with the structural dependency on the US, held the growth of intelligence in check throughout the Cold War.
Samuels enlivens the byzantine account of intelligence bureaucracy with dramatic spy stories, such as of Soviet legend Richard Sorge in the 1940s and spymaster Stanislas Levchenko in the 1970s, for whom Japan was “spy heaven.” After the Cold War, political leaders tried to reform the intelligence infrastructure and address the root “pathology” of stovepiping (not unique to Japan, as Samuels notes). But not until Shinzo Abe’s leadership in 2012 did a systematic “re-engineering” of how espionage and intelligence are done finally take form — and remains a work in progress. Anyone interested in intelligence in Asia and Japanese security policy will want Samuels’ readable and deeply researched book on her shelf.
Samuels enlivens the account of intelligence bureaucracy with dramatic spy stories.