Where is Japan's MI6?

Why one of the richest nations on earth remains shy about intelligence

Jun 20, 2025

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This week, news broke that Britain will get its first-ever female head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. Blaise Metreweli will take over in the autumn from the current MI6 chief - a man bearing the almost Bond-like name of Sir Richard Moore.

No doubt there will pangs of envy in Japan, where the development of a robust overseas intelligence agency has been on the wish-list of foreign-policy hawks for many years now.

So why doesn’t Japan have one? East Asia is a rough neighbourhood and Japan has the money to spend big on this if it really wants to.

The answer lies in Japan’s mixed modern relationship with the worlds of surveillance and espionage: promising beginnings followed by transformation into the handmaiden of authoritarianism in the mid-20th century, and finally a steady but highly controversial recovery between 1945 and the present day.

It’s a fascinating topic and there’s so much to say about it that I’m going to confine myself here to the story as it played out up to 1945. In Part II, next week, I’ll bring you up to the present day.

Fans of medieval Japanese history will already know about the shinobi. The word comes from a Japanese verb meaning ‘to act stealthily.’ It describes covert agents whose job it was to engage in activities including espionage, sabotage and assassination. They were basically what we call ‘ninjas.’ Most were men but female shinobi were sometimes employed to infiltrate enemy families as maids or courtesans, or to serve as messengers.

After Japan’s unification in 1600, the ruling Tokugawa shogunate employed spies to keep an eye on their former rivals - after all, feudal lords (daimyō) who had submitted to the Tokugawa clan only after defeat in battle could pretty much be counted on to bear lasting animosity towards Japan’s new regime. Some of these operatives were known as oniwaban or ‘garden guards’: spies for the shogunate who criss-crossed Japan posing as gardeners, merchants and travellers.

Others in Tokugawa employ kept their eyes on the Dutch at Nagasaki. Their job was to make sure that the only Westerners with access to Japan behaved themselves. They also sought out information about the outside world, which might be useful to the shogunate.

Hattori Hanzō (1542 - 1597) was a loyal servant of the Tokugawa clan and leader of a celebrated group of shinobi from Iga Province

In 1853, Japan’s intelligence operatives were shown up in the most dramatic way. They had a decent working knowledge of what was going inside Japan, but the rest of the world was far more of a mystery to them than it should have been.

In the summer of that year, American Commodore Matthew C. Perry suddenly appeared off Japan’s coast bearing a letter from his President and threatening consequences if the country didn’t open its doors. It suddenly became clear just how much Japan’s rulers didn’t understand about the world’s major players, the global economy and the kind of steam and weapons technology that was on full display in the Perry flotilla.

To their credit, within a little over a decade the Japanese had realised how dangerous this world was and - following a civil war and a change of leadership - had begun to modernize at a furious pace.

Intelligence-gathering abroad was largely left, at first, to bands of ultra-nationalist gangsters known as tairiku rōnin - ‘continental adventurers,’ motivated by an out-sized patriotism to meddle in the affairs of countries like China and Korea, to the imagined benefit of Japan.

‘Imagined’ is key here: only in the weakest sense were these adventurers directly doing the bidding of politicians and bureaucrats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs back home. This was useful for the maintaining of plausible deniability, but it helped to foster a culture in which intelligence and military operatives felt that once they went beyond Japan’s borders they could take a looser approach to the chain of command. This would become disastrous for Japan in the 1930s.

Gangsters belonging to paramilitary groups including the Gen’yōsha (Dark Ocean Society) and the Kokuryūkai (Black Dragon Society) were later credited with an ambitious range of operations. They helped to provoke an uprising in Korea in 1884, which the Japanese used as a pretext for military intervention. They orchestrated a pro-Japan coup in 1895, during the course of which the Korean Queen was assassinated. And they supported Chinese revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen, in hopes of weakening China’s Qing dynasty.

Two of Japan’s best-known ‘continental adventurers’, Tōyama Mitsuru (middle) and Uchida Ryōhei (right) - pictured, somewhat incongruously, with the religious leader and pacifist Onisaburō Deguchi

Military intelligence of a more professional sort got going during the first decade of the twentieth century. Human intelligence - HUMINT - took the form of people like Army College graduate Ishimitsu Makiyo, who opened a laundrette in Russian-occupied Harbin, in Manchuria. There he listened in as Russian soldiers engaged in some relaxed and no doubt highly-revealing banter. Ishimitsu followed this up by creating a photo studio, under cover of whose multiple branches he and his employees took a great many useful pictures along the strategically important Russian-owned Eastern Chinese Railway.

Signals intelligence developed around the same time. Officers of the Imperial Navy managed to break Russian codes during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, dramatically reducing the risk of surprise attacks on Japanese shipping. But even as technology improved and operations became more professional - thanks in part to co-operation with Great Britain around the time of the First World War - intelligence officers continued to find themselves the poor relation within the military. They were regarded as mere messenger-boys, doing the sort of job that anyone could do - including the sick and the cowardly.

Exceptions to this unflattering reputation were made for ‘special duty units,’ built around talented individuals and charged with conducting operations outside the usual channels of military command and oversight. One was formed around Ishimitsu and for a time tried to help out anti-Bolshevik forces in Russia’s far east.

As Sino-Japanese relations deteriorated during the 1920s and early 1930s, agents were activated across the mainland, seeking information and ways of undermining the Republican leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. More than a few unsuspecting marks got caught in hotel honey-traps set by women known by names like Miss Yuriko and Miss Haruko.

One of Japan’s most celebrated female operatives was Kawashima Yoshiko: a Qing-dynasty princess who was raised in Japan after the 1911 Chinese Revolution and ended up leading counter-insurgency efforts in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. She was hailed in Japan as the ‘Joan of Arc of Manchuria.’

Kawashima Yoshiko, portrayed by Hong Kong actress Anita Mui in the 1990 biopic The Last Princess of Manchuria.

In Europe, Japanese agents were active in Paris and Berlin during the interwar years. Polish cryptographers were employed to help break codes used by the Soviet Union’s Red Army. And British parliamentarians and retired military officers were persuaded to take bribes in return for information and assistance.

America was a harder target, but by 1938 the Japanese had listening ships positioned off the US coast. Graduates of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Intelligence Bureau meanwhile enrolled as language students at several US universities, from where they ran networks of US informants.

Perhaps the most famous piece of tradecraft came from a man who had no training or experience at all as a field agent. Yoshikawa Takeo spent a few weeks in 1941 touring around the Hawaiian island of Oahu: in a taxi cab, by boat and on one occasion in an airplane. He noted the movements of American ships in and out of Pearl Harbor, tested the depth of the water at key locations and attended a ‘Gala Day’ at Schofield Barracks - where he noted the details of hangars, runway lengths and the number of aircraft capable of taking off at once. Everything was fed back to the Imperial Japanese Navy, helping with their planning for the Pearl Harbor attacks in December that year.

Japanese military intelligence continued to grow throughout the war, even while it was undermined by the arrest of undercover operatives, disastrous lack of co-ordination and information-sharing and the tendency of some in the Japanese armed forces to exaggerate their achievements. The Emperor once expressed his frustration at being told four separate times that the USS Saratoga had been sunk. It wasn’t even true: the Emperor’s Navy failed to sink the Saratoga even once. Instead, the ship was deliberately destroyed during American nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

Footage of the American nuclear tests in which the Saratoga sank. The blast is at 35 minutes and the slowly-sinking Saratoga is pictured at 41 minutes.

Alongside spies abroad went spies at home. After a plot was discovered to assassinate the Emperor in 1910, a ‘Special Higher Police’ or Tokkō was formed to keep an eye on potentially subversive elements in society - and leftists in particular. They became involved in phone-tapping, the interception of post, infiltration and the recruitment of informants.

People guilty of minor political infractions might be served a hot meal and given a gentle talking-to: ‘Your mother must be worried about you - why don’t you give up all this socialist nonsense and go home to her?’ Bigger offenders, and the unrepentant, could expect beatings and long periods of detention in appalling conditions.

The military police, or Kempetai, meanwhile earned their own grim reputation both at home and abroad, becoming involved in everything from surveillance to torture. Both the Tokkō and the Kempetai relied for their legitimacy on increasingly repressive legislation passed in the Japanese Diet.

All this intelligence activity could not make up for the basic failings that ensured Japan’s defeat in World War II. Japan’s leaders underestimated American willingness to strike back and go all the way once they were attacked. Japanese industry and supply-lines couldn’t keep pace with the demands made of them, across a large and far-flung empire. China was a quagmire, where no meaningful victory was ever possible.

What that intelligence work did achieve was to inoculate the people of Japan, for many decades afterwards, against trusting their leaders to create laws and intelligence agencies that would behave responsibly and accept civilian oversight.

Just how effective that inoculation was became clear from the summer of 1945, when the enormously consequential American Occupation of Japan began.

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Images:

Hattori Hanzō: Wikimedia (public domain).

Continental adventurers: Wikimedia (public domain).

Still image from The Last Princess of Manchuria: MUBI (fair use).

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