Dopo 70 anni sembra che il governo giapponese sia sul punto di ristrutturare il proprio comparto intelligence istituendo, per la prima volta dopo la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, un’agenzia di spionaggio estera.
Attualmente, infatti, il sistema di intelligence di Tokyo, oltre a non avere un punto di fusione per le informazioni e le analisi prodotte dalle cinque strutture di intelligence esistenti, non dispone di un’agenzia per la raccolta informativa all’estero e deve fare affidamento, in questo campo, al supporto degli alleati. Stati Uniti in primis.
L’uccisione del giornalista giapponese decapitato dall’ISIS ma soprattutto il continuo rafforzamento militare cinese, percepito da Tokyo come una minaccia strategica crescente, ha spinto l’attuale governo ad elaborare una proposta di legge per la creazione di un’agenzia sul modello, sembra, dell’Mi6 britannico.

Scrive la Reuters:

[…] Japan’s existing intelligence community has about 4,400 personnel split into units under different ministries, but has been hampered by a reluctance to share secrets across bureaucratic lines, experts say.
That reluctance to work closely stemmed partly from a lack of rules setting common standards for preventing leaks of classified information, a problem that has been eased by the state secrets law that took effect in December.
Turf battles, however, persist, complicating the outlook for a new intelligence agency.
The main actors in Japan’s intelligence community are the National Police Agency (NPA), the Justice Ministry’s Public Security Intelligence Agency (PSIA), the Defence Ministry’s Defence Intelligence Headquarters, the Foreign Ministry, and the Cabinet Intelligence Research Office, whose staff come largely from other ministries.
“The NPA is very influential in the Abe government and Japanese bureaucracies,” said one security expert.
“If a new agency was established, probably the NPA would take the initiative and the Foreign Ministry and PSIA wouldn’t like that.”
The PSIA, with some 1,500 staff and whose main job is to monitor domestic subversive and extremist groups, could be a logical choice to form the core of a new agency, adding overseas counter-terrorism to its portfolio, some experts said.
Bureaucratic rivalries aside, politicians may be wary of setting up a new agency given public memories of a wartime military intelligence apparatus that operated outside civilian control.
Abe’s support ratings slipped in 2013 after his ruling bloc enacted the state secrets act despite criticism it would muzzle the media and let officials hide misdeeds, and he is already pushing controversial changes to the scope for military actions.
Attitudes, however, may have shifted after the killing of the two hostages, Iwaya said.
“It was a fact that we didn’t have enough presence in the Middle East and had to rely mainly on foreign countries beginning with Jordan and Turkey,” he said. “So the public has begun to think they want information gathering and analysis to be done properly.”
If the government decided to create a new agency, building an organisation that could function as well as overseas counterparts would take decades.
After unifying oversight of different forms of intelligence gathering, Japan would have to boost the number of agents, send them abroad and develop contacts on the ground, Kawakami said.

“That would be intelligence gathering, not clandestine activity,” he said. “Even that would take at least 30 years.”