Japan's Secret War: Spies, Scandals, and the Fight to Build a Modern Intelligence State

On July 31, 2026, Japan quietly dismantled the intelligence office it had deliberately kept weak for eighty years, and replaced it with something it had never had before. A new National Intelligence Council, backed by a National Intelligence Bureau with real legal authority to compel Japan's own agencies to share what they know, took over from the modest Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office that morning - the most significant change to Japan's national security architecture since 1945. Japan's Secret War tells the full story behind that reform, starting not in 2026 but in 1901, and following Japan's intelligence history through the Tokko's reign of political terror, Richard Sorge's penetration of wartime Tokyo, the postwar occupation, three Cold War-era scandals, the crises of the 1990s, and thirteen years of legislative guardrail-building. Written by a Tokyo-based university teacher with graduate training in public policy, law, and education, the book gives a fair hearing to the strongest arguments against the reform as well as for it, and asks whether Japan's democracy has built the tools to judge its own creation.