[Opinion] Japanese CIA

Without mentioning Ryuzo Sejima, we cannot talk about keys to Japan’s success as a great economic power. He was a living witness of Japan’s Keiretsu who, in 1967, predicted that the Middle East War would end in six days and who, in 1973, helped the company he worked for to get large marginal profits by foreseeing the Oil Shock. His greatest property was his keen sense of information that he developed while servicing as staff officer of Japanese army during the Second World War. Even though he spent eleven years in vain captured by the Soviet army, he became the Chairman of Itochu Corporation later and came to be admired as unprecedented Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Japan has no intelligence services such as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). Instead, the Japanese government runs a small system called the Information-investigating Service. Massive information gathering may be essential for a big country like Japan, and how would it complement the work of the system? The answer is that “from various sectors, such as businessmen like Sejima, diplomats, and the press voluntarily complement it. For example, Mitsui accumulates information gathered from 185 local branches all over the world in the head office’s central computer system which is said to be run from 1957. A great part of this information undoubtedly goes to the Information-investigating Service.

In short, Japan has a unique national intelligence service run by cooperation of private citizens and the government. Postwar Japan’s strategy for success was to fill 85 to 90 percent of the information collected in foreign countries with that of the economy under the umbrella of security provided by U.S. Is Japan thinking that such system is not enough now? Because it is said that the Information-investigating Service will be reorganized into a CIA-like intelligence service.

Amid the risk of terror since the U.S. terror attack on September 11th, it is natural for Japan to reorganize its intelligence service, but it is not a thing for us, as its neighboring country, to welcome. Now, when people talk about Japan’s heightened conservatism and rearmament, the descendants of Sejima may frequent Korea. Wasn’t a Seoul-resident journalist from a Japanese television station captured while working for military intelligence and forcefully withdrawn in 1994?

Editorial writer, Song Moon-hong songmh@donga.com