Japan is moving past the physical rearmament phase of adding missiles and warships and is reshaping itself into a counterintelligence state that collects and protects information and shares it with allies in real time. The House of Councilors held a plenary session on the 27th and passed the bill to establish a National Intelligence Council by a majority in favor.
The law creates a new National Intelligence Council, a meeting body chaired by the prime minister of Japan and joined by nine key ministers including the chief cabinet secretary, the foreign minister, and the defense minister. A separate organization, the National Intelligence Agency, which will handle the council's administrative work, will also be set up. Until now, Japan's intelligence network has operated in silos across the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, the National Police Agency, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The plan is to bring information that each ministry gathered separately into a single place for the prime minister's office to review directly.
According to Japanese media including the Sankei Shimbun on the day, not only the Liberal Democratic Party and Japan Innovation Party but also opposition parties the Democratic Party for the People, Komeito, and the Sanseitō cast bipartisan votes in favor of creating the National Intelligence Council. It came just a day after the bill cleared the Cabinet Committee of the House of Councilors on the 26th. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi plans to open the National Intelligence Agency as early as July. Confronted with a compound crisis of China's pressure on Taiwan, North Korean missile threats, and stronger alignment with Russia, Japan says it has no time to look back. Takaichi defined the establishment of the National Intelligence Agency as the first phase of intelligence reform and set a spy prevention law and the creation of a foreign intelligence agency as the second phase. The Takaichi Cabinet plans to further bolster counterintelligence by sequentially submitting bills at next year's regular Diet session to enact a spy prevention law to block foreign espionage activities and to create a new agency dedicated to collecting overseas intelligence.
The defense budget that Japan's Ministry of Defense set for this fiscal year is 8.8093 trillion yen (about 84 trillion won), up about 1.7 times from 5.2 trillion yen in 2022 in five years. Of that, 1 trillion yen (about 9.55 trillion won) over five years has been newly allocated to command, control, and intelligence functions, and another 1 trillion yen to cyber-related fields. At the same time, the Self-Defense Forces plan to increase cyber personnel to 20,000 by 2027, about 8% of service members on constant duty. A joint operations command that handles information warfare was also launched in March last year. Observers say this reflects the view that in modern warfare, the first strike begins with hacking that targets communications and power grids before missile launches.
In the cybersecurity strategy revised in December last year, Japan specified that it will raise its counterintelligence capabilities to a level "on par with or surpassing major Western countries." It also introduced an active cyber defense system for government agencies and critical infrastructure. Moving away from post-attack recovery after hacking, the plan is to detect signs of attack in advance and, if necessary, preemptively strike the other party's servers to neutralize them. Reuters, citing experts, assessed that Japan is shifting from a stage of focusing on defense within the fence of its pacifist constitution to becoming an information security state that moves proactively from the prewar stage.
Japan also plans to elevate key assets in the economic security sphere to the level of military secrets. Semiconductor processes and battery materials, subsea cables, and satellite technical blueprints will now be treated not just as civilian industrial information but as national security assets to be protected from external threats. Last year, the National Police Agency and the National center of Incident readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) announced that the China-linked hacking group MirrorFace had targeted Japanese think tanks and government official·retirees, politicians, media, and the semiconductor, manufacturing, telecommunications, academia, and aerospace sectors around 2019. The National Police Agency called it "an organized cyberattack suspected of Chinese involvement aimed at stealing information related to Japan's security and advanced technology." They rattled Japan's knowledge institutions and corporate research labs with tactics such as malicious email attachments, exploiting software vulnerabilities, and sending malicious links. The Japanese government said that once the National Intelligence Agency is launched, consolidating cyber threat information scattered across ministries in one place will strengthen its ability to detect and block organized attacks like MirrorFace at an early stage.
Intelligence powerhouses like the United States and the United Kingdom do not share high-grade secrets with countries that leak. Japan enacted the 2024 Act on the Protection and Utilization of Important Economic Security Information and fully activated a security clearance system. Only corporate executives and employees and public officials who pass background checks can access information on critical economic infrastructure designated by the Japanese government. Reuters said Japan's measures to strengthen the counterintelligence institutional sector are "a move to align the country's security framework with Western standards and expand information sharing with allies and private corporations."
Japan also focused on building a multilayered network for sharing information at the latest Quad foreign ministers' meeting, which wrapped up on the 26th. The Quad is not a military alliance with a collective defense clause like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But by tying together prewar-stage security nets such as maritime surveillance and communications networks, it functions as a de facto mechanism to check China. At this Quad meeting, Japan, together with the United States, Australia, and India, addressed maritime security, critical mineral supply chains, energy security, navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, emerging technologies, and concerns over China's militarization of the South China Sea.
Experts said that in terms of information networks, Japan is evolving from a single pillar of "security means the United States" into a multilayered structure spanning the Indo-Pacific and Europe. In September 2025, by bringing into force a reciprocal access agreement (RAA) with the Philippines, Japan secured information on sea lanes in the South China Sea and south of Taiwan. It also expanded points of cooperation with NATO on advanced technologies including cyber defense, countering disinformation, and artificial intelligence (AI). The Self-Defense Forces took part in cyber defense training with NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence in Tallinn, Estonia.
Some quarters have pushed back against the rapid shift toward a counterintelligence state. During deliberations on the bill to create the National Intelligence Council, potential privacy violations and political misuse emerged as the biggest issues. Japan's civil society, including the Japan Lawyers Association for Freedom, issued a statement opposing the move, saying, "If information and authority are concentrated in one person, the prime minister, there is a high risk the system will degenerate into one that surveils citizens under the pretext of national security." When passing the bill on the 26th, the Cabinet Committee of the House of Councilors also adopted a supplemental resolution urging the government to "take sufficient care to ensure that personal information and privacy are not unnecessarily violated and to appropriately explain its activities to the Diet." A supplemental resolution is a political expression of intent without legal binding force. Komeito, which voted for the bill, said it "reflected provisions on privacy protection and ensuring political neutrality in the resolution" together with the Centrist Reform Coalition and the Constitutional Democratic Party.