When Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's Cabinet approved legislation last month to establish the National Intelligence Secretariat and a coordinating National Intelligence Council, the reaction from Beijing was predictable. Japan, the usual narrative goes, is once again baring its teeth — militarizing, securitizing and destabilizing the region. This framing deserves to be challenged directly, because it is as misleading as it is convenient.

Japan's planned reforms would upgrade the existing Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office (CIRO) into a national intelligence bureau, grant it authority to direct other government agencies and replace the existing Cabinet Intelligence Committee with a National Intelligence Council chaired by the prime minister. This is not the birth of a Japanese CIA. It is closer to the painful, decades-overdue act of getting Japan's own house in order.

The structural problems have been well documented. Japan's intelligence community has long been fragmented across several bodies — the CIRO, the Foreign Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the National Police Agency and the Public Security Intelligence Agency — each collecting information within distinct lanes but without any systematic mechanism to integrate it at the highest levels. The result is that a country facing one of the most complex threat environments on Earth has been making strategic decisions based on intelligence that is, by design, incomplete.

© The Japan Times