Russia came late to Japan, but devoted considerable energies to grappling with one of the world’s great intelligence challenges and penetrating the insular Asian nation once the Japanese shifted in the latter half of the 19th century from a policy of restricted contact with the outside world to one of imperial competition with Moscow and the other great powers.
James DJ Brown, an expert in Russo-Japanese relations who teaches international affairs in Tokyo at the Japan Campus of Temple University, writes of how Moscow overcame obstacles of language and access to hit its Japanese intelligence targets with repeated success from the years after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 to the Second World War.
The Russians, who expanded their empire eastward over vast expanses of land to the Pacific Ocean, were much later than the Portuguese and other seafaring powers of the Atlantic in contacting and communicating with the Japanese. Two dictionaries tell the tale. Russia’s first “proper” Russo-Japanese dictionary, as Brown describes it, Russko-Iaponskii Slovar, the product of a Russian diplomat and a Japanese employee of Moscow’s foreign ministry, was published in St Petersburg only in 1857. Jesuit missionaries had published in 1603 in Nagasaki in Portuguese and Japanese the Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam, the first European dictionary of the Japanese language.
The language barrier was a great source of frustration in the early years of regular Russo-Japanese relations. A Russian military attaché in Japan described with bitterness the Japanese use of Chinese characters as “the greatest impediment for military attachés… This gibberish not only prevents them from examining any confidential paper they get… but also makes a military attaché fully and sadly dependent” on Japanese to translate documents.
Moscow was late in developing institutions to teach the Japanese language, the basis for business, diplomacy, and espionage involving Japan. Instruction in Japanese only began in earnest with the establishment by imperial decree of Russia’s Oriental Institute in Vladivostok in 1899. The Japanese took earlier action in regard to Russia. The Tokyo School of Foreign Languages (today the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, TUFS) from 1873 included in its curriculum Russian, along with English, French, German, and Chinese, the main languages that businessmen, diplomats, and intelligence officers needed to advance Japanese interests around the world.
Japan became a significant intelligence problem for Russia only after the Russian Empire had expanded to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan. The Russians then vied with the Japanese for control of the Kuril island chain that stretches between Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Japan’s northernmost main island of Hokkaido, the nearby island of Sakhalin, the Korean Peninsula, and Manchuria. The author cites the turn-of-the-21st century Очерки истории российской внешней разведки : в шести томах [Essays on the History of Russian Foreign Intelligence: In Six Volumes] written under the direction of Yevgeny Primakov, the former prime minister who had also served as director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Brown notes that there is no “serious mention” of Japan until “chapter 27” of the first volume (1996), which covers Russian intelligence “from ancient times to 1917”. The chapter’s focus, Brown writes, “is on the years immediately preceding the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5).”
Once Tokyo became a major intelligence problem, Moscow worked diligently to develop various means to access sources of intelligence on Japan. Brown’s book for the most part recounts Russian means of overcoming Japanese barriers in order to gain access to political and military intelligence.
The book’s title comes from Richard Sorge, a Soviet military intelligence officer whose ring reached the highest levels of the Japanese government and the German embassy in Tokyo from the time of his arrival in 1933 to his arrest in late 1941. He likened the Japanese target to a hard-shelled crustacean:
Japan is like a crab. Its outside has a hard, durable surface, but once you get on the inside, it is soft. And if you arrive at this point, it is easy to get information.
Brown devotes the lion’s share of his book to various Russian successes in human intelligence. He profiles the members of Sorge’s ring, writes of “honey traps” (the use of women to compromise and thereby compel men to work for Soviet intelligence), and describes the Russian use of various agents, not only Japanese but others from Europe, Korea, and the United States. He also mentions the breaking of Japanese encrypted communications and the exploitation of Japanese documents gathered on the battlefield.
There is much to like about this book. Brown can and does exploit sources in both Japanese and Russian, a rare language combination for a scholar from the Anglosphere. He has also pulled information from a wide variety of sources in English, from Alvin Coox’s classic account of the Nomonhan “Incident” (a limited war fought in 1939 between Russia and Japan) to a recent article from the Russian Japanology Review on early Russian military studies of Japan.
Brown has written a book that many readers interested in history and intelligence are likely to enjoy. The readers of particular interest to him, however, are “Japanese policymakers”. He warns them in his book’s introduction:
At a time when Japan is facing intensified espionage activity from a hostile Russia, as well as from China, it is imperative that the Japanese authorities enhance their historically weak counterintelligence capabilities.
In his concluding chapter, Brown offers “lessons” drawn from history on Russian spying against Japan and attempts to point out “areas where vigilance is needed”. He ends his book with an apparent promise to continue his history from the Second World War to the present, concluding that “how Japan became a spy paradise for Moscow’s intelligence services between 1945 and the present is the topic for another volume.”