Bōchō (Counterintelligence)
the side keeping the secret starts by questioning its own students
Meaning
Bōchō means keeping your own side's secrets from leaking out. It is the counterpart of chōhō (intelligence gathering): where chōhō goes out to take secrets, bōchō keeps them from being taken.
In 1940, a school for secret warfare was established in Tokyo. Its formal name was the Rear Duty Personnel Training Institute; the name "Army Nakano School" appears that year only inside parentheses.
One of the first things the school did was to measure how far its own secret had already spread.
How it worked
- Grades of secrecy. The paper itself carries its handling grade: hi (secret), gokuhi (top secret), gun gokuhi (army top secret), gunki (army confidential). In the Nakano School files, the selection of students, the counterintelligence regulations, and the removal of a student's name were all gun gokuhi.
- Background checks. Those selected were investigated by the Kempeitai headquarters. The paper records that a "strict background investigation is currently being carried out by the Kempeitai headquarters." The 141 who passed were its subjects.
- Substituted words. The papers avoid naming the thing itself. Intelligence personnel are written as "special duty personnel" or "rear duty personnel," and the training as "special education."
Where it appears
In the selection files, a table records what each candidate was told, and by whom. The students' own words were copied down, and beside them the school wrote its assessment. Of one school that had said too much, the note reads: "not appropriate from a counterintelligence standpoint."
Here, bōchō was measured not against an outside enemy, but against the school's own incoming students.
- The Army Nakano School Japanese page
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