Introduction
Lately, three news stories of entirely different natures have come to look, to me, like points on a single line.
The first is the series of reports surrounding Chen Zhi, the alleged head of Cambodia’s Prince Group. On October 14, 2025, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the U.K.’s FCDO sanctioned 146 individuals and entities, designating the group a transnational criminal organization (TCO) (U.S. Treasury press release). The same day, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted Chen Zhi for wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy, and filed a civil forfeiture complaint against approximately 127,271 bitcoin—worth roughly USD 15 billion at the time (U.S. Department of Justice press release).
▸ U.S. Treasury (October 14, 2025) https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0278
▸ U.S. DOJ / EDNY (October 14, 2025) https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/chairman-prince-group-indicted-operating-cambodian-forced-labor-scam-compounds-engaged
In January 2026, Chen Zhi was stripped of his Cambodian citizenship and handed over to China (FRIDAY Digital; the sequence of events is also confirmed in the Treasury’s June 23, 2026, release).
▸ FRIDAY Digital (J, January 2026) https://friday.kodansha.co.jp/article/453102
▸ U.S. Treasury (June 23, 2026, follow-on sanctions) https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0538
And then there is Japan. Hu Shi (also reported as Hu Xiaowei; a Cypriot national), said to be one of the group’s most senior executives, was arrested on suspicion of filing a false change-of-address notification in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward in April 2026, and reportedly told investigators he did it “to obtain permanent residency” (TBS NEWS DIG). He was subsequently re-arrested under the Immigration Act for allowing orearrestede his residence and for allowing a seal registration procedure, as it also efacilitatinghat he had obtained “Highly Skilled Professional” residency status back in 2023 (FNN Prime Online).
▸ TBS NEWS DIG (arrver false residency filing) https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/5b54d27b967939363e15922a81cac5eb8f19e479
▸ FNN Prime Online (Highly Skilled Professional visa / permanent-residency plan) https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/5deeae326e5cb041dcfa6c5fbc3d2fff215a474e
The second story is the reporting that some of the Russian intelligence officers expelled from Western countries after the invasion of Ukraine have been redeployed to Japan as a base of operations. On July 12, 2026, The New York Times reported that officers of “Unit 20” of the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence directorate) had been posing as employees at Aeroflot’s Tokyo office, procuring semiconductors, machine tools, telecommunications equipment, and other goods for Russia via third countries—and described Japan as a “spy’s paradise” (Nikkei / Sankei Shimbun). A Shueisha Online piece goes into detail on the alleged base and on Uniabout20 itself, while a morautious analysis questioning the premises of the reporting has reporting’s premiseskkei (July 13, 2026) https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOGM1333N0T10C26A7000000/
▸ Sankei Shimbun (“den of spies” coverage) https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/e8c2ac70fba2f1d8bf030897cb4ae85e7177118c
▸ Shueisha Online (inside GRU Unit 20) https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/e1dc2883250138b12bd525a323f16e170f1a5dfc
▸ Seculligence (a critical review of the NYT reporting) https://seculligence.com/news/1669/
The third story is the disappearance of technical intern trainees. According to statistics published by the Immigration Services Agency, 6,510 trainees went missing in 2024 (Reiwa 6). That is more than 3,000 fewer than the record year before it—but the cumulative total since 2019 stands at roughly 47,000 (Immigration Services Agency, published data). These are not criminal syndicates or spies. These are young Southeast Asian migrant workers.
▸ Immigration Services Agency (missing-trainee statistics and other disclosures) https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/applications/titp/nyuukokukanri07_00138.html
These look like entirely separate stories, but they share a common foundation: in Japan, society as a whole has remarkably few means of verifying the true identity and substance of people and companies.
I have worked in the private investigation business for more than thirty years. Whenever I describe to foreign investigators what information access actually looks like for investigators in Japan, they tell me the same thing: Japan is the black hole of the investigation industry. I am writing this article because I believe the simple fact of “here is what practice actually looks like on the ground” deserves to be more widely known.
Even When We Want to Investigate, There Is Nothing to Investigate With
What a private investigation firm can do in Japan is far more limited than most people imagine.
Corporate and real-estate registries are available to anyone. Published administrative sanctions, press archives—if you patiently layer up this kind of “open information,” you can paint a reasonably useful picture. In fact, the bulk of our work is exactly this kind of layering.
On the other hand, the following categories of information are essentially out of reach:
- Systematic tracing through resident registrations and family registers (even with a demonstrated legitimate interest, the scope is narrow, and administration grows stricter every year)
- Personal credit and debt information
- Any systematic means of checking criminal or arrest records
- Civil and criminal litigation histories
- Government-held records of residence, employment, and medical care
In due diligence engagements, overseas clients routinely ask us to “run a criminal record check on the counterparty.” But Japan has no criminal-record database that private parties can query at all. So rather than simply saying “we cannot obtain it,” we have to start by explaining that no such system exists in Japan in the first place.
I understand the rationale for protecting criminal history, as it supports rehabilitation for law-abiding citizens; a certificate of no criminal record is one of the most important credentials in credit and trust management. I cannot help feeling that the Japanese government has never given this perspective adequate weight.
If Protection Is All We Pursue, Who Benefits?
With every amendment, Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act moves in the direction of stricter protection. As a general direction, this follows a glo, and I understand it.
The problem is that the exceptions—and the actors qualified to operate within them—are not being built at the same time.
The EU’s GDPR and various U.S. legal regimes all provide gateways such as “legitimate interest,” “public interest,” and “the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims,” and they institutionally define who may pass through those gateways: lawyers, licensed investigation firms, compliance providers, and so on. Protection is strengthened, but lawful avenues of inquiry are designed in parallel.
In Japan, only the protection side is reinforced, while the avenues of legitimate inquiry grow ever narrower. And what happens as a result?
- Illegal overstayers who slip into workplaces with lax identity checks are, in practice, never detected
- Organized crime figures can break the chain of their own history by interposing borrowed names and shell companies
- Fugitives can build a functioning life by leaving their resident registration untouched and drifting between loosely managed rentals and cheap lodging houses
- Foreign intelligence services know full well that Japan has almost no domestic investigative counterweight
Strict protection does not shield only the privacy of law-abiding citizens. The people who do not want to be found are standing behind the same shield.
A person under international sanctions obtained the privileged “Highly Skilled Professional” residency status and set about building a life in Japan with permanent residency in his sights—the Prince Group executive’s case, described above, is precisely such an example. Commentators have raised it as a question about the practical rigor of the screening behind that visa program (Coki, “Japan as a Safe Haven for Criminal Money”).
▸ coki (on the effectiveness of Highly Skilled Professional screening) https://coki.jp/article/column/88896/
The reason trainee disappearances have stayed so high for so long comes down to the same root. In low-skill, labor-starved workplaces, ID verification has become a formality. In a country that cannot even trace missing people who mean no harm, there is no chance of tracing the people who do.
The “Detective Business” Was Never Designed as a Servant of the Public Interest
Japan’s detective industry operates under a notification system based on the Private Detective Services Act. It is not a licensing or permit system. File the prescribed paperwork, and in principle, you can open for business tomorrow.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s own explanation puts it plainly: no special qualification is required to run a detective business—anyone not subject to disqualifying grounds may operate one. And filing the notification does not enable any act prohibited or restricted by other laws, nor does the label “detective work” confer any special authority whatsoever (TMPD, “Outline of the Private Detective Services Act”).
▸ Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department (outline of the Act) https://www.keishicho.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/tetsuzuki/tantei/overview.html
This may look convenient for the industry, but in reality, it is the opposite. Without a mechanism to ensure the quality of entrants, the industry has never had the institutional preconditions to earn society’s trust.
In developed countries, private investigators are licensed: examinations, documented experience, background checks, continuing education, and insurance requirements. In exchange, they are granted, in practice, certain information-access privileges and standing as providers of evidence before the courts. Obligations are imposed, and a role is conferred in return.
Japan has no such exchange. Obligations are imposed—mandatory disclosures to clients, training, roster management, prohibitions on discriminatory investigations (Kanagawa Prefectural Police, “Outline of the Private Detective Services Act”)—but no corresponding role is granted. The idea of putting the investigation industry to work for the public interest seems barely to exist on the government’s side.
▸ Kanagawa Prefectural Police (the Act and operators’ obligations) https://www.police.pref.kanagawa.jp/tetsuzuki/eigyokankei/tantei/mesd0091.html
The result: the industry cannot shake its “shady business” image, talented people do not enter it, and the standard of practice does not rise. I have watched this vicious cycle for my entire career.
On the Ground, We Are Already Brushing Against Foreign Threats
There is one more thing that rarely gets talked about.
The great majority of Japanese detective agencies make their living on domestic consumer cases—infidelity investigations, missing-person searches, background checks on individuals. That is legitimate work in itself. But denied access to the data that investigation fundamentally requires, these firms survive on analog methods: tailing, stakeouts, labor-intensive door-to-door inquiries. From due diligence-type work—work due diligence-type administrative frameworks, data access, and data analysis—they have effectively been shut out. And the number of firms that routinely handle investigations of foreign nationals entering Japan, or investigations of foreign residents commissioned from outside Japan, is smaller still.
Handling international cases as our main line of work, we run into situations like these:
- The identity the client claims and the substance of the request plainly do not fit together
- The subject is a foreign resident of Japan with a history of political activity, and the stated purpose of the request is vague
- A locate request with no visible purpose—“just confirm where the person is, that’s all we need”
- An unnatural number of intermediaries and routing countries, with the ultimate client nowhere in sight
We do not accept such requests. We are not so naive as to be unable to imagine whose hands the location information might end up in, and what might happen next.
The human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders has reported that unofficial Chinese “overseas police stations” exist at more than 102 locations across 53 countries, including several in Japan (explained in Japanese by JBpress). The Japanese government has protested to the Chinese side that “if activities that infringe upon Japan’s sovereignty are being carried out, they are absolutely unacceptable”—but with no law directly criminalizing such activity, enforcement is reportedly difficult (Kansai TV). The risk that a private investigation firm could unwittingly become a subcontractor to another country’s intelligence or security services is not an abstraction. It is a judgment call we face in practice.
▸ JBpress (on the Safeguard Defenders report) https://jbpress.ismedia.jp/articles/-/81172
▸ Kansai TV (China’s “secret police” and Japan’s protest) https://www.ktv.jp/news/feature/230420-2secretpolice/
And there are almost no practitioners in Japan who confront this judgment on a routine basis. Which is exactly why this category of risk never surfaces in the policy and legislative debate. That, I believe, is the biggest problem of all.
We Are Not the Architects of the System—And Yet
As I said at the outset, I am in no position to argue legislation or policy. I am something like an engineer who keeps investigative operations running—my job is to figure out how to achieve a client’s legitimate objectives within the legal framework I am given.
I am not asking for protection to be loosened. I am asking that if protection is to be strengthened, then lawful avenues of inquiry—and qualified actors entitled to walk them—be designed at the same time. Sealing every entrance does not make a society safe. Behind the sealed entrances, there are bad actors quietly p
The Chen Zare hi affair, the reporting on Russian intelligence activity, the disappearance of trainees—they all pose the same question. Push information protection forward without exceptions, and you may end up protecting spies, terrorist actors, organized crime, and illegal overstayers along with everyone else.
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