Outline of the functioning of the legal residences of the 1st Chief Directorate of the KGB in Japan and contemporary reminiscences of this phenomenon

Abstract

The article analyses, on the basis of Japanese and American governmental documents and using empirical, quantitative and comparative methods, the activities carried out by the KGB in Japan with the use of its legal residences in the years 1954-1991. Apart from presenting their number and location, as well as the evolution of the number of KGB personnel and defining their proportion to analogous GRU employees, as well as to all employees of various official USSR representations, it also presents the basic directions of the committee's activities in the ‘blooming cherry country’ and the scale of penetration of Japanese institutions through personal sources of information. In addition, an attempt has been made to compare the aforementioned data relating to the Cold War period with analogous - albeit much more fragmentary and residual - data relating to the present day.