This presentation examines intelligence, surveillance and information gathering activities of Imperial Japanese authorities that focused on transnational and diasporic Indians’ resistance to British colonization of India, in metropolitan Tokyo during the Taisho period.

Indian revolutionary Rash Behari Bose is considered the central figure in the history of Indian revolutionary activity in Japan as well as the history of Japan- India relations in modern times. Especially during the Great War, the multilayered Ghadr movement attracted international attention owing to the Indo-German collaboration or “conspiracy” with the German Foreign Office. However, this was no match to the superiority of British intelligence service.

Besides, fragility of the revised Anglo Japanese Alliance, Britain’s paranoia read more into Japanese intentions following their government’s attitude of balancing security and civil liberties of Indian “seditionists”. This intensified as Tokyo turned a blind eye despite evidence of Japanese sympathizers’ involvement in German hatched arms supply plan to destabilize British India. Unique trends and transformations surface in the nature of Japanese surveillance and the subsequent networking of Indians and their interactions with local Japanese.

Microscopic in approach, this account traces the daily life of diasporic Indian entities such as students, intellectuals, business persons in Japan by piecing together evidence from a rich corpus of Japanese archival sources such as confidential intelligence reports alongside personal memoirs of pan-Asianists among historiographical works of higher educational institutions. This holds promise to uncover “underwater currents” with global implications which are otherwise obscured by the shadows of colossal entities such as “Bose of Nakamuraya”.