50s: Starting with a storage ring

Chapter 442 Cabinet Intelligence Research Office

The booming industrial development in the 80s led to a intensive demand for labor, and countless farmers migrated to cities to become low-level workers.

Of course, thanks to the economic prosperity, even the lowest-paid workers can make ends meet, and survival is no longer a problem.

However, due to soaring land prices, it is extremely difficult to acquire a plot of land for building a house through wages alone. And without a house, one cannot establish oneself in the city.

When intelligent factories replace mechanized factories, migrant workers, lacking knowledge and skills, will inevitably be eliminated and return to the countryside.

At the same time, with the emergence of the electronics industry and urban culture, most people have abandoned their past savings habits and started using credit cards.

Young people, in order to avoid being seen as different by others, begin to consume blindly and live on loans.

During these years, a large middle class emerged in Tokyo. They were highly educated, had high salaries, and lived a decent life.

However, due to a lack of capital savings such as land, even though incomes have increased along with economic development, the emergence of consumerism has prevented a large amount of wealth from being accumulated.

Even if they accumulate wealth, their wages can't keep up with the rising land prices. This makes them very anxious, but they have no solution.

This place has become the de facto world factory, and the huge trade deficit makes Old M restless at night.

Five years later, after the signing of the agreement, with the appreciation of the yen, everything was like a raging fire, leading the little man to shout the outrageous statement, "Sell Tokyo and buy the United States."

Does all of this seem familiar?
Fortunately, we have a large area and a large population, and we have learned from past mistakes, so we won't repeat the mistakes of those who lived in poverty.

What Sun Zhiwei saw now was such a bustling metropolis. Most people would be dazzled by it, but not him.

After getting off the plane, Sun Zhiwei immediately changed his appearance, clothes, and identity, adopting the identity of Akimoto Tadashi, an Osaka businessman he had used before.

The last time he used this identity was two years ago when he went to rescue Professor Meng. At that time, he only used this identity to deliver a message and it was not exposed, so he used it again this time.

Soon, he took a taxi to Chiyoda Ward, where a large number of government buildings are located, and the Cabinet Research Office he was looking for was located in the Prime Minister's Office Building.

In later television and movies, the Special Higher Police and other agencies depicted were all "elite agents" wearing military uniforms and displaying military ranks.

The real Special Higher Police (STPP) members all wear plain clothes and are hidden in various industries and departments. They do not actively reveal their identities, so you have no idea that they are STPP members.

According to data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in 2024, there are 620,000 registered "security volunteers" nationwide, meaning there is one "unofficial intelligence officer" for every 200 residents.

The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office's model of nationwide surveillance is exactly the same as the plainclothes agents of the Special Higher Police in the past.

It's not just the intelligence mode; a large number of former Special Higher Police (SPD) personnel are also involved, and their behavioral logic is exactly the same as that of the SPD back then.

The Special Higher Police, which should have been swept into the dustbin of history, is now wearing modern suits and continuing to write its story.

Sun Zhiwei came here this time to find out what secrets he had.

He got off the bus across the street from the Prime Minister's Office Building and went directly into the adjacent Tokyu Capitol Hotel.

This is a five-star hotel, with more than 50 floors in the building. The Shouxiangfu Building is just 100 meters away.

With such comfortable conditions, he naturally wanted to make use of them; who would want to be a groundhog when they could stay in a hotel?

So he booked a room on the 6th floor of the Tokyu Capitol Hotel. Every day he would go out sightseeing, and when he returned to the hotel to rest at night, he would start to investigate the situation in the Seikoufu Building across the street.

The Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office is located in the southwest corner of the building, and the top three floors are all offices of the research office.

However, all three floors were office areas, and Sun Zhiwei did not find any place to store documents or files.

This is very strange; an intelligence agency doesn't even have an archives room.

After careful observation, he discovered that every day a dedicated person would bring a pile of materials on a small cart and distribute them to different staff members.

After receiving the data, these staff members will write analysis reports according to specific steps, and indicate the categories and levels. Before leaving get off work, the analyzed intelligence will be collected in a unified manner.

He then realized that the hundreds of employees here were just analysts; their main responsibility was to analyze intelligence, and the storage and retrieval of intelligence were not done here at all.

Thinking of the group of people responsible for distributing and collecting the goods morning and night, he immediately turned his attention to them.

On each floor, a cart was collecting raw intelligence reports and analysis documents. After collecting them on all three floors, they met in the same elevator and went down together.

Just when he thought the group would deliver the information from the three carts out of the building, the elevator, which was supposed to be on the first floor, didn't stop but continued to descend.

He then noticed that there was a long passageway extending downwards beneath the elevator.

He immediately searched the space downwards and, sure enough, found a large underground space dozens of meters below.

This space is estimated to be larger than a football field, and it is divided into many small rooms, with the room numbers decreasing as you go further in.

Soon, three carts arrived underground, and the workers handed over the original data and analysis reports one by one at the central handover platform.

Subsequently, these materials were categorized and stored in different rooms by the staff.

Wow, so much information! I've got a lot to look for.

He quickly browsed through all the rooms and discovered that the documents were stored in a chronological order, with earlier documents stored in smaller room numbers.

However, this storage pattern is very strange. Are all the records out of order? How would you find a document with an unknown year?

After searching the entire underground storage area for a long time, he finally found it in a cabinet next to the handover table, another classification book.

The new booklet is categorized by country and data type, which is their usual way of storing intelligence.

After comparing them, he realized that the old classification method was inherited from the Special Higher Police, and the fonts on it were different from modern Japanese fonts.

He guessed this might be to curry favor with the old boss, as he had heard that the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office was formed by a group of former Special Higher Police members.

It's also possible that they preserved it to keep up with tradition. People like to go for retro things, and they often have shops that claim to be century-old ramen shops or thousand-year-old handmade shops.

In fact, the staff had already started using the new classification method to store intelligence materials under normal circumstances.

(End of this chapter)