In December 1943, under cover of darkness, eight men waded ashore near Dwarka on the Kathiawar coast of Gujarat. They carried wireless sets, firearms, explosives and signalling equipment. Trained in Penang and led by an instructor from the Japanese Indian Friendly Centre, they were meant to fan out across Punjab, the North-West Frontier, Sindh, Bombay, the United Provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, gathering intelligence for an invasion of India that Japan still hoped to launch. One of the eight surrendered soon after and told the British everything, including where he had trained. The other seven disappeared from the record. Nobody knows what became of them.

That landing was one small episode in Japan鈥檚 least-remembered wartime venture. Tokyo tried to prise India away from British rule through espionage, sabotage and alliances with the people who lived along its eastern frontier.

The stakes rose in March 1942, when Rangoon fell and Japan cut the Burma Road, the route by which the Allies supplied Chiang Kai-shek鈥檚 China. The victory solved nothing. The Americans simply rerouted supplies through Assam, first by air over the Himalayas and then along the new Ledo Road, and Northeast India became the lifeline Japan most needed to sever. Controlling that frontier, Tokyo believed, could end the war with China and open the way to driving Britain out of Asia altogether. The tool for doing it already existed in outline. In September 1941, Major Fujiwara Iwaichi had been sent to Bangkok to build ties with Indian revolutionaries there, and out of that contact came the Indian National Army, formed from prisoners of war captured in Malaya. On 17 February 1942, at Farrer Park in Singapore, a British officer formally handed several thousand captured Indian soldiers over to Fujiwara, who passed them to the INA鈥檚 new commander, Mohan Singh. Overnight, prisoners became volunteers, and Japan had a homegrown force to send against British India.

It also had a growing archipelago of training schools. At Gilani鈥檚 Penang School, seventy Muslim prisoners of war were narrowed down to twelve for what became known as the Pasni Party, landed by submarine on the Baluchistan coast in February 1944 to establish contact with Subhas Chandra Bose鈥檚 supporters in Delhi. British surveillance found them within weeks. At the Thingangyun School in Rangoon, ninety trainees passed through in early 1943 learning disguise, sabotage and propaganda. At the Swaraj Institute in Penang, agents were prepared in courses as short as six weeks, which left many so poorly briefed that local police identified and arrested them almost as soon as they landed. A parachute team calling itself the Chandgadar, the Bats, dropped near Sunamganj in April 1943 and was rounded up within days, its members tried and sentenced to death. Only one man, Zahur Ahmed, was never found.

None of this happened without India鈥檚 frontier communities. As Japanese forces pushed toward Imphal and Kohima in 1944, the Kuki and Naga peoples of Manipur and the Naga Hills became targets of a deliberate courtship. Japanese agents through Hikari Kikan and Nishi Kikan offered arms, autonomy and respect for local custom, and they leaned hard on old grievances. Many Kukis still remembered the suppression of their 1917 to 1919 uprising and the land taxes that followed it, and Tongkhothang, chief of Chassad, crossed the Chindwin in November 1943 to offer the Japanese his support. Others, like Ngamkhothang and Am Zalit, had already been recruited into intelligence work months earlier. Among the Nagas, agents invoked the memory of the Battle of Khonoma, fought against the British sixty years before, and one operative arrived in Ukhrul styling himself the Nippon Government and Naga Commissioner. Angami Zapu Phizo, who would later lead the movement for Naga independence, made contact with the Japanese and with Bose himself, hoping wartime chaos might deliver self-determination where decades of petition had not.

The alliance never became what Japan needed. Requisitioning and looting by hungry, overstretched Japanese troops burned through whatever goodwill existed. Most Nagas stayed loyal to the Allies throughout, working as guides and scouts and, in June 1944, feeding intelligence that let the Allies bomb Japanese supply dumps directly. What Nagas thought of their supposed liberators survives in one grim remark recorded after the war. They disliked the Indian nationalist agents even more than the Japanese, of whom it was said they must be another kind of animal, not human beings at all.

Even where the alliance held, it was riddled with mutual contempt. The INA had its own derisive name for Hikari Kikan, the Japanese agency meant to be its partner. They called it Murghi Butai, the Chicken Department, a joke about an organisation the Indians thought useless and overbearing. Hikari Kikan wanted the INA under its command. The INA wanted recognition as a sovereign army. Neither trusted the other with supplies, and in March 1944 a planned INA raid on British positions near the Shuganu-Palel road had to be abandoned because Hikari Kikan simply never delivered the promised ammunition. When the monsoon broke in June, radios fell silent, malaria and dysentery spread faster than any battle casualties, and the retreat from Imphal turned into catastrophe. Of the roughly two hundred and seventy INA intelligence agents who had gone into the field, only forty came out.

Japan had entered this war with almost no prior knowledge of India. It had few Hindustani speakers, no established contacts, and a diplomatic history in which British India had never been more than an afterthought. Every network described here had to be built from nothing after December 1941, hurriedly, by men studying a country鈥檚 geography from books while running an intelligence war against it. Fujiwara himself later admitted that many of Japan鈥檚 celebrated early successes in Southeast Asia owed less to skill than to what he called divine providence. Against British counterintelligence, monsoon terrain nicknamed the Green Hell, and a Naga and Kuki population whose loyalties never resolved the way Tokyo hoped, providence was not enough.

What lingers from this story is the gap between the rhetoric of Pan-Asian liberation and its reception on the ground. Kuki collaborators fought alongside Japan for reasons rooted in a 1917 uprising, a grievance decades older than any talk of a Co-Prosperity Sphere. Naga communities weighed two occupying forces against each other and, for the most part, chose the one that seemed less likely to burn their villages. The frontier that Japan hoped to turn into a gateway for Asian solidarity instead became the clearest evidence of how thin that solidarity really was once armies, spies and hungry soldiers arrived to test it.

This post is based on the article Sitlhou, P., & Mishra, B. (2026). Intelligence, espionage, and tribal collaboration: the Indian National Army and Japanese involvement in Northeast India during the Second World War. Japan Forum, 1鈥�34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2026.2719592. .