Japan Coast Guard
coast guard of Japan
The Japan Coast Guard (Japanese: 海上保安庁, Hepburn: Kaijō Hoan-chō) is the coast guard responsible for the protection of the coastline of Japan under the oversight of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. It consists of about 13,700 personnel. The Japan Coast Guard was founded in 1948 as the Maritime Safety Agency and received its current English name in 2000.
The motto of the Japan Coast Guard is "Righteous Benevolence" (正義仁愛, Seigi Jin'ai).
History
Coast guard operations were performed by the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Empire of Japan, but the ability of maintaining maritime security declined significantly following the surrender of Japan in August 1945 and the resulting dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Maritime trade and smuggling had increased dramatically, and even pirates had begun to appear. Consultations were undertaken between the Japanese government, which wanted to restore its public security capacity as soon as possible, and the Allied countries which wanted to maintain the disarmament of Japan. However, in 1946, an "Illegal Immigration Control Headquarters" was established in the Ministry of Transport after cholera was transmitted to Kyushu by smugglers from the Korean Peninsula. This resulted in an increase in severe infections.
Meanwhile, the GHQ/SCAP also recognized the deficiencies of the Japanese maritime security system and in March 1946 Captain Frank M. Meals of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) was tasked to consider the situation.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Japan Coast Guard” as coast guard of Japan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as coast guard of Japan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q565418. VIAF identifies the subject as 143176181. The Library of Congress control number is n80035871. 3 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 2000, 1945 and 1946.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Japan Coast Guard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.