At the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union combed the intelligence agencies and scientific institutes of their defeated enemies to find and enlist skilled personnel to, in author Stephen Mercado’s words, “work in the shadows of the Cold War.” While much has been written about the postwar recruitment of German spies and scientists, Mercado’s new book, Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons, focuses on Japan’s Noborito Research Institute—its origins, its work for Imperial Japan during the war, and America’s use of the Noborito’s veterans in the early Cold War years.
Mercado, a retired officer in the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, previously authored a book on the Imperial Japanese Army’s Nakano intelligence school and has translated Chinese and Japanese diplomatic documents for the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. His new book is a methodical history of the Noborito Research Institute, whose origins date to the end of the First World War, when Japan’s Army leaders, recognizing the need to catch up to the Western powers in the fields of military intelligence and technology, established the Army Technical Headquarters (ATH). The ATH spawned specialized institutes to conduct research and experimentation on “weapons for both overt and clandestine warfare”, including the 9th army technical research institute at Noborito, which was located southwest of Tokyo.
“Noborito,” writes Mercado, “was enveloped in secrecy and engaged in deadly work” that involved developing “spy gear and special weapons” for the Imperial Japanese Army. Mercado notes that the employees of the Noborito Research Institute worked on “electric-wave weapons … chemical warfare and … poisons”. It also conducted research to develop “secret inks”, special “dust” to retrieve fingerprints, methods for opening and re-sealing intercepted mail, disguises for explosives, and counterfeiting currency. Army officer Shinoda Ryo was the institute’s director. Its employees included engineers, technicians, scientists, and specialists from academia and industry. Noborito’s work also extended to counterintelligence, and Mercado credits it with helping Japan to catch Soviet spy Richard Sorge. The Institute also supported the Nakano school in training its intelligence officers.
Mercado details Noborito’s efforts to develop a “death ray” and biological weapons. It worked with the infamous Unit 731 which injected prisoners of war with poisons and biological agents. It also worked on “bombing balloons” with the goal of setting parts of the western United States on fire. Mercado quotes Japanese Major Gen Kusaba Sueki, a section director at Noborito, that the bombing balloons were “dream-like weapons” that would set fires and set off explosions in America achieving at least a “psychological effect” on US citizens. Japan launched nearly 10,000 bombing balloons at the United States. It is estimated that about a thousand actually reached US territory, including one that reached Michigan. The incendiary balloons caused minor fires and six deaths. Mercado notes that there is evidence that Japan also planned to launch balloons with biological weapons.
Death rays never materialized from Noborito’s research. The bombing balloons had little real and psychological effects on Americans (in part due to wartime censorship). Counterfeiting efforts failed to inflict economic harm on the United States. After the war, US officials recruited some of Noborito’s technicians, scientists and intelligence agents to help with the occupation of Japan and to work for America against the Soviet Union, and later against Communist China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Some of Noborito’s veterans went to work in the United States at a naval facility near San Francisco.
Mercado closes his history of Noborito by noting that even today most of Noborito’s work remains shrouded in secrecy, including details about biological weapons intended for use with the bombing balloons and the extent of Noborito’s involvement with Unit 731 and its wartime atrocities. Japanese Army personnel destroyed incriminating evidence after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender message on August 15, 1945. The United States granted immunity to some Japanese technicians and scientists that were implicated in possible war crimes. As happened in Germany, waging Cold War took priority over justice.