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Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and non fiction authors working in around and about the Asia Pacific region. War and the threat of war spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weaponry. Imperial Japan ahead of the Second World War was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Naboorito Research Institute, a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into this history in his new book, Japanese Spy Gear and Special How Naborito Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War. At Naborato, a Japanese scientist researched fanciful weapons like balloon bombs and death rays, covert activities like poisons and counterfeiting, and more insidious research topics like biological weaponry. Stephen Barcado, the author of Shadow warriors of A History of the Imperial Japanese Army's Elite Intelligence School, has also written a dozen articles and several dozen book reviews on Asian open source intelligence. His writing has appeared in the journals Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence Studies, Intelligence and on the website 38 north of the Henry L. Stimson Center. His translations include numerous declassified Chinese and Japanese diplomatic documents published as part of The Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War National History Project. He is also a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books. So, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book, Japanese Spy Gear and Special how Noborib scientists and technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War. You know, maybe before we begin, maybe you could explain what exactly was the Naboorito Research Institute and what motivated you to write about it.
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C
Yes, thank you for having me on the show. And first, the motivation was pretty straightforward. Many years ago I had written a history of the Japanese army school for spies and commandos, the Nakano School. And in that story Noborib was mentioned. But I felt that it was such an interesting topic in its own right that I would do a book just on the Boruto one day. And it took me about 20 years to get back to the idea, but I finally did publish it earlier this year. So as for what was the Noboruto Research institute, it was one of 10 numbered institutes that the Imperial Japanese army had in its research structure. They were called Army Technical Research Institutes one through ten. And number nine, the ninth Army Technical Research Institute, located at a place called Naborito, was different from the other nine because it was the only one that fell under what was called 8th section of the 2nd Bureau of the Army General Staff. Now 2nd Bureau in Japan and other armies was the, I think still is in some cases the Intelligence Bureau. And then a section was the section created for clandestine operations. So whereas the other nine Army Technical Research Institutes were doing what we could call conventional research, developing tanks, things like that, the ninth Institute, Noboreto was working on things that would go to intelligence operatives in the field. It could be things like equipment for dusting for fingerprints, radio finding, equipment for detecting illegal radio transmissions of enemy agents, things like that. So while the other institutes were conventional, we'll call them that Noboruto was in charge of unconventional or special research.
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B
So let's talk about some of those instances of special research. And maybe the most eye catching project, which was the attempt to build a death ray, which for lack of a better term, how did that project come about and how was it supposed to work?
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C
Well, it was, you know, the technology was out there and it was much discussed and there have been some, some high expectations that, that it could work. You know, this was all very revolutionary. Marconi, and I think everyone knows Marconi was a scientist who was a major force in developing radio, right? So radio comes along and all of a sudden communications is transformed through electric Waves, we can send information across the airwaves, across the air, in a way that had never been done before. And other people started to think of other things you could do with electric waves. And it occurred to many people that you could use it as a weapon. There was the idea that powerful waves that were really short, what they call ultra short waves, if properly applied, could interfere with an engine's operation or even stop the engine from running. And then the other application was there was idea that you could use death rays to kill people, that it would be an anti personnel weapon. And this was much discussed. And a number of people stepped forward between the two wars with claims that they had developed a death ray. Even Nikola Tesla, who's famous now because there are a lot of cars with his name on it. Tesla in 1934 said that he had developed a death ray that, you know, could kill people. But he said the drawback was that it would require such a massive power supply that he could only envision putting it on something very large, like a battleship. He couldn't see it as something you could wheel about, you know, like an artillery piece, but he thought, you know, you might be able to emit death rays from large ships. So this was, you know, in the air, so to speak. And then, you know, at that time too, there was a lot of popular imagination about this. You know, there was Buck Rogers and, you know, heroes with, with, you know, lasers cutting down their opponents. So it was something that people thought, well, perhaps we could develop this. And the Japanese army looked into it, I should say too, they were looking into it, you know, as a frontier technology before the war. But then as the war started and in the Second World War, Japan's initial successes gave way to defeats and reverses. And it became very clear that Japan could not win a conventional war. Then Japanese military authorities started to look at the death ray as an unconventional means, sort of a revolutionary technology that if it succeeded, and they weren't at all confident that it would succeed, but if it succeeded, it could give Japan an advantage because there was no way that Japan could, through conventional means, stave off defeat by the Allies.
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B
So I jumped ahead a bit in my question list here. But how did the Institute get started and how did its purpose change in the years leading up to the Second World War?
- [08:38]
C
It starts really with the First World War. Japan was a member of the Allied forces in the First World War alongside Britain, France, the United States. But World War I largely took place on the battlefields of Europe. That's where the major battles were fought. And that's where the major new technologies emerged. So Japan fought the Germans in East Asia in very limited engagements. And it really wasn't a total war for Japan the way it was for the West. So in the west, we saw the emergence of battlefield use of poison gas. We saw tanks emerge. Aircraft made rapid developments during the war. So the Japanese army realized that in. In the sense that they were behind that they. They needed to keep up with the Western powers. So right after the war, in 1919, they established something called Army Technical Headquarters with a subordinate Army Scientific Research Institute. And in the beginning, this scientific research institute was primarily dominated by research activities into poison gas, because that's probably what most impressed and scared the authorities, you know, what they witnessed in Europe. And then later on, I think it was 19. Yes, 1927. The institute develops a laboratory within the Institute for covert warfare, where they would focus on developing materials that would help operations off the battlefield, in the shadows, so to speak. And it was very small at first, basically one officer and a few assistants. But it grew over time to the point that in 1937, where they were not only doing research on poison gas, but they were doing other things too. They started to do more and more on electric wave research. And they needed something that could do this research outside of central Tokyo, where the main institute was located. So they opened a place in the countryside at a place called Noborito. It was a hilltop area about 45 minutes southwest of Tokyo. And there they developed a laboratory that later grew into a branch of the institute. And eventually it became, as I said before, the number nine or the ninth Army Technical Research Institute, where at first, much of the research there and development was focused on electric waves, death rays, and other things you can do with electric waves. In time, they added biological warfare as another key area of research and development. And then finally counterfeiting. Counterfeiting, Foreign. Foreign currencies, foreign banknotes. So that became sort of the three major areas of effort at Liberto.
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B
Maybe we can jump ahead to talk about the counterfeit currency part of it. I mean, why did they get involved in this? What was the. What was the objective to kind of printing all of this fake money?
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C
Well, Japan had been at war in China in a big way since 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge incident. And even before then, the army in 1931 had launched the takeover of Manchuria, which was part of northeast China, and then had sponsored the puppet state of Manchukuo. Right. So the Japanese had already taken over much of China, and they were looking to dominate or take over the whole country. So they'd gone to war after 1937 and they had been hoping for quick victories. They did achieve some initial successes rather quickly. But then, even though they had taken the Chinese capital at Nanking, Nanjing today, the Chinese did not surrender, but they retreated into the, into the western hinterland, setting up their capital in chunking. So the Japanese army was facing resistance that would not yield. And China is just so vast that they didn't have the resources to conquer the entire country. And plus they were saving their resources for what they saw as the coming decisive war with the Soviet Union that they would launch at some point in the Soviet Far East. So what to do with this Chinese resistance that wasn't going away? Well, they thought let's destroy. The economic basis for resistance will destroy the Chinese economy. And the way we can do that is by counterfeiting Chinese money. Then we'll insert it into the economy and there'll be so many Chinese banknotes floating through the economy that inflation will become worse and worse. Maybe we'll get hyperinflation and it'll wreck the economy and it won't be able to function. I think that was the essential idea.
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B
So another, another project that this institute was responsible for were the bombing balloons. And which I guess was these were the only instances of bombs actually being dropped on the U.S. kind of, or the continental U.S. but what exactly what were these balloons? Why did they make them, how did they work and how successful were they?
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C
Right. Well, the Japanese had started experimenting with balloons long before the Second World War. And I think they had originally envisioned using them against the Soviets in the Far East. And so for example, they had developed a balloon 5 meters in diameter that they envisioned launching from occupied Manchuria that would then float, float east and attack, say, Vladivostok, which was the major Soviet base in the Far East. And what happened in the Second World War was that after Midway when, when the US Navy scored a, you know, a crushing blow against the, the Japanese Navy after Midway, there was no, there was no possible way that the Japanese could conventionally, you know, sail west across the. Sorry, sail east across the Pacific and strike the United States with carrier based aircraft, they couldn't do that yet. They, they really, you know, had the, they had the desire to strike the United States because obviously after the Doolittle raid In 1942, when the US launched its first aerial attack against Japan, US raids became increasingly more destructive and the Japanese, you know, really wanted to in return strike the United States. So if they couldn't do it with carrier aircraft. Their first idea was, well, let's build a super long distance bomber that'll fly from Japan, bomb the U.S. new York City, for example, fly on to occupied France and then back again, bombing the US on the way back home. Well, that turned out to be beyond resources that Japan had, and they didn't have enough time to do that sort of thing. So the second idea was like, well, let's use balloons. We can use the jet stream that goes across the Pacific from basically November to the spring each year. And we'll float bombs on balloons and then we'll set up a mechanism for controlling the altitude of the balloon and a mechanism that will, when it reaches a certain distance, it will drop its payload of bombs and this will be our way of attacking the United States. And so using, in the end, what they did was they used Japanese paper and a paste made from mulberry bark, mulberry fibers, and they succeeded in creating a balloon that could survive the passage across the Pacific. So that was quite an engineering marvel, using paper, basically. And to that they attached a payload of explosive and incendiary bombs. So how did this work? Well, it wasn't pinpoint bombing. There was no way to direct the balloons to a specific target, just send them in the general direction. And so they were hoping for a psychological effect, that forest fires would start in the west and people, you know, would see the bombs, it would be reported, the media, there'd be like, say, public hysteria would arise and they could at least score psychological damage. Now, what's, what's not really well known in, in most of the history because the blue, the bombing balloons have been covered before. But the Japanese had also been working on biological weapons. And the original intent was to put some of these weapons on the balloons and so that you don't need pinpoint accuracy. They had actually succeeded in developing cattle plague as a weapon. They had, you know, tested in, in the field. They, you know, killed cattle with it and they put it into a form that was dried and freeze dried and powdered form so that it could survive the extreme temperatures on the flight across the Pacific. And then it would be dropped on the United States with the hope that it would infect America's large cattle herds in the West. So that was one idea. And although we know about the cattle plague, we don't really know what else was going on, but it's quite likely that other diseases were being worked up as well.
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B
Yeah, I mean, we should talk a bit more about that because that's, I mean, it's, you know, controversially, Naburuto is kind of is working on chemical and biological weapons. I mean, what sort of work did the institute do? You know, including tests of these weapons. And poisons too, or poisons was another part of this as well.
- [19:16]
C
Yes, right. They were working on a variety of things in what we might broadly call biological warfare. And this was a large effort in the Japanese army, I think you could say that. Or the United States had opted for the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons. The Japanese army had decided that they would go with biological. That perhaps they didn't think that nuclear weapons were feasible in a short period of time. So they went a major effort on biological weapons. And the assessment was on the US side at the end of the war that the Japanese had developed a premier BW effort in the world, among all the armies. And it was done at a variety of levels with testing throughout Asia. There were units spread from Manchuria down to Southeast Asia. The most famous one that people have probably heard of in the west is called unit 731, which was run by a General Ishii out of Manchuria. And there they were using horrific human tests to develop a number of biological weapons intended, I believe, to be used against primarily the Soviet Union in that war that they imagined was coming with the Soviets. But while you could say that unit 731 and the other units on the continent were developing, I would say maybe conventional biological warfare, Naborita was probably more involved in doing the, we could say clandestine efforts. So a lot of it would be more like. Some of it was assassination. That was what the poisons were for. They were developing a delayed effect poison so that you could assassinate someone by poisoning him and then the victim wouldn't die, like say for 10 hours or the next day. And so that it would be unclear why he died and who killed him. So they were doing things like that in biological warfare.
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B
Before I kind of move into the post war period, I want to ask, I mean, how were you able to research all of this stuff at the institute? I mean, what sources did you use? How'd you find them? Like, how did you do the research for this book?
- [21:32]
C
Well, that was quite a challenge because, and I mentioned this in the book, Japan announced surrender on August 15, 1945, and the US occupation, or the Allied occupation, because the British were also involved. The Allied occupation doesn't begin really until the next month. The formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri took place on September 2nd. So they've got weeks and weeks to Destroy the evidence. And they set about destroying basically everything official related to special research. In fact, there was a lieutenant colonel who was overseeing special research in the War Ministry. He sent out a directive on August 15 alerting everyone involved to destroy everything involved with special research. And Noborito was number one on the list. Noboruto was above unit 731. And if you think what horrific things the unit 731 was doing, we can assume that Noboribito was also involved in things that equally. Well, you don't want the Allies to know about them, we'll put it that way. And I think this ties in with the bombing balloons because whereas unit 731 was basically preparing for operations against the Soviets and let's say also the Chinese, Noboruto was developing weapons for the United States. The cattle plague, hog cholera, things like that, maybe even weapons to hurt people. And so that was the number one thing to get rid of. So they got rid of all of that. And there's really almost nothing official that you can find. So I had to rely on memoirs. One of the. One of the. One of the officers at Nobori to wrote a book that has become sort of the standard source to go to is Major Bon Shigeo wrote about Naboorito. And that was very, very helpful in the research that I did. Other people also wrote memoirs. Sometimes they published articles in history journals, things like that. And also there's a history museum at the site of the old Noborib Research Institute. They have a museum dedicated to the history of that institute. And that museum publishes reports that are very useful for anyone interested in the history of the institute. So I relied on that as well. And so just, you know, doing as best I could, you know, knowing that, you know, I don't think we'll ever find the, you know, any official paper trail.
- [24:18]
B
So, I mean, from some of these sources, I mean, how much do we know about what Japanese personnel at Noboruto felt about their work either at the time or afterwards when they maybe had some time to think about the stuff they'd done?
- [24:34]
C
Right. We know a little bit about what they felt because, for example, some of the younger ones who lived a long time after the war, they eventually sat down for interviews with personnel from the Nagorito Museum. And so they talked about their experiences as, you know, as workers at the Naboorito Research Institute. Some of the senior people, you know, they talked about what they felt had been gained at Naboorito, whether it was worth it or not. And so you have some of that. And then there's one writer in particular has devoted his career to writing about Naboorito. He's written several books. And to do that, he tracked down and spoke to a lot of the veterans. And so he got some idea of their personal views. And I think for many of them, it's like you're at war. You serve your country by working in some part of the war establishment. And so for the average person, particularly for those who are doing administrative roles at Navorito or were doing things that were not, say, so objectionable, then they probably felt, well, it's regrettable, I wish it hadn't happened, but it did. It's sort of maybe a resigned attitude towards what they did. You know, it had to be done. You know, we were at war. Some people, I think it affected them a great deal. I mentioned at one point in the book Laboratory veterans formed their own alumni or veterans association. And they would have annual meetings, get togethers where they talk about old times, things like that, much like veterans do around the world. But some of the veterans would not attend those meetings. And apparently this was often the case for those involved in biological warfare, because that, you can imagine, was the most sensitive and perhaps for some of them, the most thing that would make them feel guilty, make them feel bad about what they had done. And so they would not meet their colleagues after the war. So you had that sense. Some of them must have felt guilty. Some of them felt what a horrible waste of time it was. I think some felt, well, we had to do it. And others felt, you know, technically speaking, we did some great things or did some revolutionary things. So I think it spanned a range of emotions.
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B
So what happens after the war ends? And you can maybe split this into two parts. What happens immediately after the war ends in terms of the Institute and its researchers, and then what happens kind of over time in the years and decades since, as the post war kind of way of doing things starts to settle.
- [27:27]
C
In immediately after the war, the Allies move to take apart and abolish the Japanese military structure. So the army and the navy are abolished, the ministries and the forces are abolished. There's no more Japanese soldiers or sailors. And this applies also to military intelligence. So the Deborah Research Institute goes away. The facilities, the buildings still remain, very little bomb damage. So eventually that becomes part of Japan's Meiji University. It's a major private university in Japan, becomes a separate campus for the university. And immediately after the war, the United States sets about on a very intensive survey in Germany and Japan of the science and technology of the two Axis powers because they want to learn as much as they can and reap the fruits of the Axis scientists. So everyone. Well, I think many readers are familiar with the idea that the U.S. apollo space program was partly a result of the German V2 rocket program, because the US went and recruited V2 rocket scientists like Vernon von Braun and incorporated German rocket research into their own space program. And so the same thing with Japan. There was intensive investigation of what the Japanese had achieved. So all the people in the Boruito basically were questioned, interrogated by US military, and reports were written. And, you know, they tried to, you know, learn as much and see what they could gain from the Japanese. And it is known that, you know, a deal was struck with members of unit 731, for example, that's. That's been published, that in exchange for data on biological warfare developments, that the Japanese involved at unit 731 would basically be immune from prosecution. And it seems that the same deal was struck with Noborito because nobody from unit 731 and nobody from Naboorito went up for the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. Nobody was tried from either group. And then in addition to that, something that's not well known and which I mentioned in the book, is that the US Government recruited a number of the counterfeiters, the people who had been counterfeiting Chinese banknotes. And they'd also been working, producing British, I guess, the rupee, the British currency in British India, for operations against the British in India. And so some of these people recruited by the US Government, and they went about their work at a nondescript office at the Yokosuka Naval Base. Yokosuka had been a major naval base of the Japanese Navy. And then the US Took it over and made it a major US Naval base. And the counterfeiters worked there initially, and then at some point, some of them were moved to a naval base in California where they continued their operations. So that is very hard to document because you can imagine it was post war, and there's a lot of sensitivity around that. And I'm pretty sure that the counterfeiters were given very strict instructions not to say what they'd actually done. So, for example, the man in charge of counterfeiting, a Colonel Yamamoto, he wrote an entire book about Japanese counterfeiting in World War II. He did not discuss what he did at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan or what he did at the US Naval base in California. He just left that out of his book. But what little we can figure out from the sources that we have is that they were doing things along the lines of what they were doing at Naborito. So they were counterfeiting, they were forging. So they were forging documents. What kind of documents were they forging? Well, during the Korean War, they were forging things like the military notebooks that soldiers carried. They were forging probably military orders and whatever documents a soldier might have. Because during the war, Koreans from the US Side were running operations behind enemy lines in North Korea. And they needed to have Korean uniforms, North Korean uniforms. They needed to have the appropriate weapons, but they also needed to have the appropriate documents. And so the Naboo counterfeiters were working with the Americans, were creating these documents, and this work continued into the second half of the 60s. So we can conjecture, we don't know, but we can conjecture that after the Korean War, whatever, whatever, you know, events caught the attention or, you know, the requirements of the US Government, probably this is something else they worked on. So, I mean, we don't know really much, but we can imagine Southeast Asia was. Was a. An area of interest in that they would have been working on things related to, say, the Vietnam War. There's almost nothing on that.
- [33:01]
B
And to kind of close things off, I mean, how is the institute kind of seen in Japan today? I mean, you mentioned that there's an exhibition at the university, but like, I mean, is this history known in Japan much at all? How is it presented in this exhibition? I guess how well known is the Institute's work?
- [33:22]
C
You know, this. So the book I've just written is the first book in English on the Boruto. But in Japan it's been coming out for a while now. I think we started to see the first things published by veterans as early as the 50s or early 60s. And then in the last 20, 25 years or so, we've seen more research coming out, much of it from this museum that publishes reports based on their own research. So it's fairly well known in Japan. It's not unknown. And the view of it is, you know, it's not, obviously, it's not a source of. It's not a source of pride or anything like that. It's. It's, again, it's regrettable. It's. It's acknowledged that some of the things that were done there, you know, were in contravention of international law and morality. So it's presented in a very straightforward way, acknowledging, you know, what had happened.
- [34:29]
B
So I think that's a great place to end. Our conversation with Stephen Ricado, author of Japanese Spy Gear and Special How Naborato Science and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War. Stephen, I have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work, not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [34:52]
C
Well, again, thanks for having me. The book has already been published in Britain, so I assume it's at some of the bookstores there. It'll be coming out in the United States at the end of this month, and of course you can buy it online. It's Amazon's British operation. It already has it, and it's available at Amazon in the US and other online and retail places. For both books, you can find it online. And then for the next one, I'm not really sure yet, but I think I want to do something else involving Japanese intelligence, and this time maybe with a focus on Japanese radio intelligence, which isn't very well known. There's. Well, there was an organization in the Foreign Ministry in Japan called the Radio Room, which monitored primarily US And British radio broadcasts for intelligence purposes. So that might be the next one, but I'm not sure I can do that or not. But I'm interested in it.
- [36:01]
B
You can follow me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter at Nick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to AsiaReview of books.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookReviewsAsia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more authors at the New books number@newbooksnumber.com we're on life air Podcasts, apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends. Of course. Interviewing those running in around and about Asia. Next week, join us for interview with Justin Marozi, author of Captives and A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World. But before then, Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [36:37]
C
Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.