Japanese Spy Gear & Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and 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.” – Asian Review of Books

The technicians of the 9th Army Technical Research Institute, known as the Noborito Research Institute, toiled in the shadows of the Second World War to develop spy gear and special weapons for the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). Their espionage devices, including secret inks, bugging devices, and miniature cameras, helped the Army’s dreaded Kempeitai and the shadowy Yama Agency counter foreign spies and track domestic dissent. Operatives of the IJA’s Nakano School for intelligence operatives and commandos took the equipment into the field with them. Noborito’s forgers reproduced Chinese currency in an operation to wreck China’s economy. Scientists and technicians tested biological weapons on Chinese prisoners as part of a top-secret project fielded by the IJA’s infamous Unit 731 and developed a virus into a weapon to strike at America’s cattle herds. Others developed bombing balloons to attack the American heartland, a target that lay far beyond Japan’s reach by conventional means. Stephen Mercado provides, in this first book in English on an intelligence organization little known outside Japan, an absorbing account of Noborito’s activities.

The author further recounts how, in the shadows of Occupied Japan, Noborito veterans entered US military service in secret, then applied their skills to operations during the Korean War and for years afterwards in the Cold War. Other veterans applied their skills to rebuilding Japan and turning the vanquished empire into a postwar industrial power. This story is one of talented technicians who served their country in war and peace.