Noborito Laboratory (IJA 9th Technical Research Institute)

The Noborito Laboratory was the Imperial Japanese Army's institute for researching and developing equipment for covert warfare, located on the Ikuta hills in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture. The Army Science Research Institute established an experimental station here in 1937; it was expanded in 1939 into the Noborito branch, which took up full-scale work on intelligence and subversion equipment, and in October 1942 it was reorganized as the Ninth Army Technical Research Institute. "Noborito Laboratory" was a cover name. By the end of the war it had about 100 buildings and roughly 1,000 personnel.

The institute had four divisions. The first worked on physics-based weapons such as balloon bombs, clandestine radio equipment and a so-called "death ray"; the second on poisons, drugs, biological agents and spy cameras; the third on economic warfare, producing counterfeit currency and forged passports; and the fourth on manufacturing and testing the others' designs. The laboratory also collaborated with Unit 731.

Its best-known product was the balloon bomb (Fu-Go): hydrogen balloons of paper and konjac paste carrying incendiary and explosive charges on the high-altitude westerlies toward North America. A prototype was completed in November 1943, and between November 1944 and April 1945 about 9,300 were released from three sites on the Pacific coast. In May 1945 six civilians in Oregon were killed when they came upon a fallen balloon bomb. In the economic operation against China known as Operation Sugi, the third division printed counterfeit Chinese banknotes with a face value of about four billion yen, of which some three billion are said to have entered circulation.

In 1945 the laboratory was dispersed to Nagano, Hyogo and Fukui prefectures to escape air raids, and on Japan's defeat its documents and evidence were ordered destroyed. Meiji University acquired the Ikuta site in 1950 for what is now its Ikuta Campus. On 29 March 2010 the university opened the Meiji University Noborito Laboratory Museum for Peace Education in a surviving laboratory building (Building 36, formerly used by the second division). It displays a balloon-bomb model, counterfeit notes and documents, and explains how science was mobilized for war. An animal memorial stone, a former shrine and ammunition stores also survive on campus. Admission is free; the museum normally opens Wednesday to Saturday, and visitors should check the university's calendar.