The institute's origins trace to 1919, when the Imperial Japanese Army established a military science research center in Tokyo for basic technology development. In 1927, a new section for covert warfare was added under Captain Shinoda, a military engineer trained in chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University. The section outgrew its Tokyo quarters, and in 1939 a purpose-built facility rose in the Noborito area of Tama-ku, Kawasaki, in Kanagawa Prefecture. The location offered a key advantage: proximity to the capital while sitting across the Tama River, providing a buffer of distance and discretion. By the start of the Pacific War, the compound sprawled across multiple acres and contained laboratories, a manufacturing plant, and surrounding fields for testing. Shinoda, who would rise to the rank of lieutenant general, oversaw the entire operation.

Research at Noborito was divided into four rigidly compartmentalized sections. Section 1, commanded by Major General Sueki Kusaba, pursued the most ambitious projects: the Fu-Go balloon bombs that would carry incendiary payloads on the jet stream to North America, radio communications equipment, land mines, and even experimental death rays. Section 2, under Colonel Sakura Yamada, handled the spy craft -- secret inks, specialty papers, poisons, biological agents, miniature cameras, and microdots. Section 3, led by Colonel Kenzo Yamamoto, focused on economic warfare, producing materials for counterfeit foreign currencies and forged documents. Section 4, under Colonel Masao Hatao, manufactured whatever Sections 1 and 2 designed. The secrecy was so thorough that workers in one section often had no idea what the others were building.

Of all Noborito's projects, the Fu-Go balloon bomb remains the most audacious. The concept was elegantly simple: hydrogen-filled paper balloons carrying incendiary and antipersonnel bombs, launched into the jet stream to travel roughly 6,000 miles across the Pacific to North America. The Japanese military launched over 9,000 of these balloon bombs between November 1944 and April 1945. Several hundred reached North American soil, landing in locations from Alaska to Mexico. The campaign caused minimal physical damage, but it achieved one tragic result: in May 1945, six people -- a woman and five children -- were killed by a balloon bomb near Bly, Oregon, making them the only confirmed casualties of enemy action on the continental United States during the war. The weapon was a product of Noborito's Section 1, born from the same institute whose researchers freely admitted drawing inspiration from fiction.

Japan's surrender in August 1945 ended Noborito's operations, and the compound's wartime purpose was carefully obscured in the years that followed. In 1950, the complex was repurposed as the Ikuta campus of Meiji University, its laboratories converted to lecture halls and faculty offices. For decades, few students walking those grounds knew what had been built and tested there. The reckoning came slowly. In 2010, the Noborito Institute for Peace Education opened on the campus, preserving artifacts and documents from the facility's covert history. Three years later, in 2013, a documentary film titled Army Noborito Laboratory brought former employees before the camera for the first time, capturing firsthand accounts of the work conducted behind those walls. Today the museum stands as a quiet counterpoint to the campus life surrounding it -- a reminder that the buildings where students now study once housed one of the war's strangest and most secret arsenals.