Shinoda, a military engineer who studied chemistry at Tokyo Imperial University, oversaw its growth to a peak of almost 1,000 employees, with the largest budget of the 10 numbered research institutes.

Shinoda, who by the end of the war achieved the rank of lieutenant general, and Major Shigeo Ban, who led a group in Section 2, later wrote that they looked to spy novels and movies for new ideas.

The Imperial Army used items produced by Noborito in a variety of operations, including special incendiary devices for raids on jungle camps in New Guinea and hydrogen cyanide for assassinations.

Reliable and compact shortwave radio equipment developed at the institute kept operatives and soldiers on Iwo Jima and Okinawa in contact with the mainland for months after the islands were captured by the U.S. in 1945.

Noborito also helped the Kempeitai (military police) in countering intelligence threats across the empire, developing equipment and techniques for examining fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, and tooth marks; inspecting packages by X-ray; detecting secret resistance messages; and recording conversations in the open and over the telephone.

One weapon that did not come to fruition was the microwave death ray, a project started in 1939; after the move to Nagano Prefecture in 1945, the institute's researchers built a never-used parabolic antenna 10 metres (33 ft) in diameter, intended to bring down U.S.