Japanese Intelligence Operations in Scandinavia during World War II

Japanese intelligence operations in Scandinavia became active after the collapse of Poland in September 1939. Both the Japanese and the Finns exchanged information on Soviet military cryptography and tried to decrypt the enemy's codes. As a result of the cooperation, the Finns succeeded in decrypting Soviet naval code at the beginning of the Continuation War. Onodera Makoto, Japanese military attaché in Sweden, collected a lot of valuable information on the Allied Powers in the neutral country, though the General Staff in Tokyo disregarded them as unreliable.     

Illuminating the Victorians

ABSTRACT

From the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese roboticists have observed specific features in the physical designs of humanoid robots that cause users to react with either fear or affection. Analyzing the sources of these reactions, robotics egineers eliminated from robots those features that might trigger negative associations, and instead embedded their designs with cues to norms, theories, and cultural references valued by their society. By analyzing Nishimura Makoto’s building of an affable artificial human named Gakutensoku, Mori Masahiro’s discovery of the phenomenon of the ‘uncanny valley’, and Ishiguro Hiroshi’s current employment of cognitive, social, and psychological sciences to overcome the ‘uncanny’ impression of his robots, this essay claims that the development of the field of humanoid robotics in Japan was driven by concern with human emotion and cognition, and shaped by Japanese roboticists’ own associations with the social and intellectual environments of their time.