From the Yagi antenna to Jun-ichi Nishizawa’s optical communication technology, this essay exposes how Japan repeatedly sabotaged its own genius.
It reveals a fatal mindset shared by Japan’s Patent Office and Asahi Shimbun—blind reverence for the West and a failure to judge substance.

October 1, 2016
The following continues from the previous chapter.
Emphasis in the text is mine.
The same was true when Yagi Hidetsugu, a professor at Tohoku University, invented the directional antenna for ultra-shortwave radio.
Patents were granted in Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In the United States, its usefulness was immediately confirmed through applications such as nighttime aircraft guidance and radar reception.
In Japan, however, the military dismissed it as “madness to emit radio waves oneself” and refused even to conduct experiments.
The Patent Bureau followed suit and, in 1941, refused to renew the patent.
In February of the following year, after the fall of Singapore, Japan discovered that all the British radar equipment it had captured functioned using Yagi antennas.
Around the same time, Takeshi Takei of what is now TDK invented the non-metallic magnetic material ferrite and obtained a patent.
If applied to an aircraft’s surface, it could produce a stealth fighter.
After the war, however, Philips used its position as a victorious nation to demand that the Japanese government renounce the ferrite patent, and the Patent Office obligingly signed away the rights.
The Patent Office resembles Asahi Shimbun in that it cannot judge the merits of things, yet regards white people as gods.
In the year of the Tokyo Olympics, Nishizawa Jun-ichi, a professor at Tohoku University, applied for a patent on a revolutionary optical communication technology.
The Patent Office rejected the application, citing “defective formatting” and “meaning unclear.”
Nishizawa resubmitted it twenty times, but each time a different pretext was raised.
He even took the matter to court, but after twenty years of dispute, the patent application was never approved.
Around the same time, Charles Kao, an old acquaintance of Nishizawa, went to the United States and published the same paper.
He later received the Nobel Prize for it.
Meanwhile, the American company Corning also obtained a patent based on technology strikingly similar to Nishizawa’s and used that patent to sue Japanese companies that adopted the Nishizawa method, earning enormous profits.
This is a prime example of how Japan’s intelligence was crushed by incompetent Japanese themselves.
To be continued.