The U.S. Library of Congress has two books of notes written by two scientists involved in Japan's unsuccessful attempt to develop atomic bombs during the war, it was learned recently.
Sakae Shimizu and Yoshiaki Uemura worked under Bunsaku Arakatsu, a professor at Kyoto Imperial University -- now Kyoto University -- ordered by the Imperial Japanese Navy to develop atomic bombs, according to the two notebooks, copies of which were obtained by Kyodo News.
The notebooks were seized by the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces during the postwar Occupation. They have been kept with other wartime Japanese documents and not sorted and indexed to date at the library in the U.S. capital.