In the last 2 months of the war the Japs finally figure out how to use radar to direct AAA gunfire. Wow. Page 15.
I had missed that—thanks for pointing it out.
Until the planes started showing up in force in late 1944, it never occurred to the Japanese that they would have to.
You have to remember that the Japanese were firmly convinced, as a result of the failure of Kublai Khan in the middle ages, that no foreign force would ever be able to do appreciable damage to the Japanese home islands, that the gods would keep such invaders from succeeding. By the time they were disavowed of the notion, their resources were so spent that setting up such technology would have been difficult.
There were two things that happened in 1945 that the Japanese never ever expected. The first was that they were defeated in a humiliating manner. The second was that their conquerors essentially let them go--other than the military leadership--without any imposed penalty. For us this was a combination of Christian forgiveness and the realization that we needed Japan in the face of the communist threat, but for them was an even greater humiliation, because it did not give them a chance to expiate their guilt through suffering. It is why their children despised us in the 1980s when it looked to all like Japan was going to conquer the world economically--but the Baby Boomer grandchildren of the militarists, who now run the government and the businesses, are no longer tied to the war guilt, and they deal with America as both an ally and an equal, a relationship that is bound to improve when the present resident of the White House ceases his residence.
And one more thing. There was an interesting, if saddening, tangent to the US humiliation of Japan in the women's World Cup on Sunday. There were a million Twitter references to the win, but just as many to Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (cf. here). That fish was fried 70 years ago; we have more important fish to fry today. The Japanese were the seconds biggest bastards of the first half of the 20th century, with the Stalinists being the first; they both made the Nazis look like pipsqueaks, and the Japanese deserved everything that happened to them and more. But it is essentially impossible, except in the sense that we are all in sin, to see the Japanese ever doing it again. When I cannot sleep at night, it is because of what I think the jihadists may do to my children, or what the totalitarian left is already doing to my children, not because of the resurrection of a notorious Nippon.