of Port Arthur. There was an early interest in equipment for radio direction-finding, for use in both navigation and military surveillance. The Imperial Navy developed an excellent receiver for this purpose in 1921, and soon most of the Japanese warships had this equipment. In the two decades between the two World Wars, radio technology in Japan made advancements on a par with that in the western nations. There were often impediments, however, in transferring these advancements into the military. For a long time, the Japanese had believed that they had the best fighting capability of any military force in the world. The military leaders, who were then also in control of the government, sincerely felt that the weapons, aircraft, and ships that they had built were fully sufficient and, with these as they were, the Japanese Army and Navy were invincible. In 1936, Japan joined Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in a Tripartite Pact. Technology background Radio engineering was strong in Japan's higher education institutions, especially the Imperial (government-financed) universities. This included undergraduate and graduate study, as well as academic research in this field. Special relationships were established with foreign universities and institutes, particularly in Germany, with Japanese teachers and researchers often going overseas for advanced study. The academic research tended toward the improvement of basic technologies, rather than their specific applications. There was considerable research in high-frequency and high-power oscillators, such as the magnetron, but the application of these devices was generally left to industrial and military researchers. One of Japan's best-known radio researchers in the 1920s–1930s era was Professor Hidetsugu Yagi. After graduate study in Germany, England, and America, Yagi joined Tohoku University, where his research centered on antennas and oscillators for high-frequency communications. A summary of the radio research work at Tohoku University was contained in a 1928 seminal paper by Yagi. Jointly with Shintaro Uda, one of Yagi's first doctoral students, a radically new antenna emerged. It had a number of parasitic elements (directors and reflectors) and would come to be known as the Yagi-Uda or Yagi antenna. A U.S. patent, issued in May 1932, was assigned to RCA. To this day, this is the most widely used directional antenna worldwide. The cavity magnetron was also of interest to Yagi. This HF (~10-MHz) device had been invented in 1921 by Albert W. Hull at General Electric, and Yagi was convinced that it could function in the