Conclusions
Several curious facts stand out in this cursory overview of Japanese cryptological history. One is that the Japanese government did not bring in an outside expert to help with their codes until 1924. Considering all the other gaikokujin oyatoi (hired foreigners) brought in to assist with "modernization" in the Meiji period, it is striking that such an important field as cryptology would be ignored.
This suggests that the Japanese government in the first decades of the 20th century did not really understand the importance of cryptology for protecting communications. Such an attitude would hardly have been limited to Japan in the 1910s or 1920s --- despite their success at the Washington Naval Conference, and later public chastisement by Yardley, American codes remained weak right up to the early 1940s. However, even America, thanks to its ties to Europe, had a cryptological history and a reserve of talented people who understood the problems and the solutions. Japan does not seem to have had anyone like Yardley, much less a William Friedman.
The Japanese Army cryptologists, despite training with the Polish military for over ten years, originally developed substandard codes. Hara's system shows significant improvement and demonstrates an understanding of cryptography at least the same level as practiced by other major world powers in the early 1940s.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Cryptology From The 1500s To Meiji
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