Frank A. Polkinghorn was a former AT&T and Bell Laboratories engineer. He was brought to Japan in 1948 to work in GHQ’s telecommunications division as a manager. See full title below.

Frank A. Polkinghorn, director of the Research and Development Division of the Civil Communications Section (CCS/R&D) (Natsume, 2021)

He was organizing Japanese research and development in telecommunications. It sounds like he was teaching engineering processes to the Japanese modeled after Bell Laboratories system. The Japanese were behind the Americans, but actually had decent knowledge lacking in advanced organizational development. There is also literature on his contributions to quality control. So it seems he is esteemed like Schewart and W. Edward Demming, former Bell employees who are influential among the Japanese and worked for GHQ. There appears to be a lot about him in electrical engineering journals.

Partner (1999) has a story of Polkinghorn leaving a Japanese scientist, Hisashi Watanabe, in his office with a stack of transistor documents. After asking if he could read them Polkinghorn denied this request, but then said he was leaving his for office for a while. Watanabe took advantage. GHQ policy seems to restrict information access to the Japanese and some of the GHQ scientists like Polkinghorn were brought to monitor the Japanese R&D to restrict war applications.

There were other GHQ personnel sharing transistor information with at least three leakers, not just Polkinghorn, according to Partner. One is unnamed. The other is below. Apparently there was a lot of hype about the transistors because there were many GHQ personnel telling Japanese scientists about it. Many Japanese scientists didn’t know anything about transistors until they were told about it. So I think this was something else than espionage, but something more benign. In addition GHQ was providing a lot of English material on transistor science such as science journals (Bell Labs was regularly supplying their journal to GHQ) and even mainstream media like Newsweek was reporting on it. It seems like the American public had access to a lot of transistor information, and GHQ openly supplied these media by leaving these publications in their ‘media centers’ available to anyone including Japanese scientists. So the top secret “clandestine” narrative might be overblown because it was not closed source, but more open source. Bell Labs disclosed the transistor in highly publicized press conference and began licensing it immediately. The Japanese ate up a lot of information.

In regards to this espionage narrative, according to Partner (1999) it looks like Harry Kelly was involved in a very similar story to the one described in the OP.

Komagata Sakuji, head of the Denki Shikenjo, reported to Harry Kelly of the ESS. Kelly, a young and idealistic scientist who found himself in a position of unexpected influence, is also acknowledged as a friend of Japanese science.^35 Soon after Bell Laboratories announced its invention of the transistor, Kelly handed Komagata a fifteen-page docment containing a detailed summary of the military briefing Bell Laboritories had held a week before its press conference. The summary had been prepared by a U.S. Air Force attendee. According to one of the Japanese teams that studied it, the officer had completely misunderstood the principle of the transistor. Nevertheless, the exchange of information testifies to the cooperation between Japanese scientists and their US supervisors.

Note Komagata is mentioned in the link above.

The overall is that it does not seem like espionage, but “cooperation” as Partner writes. Maybe sharing is the better word. Nothing nefarious it seems. Maybe just scientists ‘geeking’ out with other scientists. Perhaps they were boasting. The transistor technology hype was realistic, but it was not a technology in its complete shape. More below.

I want to mention that Masaru Ibuka founder of Sony (its predecessor company Tōtsūsho) was pivotal in transistor development. Ibuka bought a transistor license from Western Electric (AT&T/Bell) and developed an efficient manufacturing process based on Bell’s data. The yield was very low and thus rather inefficient making transistors rather expensive. Ibuka applied the transistors to radios miniaturizing them for first commercial use. Western actually only thought its uses were only for hearing aids. Western had been licensing out the transistor to US companies much earlier than Ibuka. The commercial usage was fairly limited in ‘wired’ technologies because it was unstable electrically and its short frequency range, but Ibuka advanced the wireless applications and broke through on semiconductor developments with Leo Esaki. So this dampens the notion the technology was fully understood since the key developer was a privateer who developed it independently.

I also want to mention electronics now in retrospect is a critical technology, but it was magical in the 1940s/50s as scientists and electronic hobbyists really only understood its truly potential applications. That is the sentiment in the literature. There are stories of people misunderstanding the potential like Partner describes in the above quote. The Japanese government was skeptical of Ibuka and this technology. They were gatekeeping the limited available dollars since Japan had few currency reserves and didn’t want to be wasteful on some random technology. Ibuka had to pay dollars for the Western license since the yen was still recovering from intense post-war inflation. In the end they relented after persuasion from Ibuka.

So I don’t think there is much narrative of clandestine industrial espionage. It does not seem like Polkinghorn and others were doing anything nefarious or even anything directly beneficial to the Japanese. In terms of critical importance, the transistor was no nuclear technology design or advanced weapons system, but just a technology with a lot of potential. In the end, the technology was “cutting edge” but there is a lot of nuance to that and its historical context. I think both parties (US/Japan) in the end benefitted because it made technological innovation more possible with many more people accessing the latest technology and creating industrial collaboration. The detriment might have been keeping it a secret.

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Sources

• Natsume, Kenichi (2021) Japan’s Engineering Ethics and Western Culture: Social Status, Democracy, and Economic Globalization
• Partner, Simon (1999) Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer
• Nakayama, Boulton, & Michael Pecht (1999) The Japanese electronics industry