From Nagoya

I Wanted To Design Fighter Crafts
That's right. At one point in my childhood was the dream job of being an aeronautical engineer for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and designing Fighter aircraft. Do it where there was a tradition for it; do it where they did these things right. Of course that dream job got replaced by the dream job of slugging thirdbaseman for the Yankees, but that's another story. After all, Mistubishi was the company that designed this craft below, the famous Zero Fighter.



As part of the current shoot we visited the Oye Factory of Mistubishi Heavy Industries, which is of course the heartland of aerospace technology in Japan. This is the very factory where the Zero Fighter was designed. In fact, I got to go into the building that was erected in 1928 that houses the first wind tunnel in Japan. It's the very wind tunnel used to test the Zero Fighter, and it's still there in tact.

In fact, let me re-phrase that a little. The only reason I know about wind-tunnels is because I read about it in books about the Zero Fighter. So in a sense I had visited the ur-wind-tunnel of my childhood. It's a personal shrine, if you stop to think about it.

Unfortunately you can't take any photographs in there so I don't have any nice pickies to share with you; but I did want you all to know that I actually inadvertently stepped into the birth place of the Zero Fighter as we interviewed . It was exciting.



The pickie above is a photo of the great Jiro Horikoshi who wrote about his travails in designing the Zero Fighter. He made it seem like a truly heroic endeavour in his book. I asked the rocket engineers what it was like working as a designer for Mistubishi and they they said it was a workplace steeped in tradition. One of them worked with somebody who worked on the Zero Fighter way back when and he recounted being told the story of how the then young engineer would draw up a section and shot it to Jiro Horikoshi, the team leader. Horikoshi would just rip up the plan without even reading it.
"Horikoshi-san didn't even tell him what was wrong with it. He just tore it to shreds."
"Gee, that sounds more like a medieval apprenticeship than a team designing cutting edge aviation technology," I replied.
"Well, it was like that before the war, they say."
No wonder they lost, and maybe that wasn't the worst thing to happen to the Japanese workplace culture after all.