A student fighter pilot four weeks into his posting, with twenty-one hours on type, was holding formation on his instructor at 28,000 feet over northern Japan. He saw the airliner about two seconds before it hit him, in his four o’clock.

His right wing root struck the left tip of the Boeing 727’s tailplane. The 727 lost its elevator, dived, exceeded the speed of sound and broke up at around 15,000 feet. All 162 people aboard died.

The fighter went into a flat spin. Centrifugal force stopped him reaching the ejection lever. He noticed the canopy was gone, unbuckled his harness, climbed out by hand, and parachuted into a paddy field. He was the only person out of 163 to survive the day.

Two Aircraft, Photographed Days Before

Both aircraft in this accident were photographed shortly before it, and both photographs survive.

JA8329 was a Boeing 727-281 built in March 1971, delivered to All Nippon Airways the same month, and photographed at Haneda in May. When it broke up it had 865 hours and 56 minutes on the airframe.

The fighter was photographed at Matsushima on 25 July 1971 — five days before the collision.

Flight 58 was running forty-five minutes late because the inbound service had been late. It began taxiing at 13:25 and took off at 13:33. The two Sabres, callsign Lilac Charlie, had left Matsushima at about 13:28.

The 727 passed the Hakodate beacon at 13:46 at 22,000 feet, turned for Matsushima and climbed. It was on airway J11L, cleared to flight level 280, on autopilot, at 487 knots true, heading 189 degrees.

The Rules the Trainee Was Never Told

The Matsushima detachment had its own rules, and they were explicit. A band nine kilometres either side of the J11L centreline, between 25,000 and 31,000 feet, was a flight-restricted zone in which training was forbidden except where unavoidable.

The instructor, First Lieutenant Tamotsu Kuma, aged 31, continued training without noticing he had drifted out of the training area and into the airway. That is the official primary cause.

The trainee, Sergeant Yoshimi Ichikawa, aged 22, had enlisted in 1968, been posted to the 1st Air Wing in May 1971 and to the Matsushima detachment on 1 July — four weeks earlier. He had twenty-one hours on the F-86. He was flying fluid-four formation, concentrating on holding position on his leader.

The ANA crew probably saw the fighter at least seven seconds before impact. Analysis of Captain Saburo Kawanishi’s boom-microphone keying showed he gripped the control wheel hard seven seconds out, and again two and a half seconds out. They took no avoiding action. The official finding is that they did not expect a collision.

The 727 carried no cockpit voice recorder. The captain’s emergency call survives only because his transmission on 135.9 MHz was overheard by two other aircraft. He made it nine seconds after the impact. The official report notes that the second half of the transmission ends in an undecipherable sound that can only be taken as a scream.

Wreckage fell over about six kilometres by six. There was no post-crash fire. One person on the ground was hurt: an 81-year-old woman, when a wheel came through her roof.

Of the 155 passengers, 125 were travelling as a single party — 122 members of a bereaved-families association from Fuji in Shizuoka, on a Hokkaido tour, plus three travel-agency staff. Their families had already lost someone to a war.

AP Archive footage filmed at the wreckage site on 30 July 1971.

Twelve Years of Courts

Both pilots were arrested thirty-three hours after the accident and charged with professional negligence causing death.

Morioka District Court, 11 March 1975: Kuma four years’ imprisonment, Ichikawa two years and eight months, neither suspended.

Sendai High Court, 9 May 1978: Kuma’s appeal dismissed; Ichikawa acquitted. The court found he had never been told where the temporary training area was, or where jet route J11L ran, so no duty to fix his position arose — and the 727 had been outside his field of attention from twenty-nine seconds before impact, so the outcome was not foreseeable.

Supreme Court, 22 September 1983: Kuma had breached his lookout duty, but the sentence was excessive. Reduced to three years, suspended for three. And the court said why.

No senior officer was ever indicted.

Kuma lost his job automatically under the Self-Defense Forces Act, declined to seek a retrial, never flew professionally again and died in 2005. Ichikawa transferred from fighters to search-and-rescue aircraft and spent the rest of his career saving people, retiring in October 2003.

He had also, in 1971, put his finger on the systemic problem.

¿Qué cambió?

The Director-General of the Defense Agency, Keikichi Masuhara, resigned on 1 August 1971, twenty-seven days into the job. The Chief of Staff of the Air Self-Defense Force, General Yasuhiro Ueda, resigned on 10 August after forty days in post — and then went to visit the families of all 162 victims, one household at a time, to apologise.

Eight days after the crash, the government’s Central Traffic Safety Council issued an emergency outline of aviation safety measures requiring complete separation of JASDF training airspace from civil airways, public notification of training areas by agreement between the Defense Agency and the Ministry of Transport, and expansion of positive-control airspace.

The amended Civil Aeronautics Act followed in October 1975. It banned aerobatics and training flight in controlled airspace, imposed a statutory lookout duty and a near-miss reporting duty, mandated transponders and flight recorders — and applied all of it to Self-Defense Force aircraft, which had previously been exempt.

There had been no air route surveillance radar covering the Tōhoku region in 1971. Airway control was non-radar, based on pilots reporting their positions and a controller plotting them on a map board. The accident triggered a national radar rollout that took until June 1991 to complete.

And there had been no standing accident investigation body. An ad-hoc commission was set up in the Prime Minister’s Office, reported in July 1972, and recommended in its fifth point that an independent investigation commission be made permanent. Japan’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission — the ancestor of today’s JTSB — was established in 1974.

The Chunichi News cinema newsreel from August 1971.

The Forest of Requiem

The site was laid out as a memorial called the Forest of Requiem, and annual services were held there until the 33rd anniversary in 2003. It was rebuilt in 2019 ahead of the fiftieth anniversary, with a new Tower of Prayer for Aviation Safety positioned so that visitors face Mount Fuji — because most of the dead came from Fuji City. In 2020 it was renamed Mori no Shizuku Park.

Recovered wreckage — window frames, seats, part of an engine intake, duralumin skin — is displayed at ANA’s Group Safety Education Center at Haneda. More pieces were found buried on a slope near the site as recently as 2006. ANA designates July every year as its safety promotion month.

One postscript is worth recording, because it says something about how institutions absorb this kind of thing. In October 1986, when Kuma’s suspended sentence expired, a JASDF pilots’ fraternity held an encouragement party for him in Fukuoka. Officers flew thirteen Self-Defense Force aircraft to Kasuga air base to attend, logging the sorties as training flights. Forty people were disciplined, including the Administrative Vice-Minister of Defense and the Chief of Staff of the Air Self-Defense Force.

Sources: Official aircraft accident investigation report, reprinted in the Journal of the Japan Society for Aeronautical and Space Sciences 21(238), 1973; Morioka District Court, Sendai High Court and Supreme Court of Japan judgments; TIME, 9 August 1971; Asahi Shimbun; Aviation Safety Network; ANA Group Safety Education Center; Japanese Wikipedia.