Kate over Battleship Row

On the morning of 7 December 1941, 144 Nakajima B5N2 bombers, the aircraft the Allies would call Kate, flew in the attack on Pearl Harbor. One of them carried the raid’s commander, Mitsuo Fuchida, and a high-level bomber from the carrier Hiryu was credited with sinking the battleship Arizona. In the months that followed B5Ns helped sink the carriers Lexington and Hornet. The historian René Francillon judged the B5N2 the most modern aircraft of its type in any navy when the Pacific War began.

A naval officer who learned to fly with Curtiss

The company behind it began with a farmer’s son from Gunma. Chikuhei Nakajima graduated from the naval engineering school, piloted Japan’s first airship in 1911, and learned to fly at Glenn Curtiss’s school in the United States. In 1917 he resigned his commission and, with backing from the textile maker Seibei Kawanishi, opened Japan’s first aircraft company in his home town of Ōta. The partners split in 1919, and Nakajima Aircraft took its first order, for 20 aircraft, the same year.

The army’s fighter house

Nakajima became the Imperial Japanese Army’s fighter house. The Ki-27 of 1936 was built 3,368 times; the Ki-43 Hayabusa, Allied code name Oscar, 5,919 times; the Ki-44 Shoki interceptor 1,225 times; and the late-war Ki-84 Hayate, which entered service in 1944, 3,514 times. Nakajima also made engines: its Sakae radial powered both its own Ki-43 and Mitsubishi’s A6M Zero, and Nakajima built Zeros and their floatplane version, the A6M2-N, as well.

The founder who opposed the war

Chikuhei Nakajima himself had left the company to his brother in 1931 to enter politics, serving as railway minister from 1937 to 1939. According to his biographers he was strongly critical of the decision to go to war with the United States, warning of American industrial power, and was furious when the military abandoned his project for a bomber that could reach North America. After the surrender he was briefly a minister again, then held at Sugamo Prison as a suspect before being paroled in 1947.

From Hayate to Subaru

American bombers wrecked the Ōta plant on 10 February 1945 and the Koizumi plant that April. Days before the surrender, on 7 August 1945, the twin-jet Kikka became the first Japanese aircraft to fly on turbojet power. The occupation then banned aircraft work and broke the company up. Its engineers helped build Japan’s car industry, and in 1953 the pieces regrouped as Fuji Heavy Industries, maker of the Subaru car, which renamed itself Subaru Corporation in 2017.

Factories

• Ōta plant · Ōta, Gunma — Badly damaged by US bombing on 10 February 1945; now a Subaru plant
• Koizumi plant · Gunma Prefecture — Damaged on 3 April 1945
• Musashino plant · Tokyo

People

• Chikuhei Nakajima · founder — 1884–1949; railway minister 1937–1939
• Ryoichi Nakagawa · engine engineer — Later helped build Japan’s car industry

Records and firsts

• Kikka, 7 August 1945: first Japanese aircraft to fly under turbojet power