Built for the Army

Kokusai was a creature of Japan’s war economy. Nippon Kōkū Kōgyō was founded in 1937 and in 1941 merged with Kokusai Kōgyō to form Nippon Kokusai Kōkū Kōgyō. Its customer was almost entirely the Imperial Japanese Army, and its specialities were the unglamorous aircraft an army needs: trainers, light transports, liaison planes and gliders.

Gliders and a Japanese Storch

Its best-known design, the Ki-76, answered a 1940 Army request for an artillery spotter and is often compared with the German Fieseler Storch, though Japan had no Storch to copy until 1941 and the Ki-76 used Fowler flaps instead. In trials against an imported Storch it won on most counts except landing distance. Kokusai built 937 at Hiratsuka, some fitted with arrester hooks and depth charges for the Army’s own escort carrier, the Akitsu Maru. It also built 1,037 Ki-86s, licence copies of the Bücker Jungmann, and about 700 Ku-8 transport gliders, used in the Philippines.

From aircraft to Nissan bodies

Defeat forced a change of trade. In February 1946 the company was renamed Nikkoku Kōgyō and turned to railway vehicles and car bodies, completing its first bus body that November. A successor, Shin Nikkoku Kōgyō, took over the business in 1949 and began working with Nissan in 1951. The company is today Nissan Shatai, still headquartered in Hiratsuka.

工場

• Hiratsuka plant · Hiratsuka, Kanagawa — Ki-76 production; today Nissan Shatai

人々

• Kozo Masuhara · designer — Led the Ki-76 design