PDA

View Full Version : WW2 Imperial Japanese Naval Aviator still flying at 90 years old


GeeRam
19th Sep 2013, 20:02
One has to doff ones hat to the man :D

?Aviator god? still flying high at 90 - The Japan News (http://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0000617856)

NutLoose
19th Sep 2013, 20:04
I was going to say, I don't blame him, those kamikaze jobbies were buggers to land, but I won't :E

Ohh I did :p

Good on him, he's looking fit and obviously still enjoying life.




..

Dengue_Dude
19th Sep 2013, 20:06
Just shows the power of Positive Mental Attitude and a bit of moderation (apart from combat flying of course).

Best of luck to him.

newt
19th Sep 2013, 20:29
:DI just hope he can still park the aircraft after flight!!:;)

500N
19th Sep 2013, 20:38
Not a bad effort.

Robert Cooper
20th Sep 2013, 03:21
Great story. Long may he keep flying!

Bob C :ok:

Basil
20th Sep 2013, 10:53
We'd a ground eng in Japan who'd been a kamikaze pilot. Yeah, yeah, I know - but the war ended before he was used.

Flying Binghi
20th Sep 2013, 11:10
"...Asked about the secret of his vigor .. enjoy life without forgetting to be fashion-conscious..."

Heh, looks like he enjoys an occasional leg pull as well..;)










.

NutLoose
20th Sep 2013, 11:12
We'd a ground eng in Japan who'd been a kamikaze pilot. Yeah, yeah, I know - but the war ended before he was used.


Spare a thought for their instructors, they went through them like the divine wind, what was the saying?

"I'm only going to show you this once"

54Phan
20th Sep 2013, 13:15
It sounds like he flew the G4M "Betty", which had a number of uncomplimentary nicknames among the Japanese such as "Type 1 Lighter". Apparently a German aircraft designer (Heinkel, IIRC) toured the production line and couldn't believe that it only had two engines. It was a large, lightly armoured, relatively poorly armed bomber, which makes his survival even more laudable.

Fareastdriver
20th Sep 2013, 15:07
It was a large, lightly armoured, relatively poorly armed bomber, which makes his survival even more laudable.

There is a film of one carrying an Ohka (Baka) being disassembled by the US Navy.

NutLoose
20th Sep 2013, 22:08
Didn't Admiral Yamamoto meet his end in one shot down over the jungle..

54Phan
20th Sep 2013, 22:32
FED and Nutty, you are both right.

500N
20th Sep 2013, 22:38
"Didn't Admiral Yamamoto meet his end in one shot down over the jungle.."

I think so.

onetrack
21st Sep 2013, 02:29
The Mitsubishi G4M transport aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was shot down over Bougainville on the morning of 18th April 1943 by a squadron of 16 U.S. Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.
Thanks to U.S. Naval Intelligence cracking the Japanese Naval code, the U.S. military knew every detail of Yamamotos movements on his inspection tour of the Japanese forces in the Southern war zone.
Instructions to the U.S. military forces came directly from President Franklin Roosevelt, to "get Yamamoto".

Upon initial contact by the Lightnings of the two Mitsubishi G4M transports and their six escorting Mitsubishi A6M Zeroes, 1st Lt Rex T. Barber engaged with one G4M aircraft, which just happened to be the one carrying Admiral Yamamoto.
Barber pumped .50 cal rounds into the G4M until the port engine started to issue large amounts of smoke. He broke off the attack on this aircraft as it became obvious it was crippled and was going to crash into the jungle on Bougainville Island.

A Japanese SAR party found Yamamotos crashed G4M aircraft the following day. Yamamoto had been thrown clear of the crashed aircraft and was sitting upright, still strapped to his seat, under a tree.
Two .50 cal bullets, one through his left shoulder, and one through his skull, indicated he was dead before the G4M crashed.


Possibly the worst thing that Jun Takahashi would have endured - besides the guns of the Allies - was his reception and treatment on his return to Japan.
The code of Bushido treats all those who return alive from war defending the Emperor, as cowards, and lacking honour.

He would have received some pretty harsh treatment once he returned home, from those who still strongly believed in Bushido - which was a very large number of Japanese.

GreenKnight121
22nd Sep 2013, 06:13
Possibly the worst thing that Jun Takahashi would have endured - besides the guns of the Allies - was his reception and treatment on his return to Japan.
The code of Bushido treats all those who return alive from war defending the Emperor, as cowards, and lacking honour.

He would have received some pretty harsh treatment once he returned home, from those who still strongly believed in Bushido - which was a very large number of Japanese.

This is a severe mis-interpretation of the Code of Bushido... but then, much of how the Japanese Army had been conducting the war was a severe distortion and mis-interpretation of Bushido.

Expecting the civilian populace to correctly apply concepts they had not specifically studied, and which their leaders were mis-applying, is perhaps unrealistic.

TorqueOfTheDevil
24th Sep 2013, 11:23
It was a large, lightly armoured, relatively poorly armed bomber, which makes his survival even more laudable.


True, although better armed and armoured aircraft would also have suffered pretty horrendous losses when faced with the kind of defences which the Betty crews faced from 1942 onwards!

Wikipedia has a picture, on the page about the aircraft, showing a section of Bettys pressing home an attack through dense AA fire. The caption states that one of the aircraft shown is flown by Jun Takahashi.

File:GuadBettyAttackAug.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GuadBettyAttackAug.jpg)

ImageGear
24th Sep 2013, 12:52
Possibly the worst thing that Jun Takahashi would have endured - besides the guns of the Allies - was his reception and treatment on his return to Japan.

The code of Bushido treats all those who return alive from war defending the Emperor, as cowards, and lacking honour.


In the '80's I had the privilege of working with two unique Japanese men.

One was a young man who through virtually continuous study and dedication was selected to join our team of design engineers in the USA. His was not the easy route of the privileged, attending a good university with the surety of having a well paying post to move into - rather his was the route of self-improvement with which some of us are more familiar. I was given the responsibility to familiarise the small group with the technical design of the systems. During this time I learnt a lot about Japanese culture, tradition and code and he in turn shared some of his most personal experiences.

His father was a non-commissioned petty officer in the Navy but through conscription, had entered flight school late in the war. He was apparently a very good pilot and trained many young men who left his base never to be seen again. However, eventually he too joined the ranks of the embarked kamakazi on a carrier which left Japan as the war was about to end. While steaming to the point of launching the aircraft, the ceasefire occurred and they were ordered to return to port. (I believe three times as many kamakazi's were non-comms, as opposed to officers. Although they usually were promoted on success - postumously)

Many of the crews could not accept the order and either took off to perform the act or committed suicide in their quarters since they could not face the disgrace of returning home from their one way mission. His father did not commit suicide and he returned to the family home where he encountered the full extent of the disgrace which was upon his whole family. He lived a very lonely and bitter existence for a few years and died of heart problems at the age of (I seem to remember) 32. His son, who I trained did not feel the disgrace that the fathers generation felt but he was helpless to stop the decline and came to terms with the death of his father as an eventuality over which he had virtually no control. The culture, tradition and code were fully at work at that time and contributed to his death.

The second man was the chief systems designer and trained me. As a boy he lived with his family in the centre of Nagasaki city and he was walking to school with friends when the bomb was dropped :eek: but that is a story for another day. (He was slowly falling to pieces)

Imagegear

Yamagata ken
24th Sep 2013, 13:24
My late father-out-law was a cavalry man. Captured in Manchuria by the Soviets post WWII, he spent 3 years in a Siberian slave camp before being repatriated. On return he started a successful business in his pre-war trade: a patissierre. His best friend was in the infantry and abandoned in PNG. On his return, he built up a very successful car dealership. I live in Japan and the opinions expressed above don't square with my experience of Japanese society. I only live here among Japanese people. I must be reading the wrong books.

Basil
24th Sep 2013, 13:44
IIRC, Surrender or not, our engineer and his colleagues were walking out to go and do the biz when their boss came out and forbade them to continue.

onetrack
24th Sep 2013, 14:32
Well, perhaps I should have worded my previous post a little more clearly, to suit the pedants .. :(

"The code of Bushido, as practised by the Japanese Imperial Forces during WW2, treated all those who returned alive from the War defending the Emperor, as cowards, and lacking honour".

It was drilled into every WW2 Japanese soldier, that the only honorary way out of military loss that would end in surrender, was for every soldier to become a human bomb - or to run directly into enemy weapons with death a surety - or if all else failed - to commit seppuku.

For a Japanese soldier of WW2 to return home alive, was to commit loss of face on a scale unimaginable, and nearly always resulted in social disgrace and shunning.

The number of Japanese suicide bombers encountered by the AMF in the Pacific Islands (particularly New Britain) in the latter part of WW2 was testament to the ingraining of this interpretation of the code of Bushido.

"Even in the most desperate circumstances, 99 per cent of them prefer death or suicide to capture."

The unspeakable war and the savage Japanese soldiers who would never surrender | Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-481881/The)

Duncan D'Sorderlee
24th Sep 2013, 15:01
If I could be so bold as to bring the thread back towards old people fg: I was speaking to an elderly chap at a BoB cockers P recently (a former WW2 Mustang pilot) who informed me that he flew back to Scone (as pilot in command) a few months previously to celebrate the 70th anniversary of his first solo.

A top bloke. His Mrs (still going strong) was a WAAF at Northolt during the BoB.

Duncs:ok: