Tachikawa Airfield History: The 2:12 a.m. Flight to London, 1937

At 2:12 a.m. on 6 April 1937 a Japanese-built plane left Tachikawa for London. The story of Tachikawa Airfield, once Tokyo’s gateway to the sky.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

6 April 1937, 2:12 and 4 seconds in the morning. Barely two hours into the new day, an aircraft lifted off from Tachikawa Airfield. It was the Kamikaze-go of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, and it was bound for London. On the afternoon of the fourth day it landed at Croydon Aerodrome in London, and a Japanese-built aircraft had set a world record between Tokyo and London.

A word about the name, before anything else. Kamikaze means “divine wind,” a phrase from Japanese history. This plane carried it in 1937, years before the word became attached, in the last part of the Second World War, to the suicide attacks it is known for abroad today. The plane in this story was on a goodwill flight.

How many people living in Tachikawa (立川), a city in west Tokyo, know this story? There is a slightly meaner question, too. The Kamikaze-go took off from Tachikawa. So when it came home after a tour of Europe, where did it land? Not Tachikawa. Haneda.

Why did it leave from Tachikawa, and why did it not come back to Tachikawa? And why in the middle of the night? Packed into those questions are the few years when Tachikawa was Japan’s front door to the sky, and the reasons that door moved east. I decided to follow, through the documents, the people who gathered on the airfield’s open grass and the two men who flew from it.

The Kamikaze-go and Tachikawa Airfield: take-off at 2:12 a.m., 6 April 1937

The flight had a clear purpose. According to the encyclopaedia, the Asahi Shimbun planned a liaison flight linking Asia and Europe, ostensibly to celebrate the coronation of King George VI in London on 12 May 1937. At the time there was no scheduled air route between Japan and Europe. What is more, a flight from Tokyo to London meant flying into headwinds. A French attempt to fly between Paris and Tokyo in 100 hours had failed again and again.

The aircraft was the second prototype of the Ki-15, a reconnaissance plane Mitsubishi was developing for the army. The Asahi Shimbun asked the army to release it, and the army agreed. It was an all-metal, low-wing monoplane designed with speed above everything else. It carried the registration J-BAAI.

A first departure was attempted on 2 April, but bad weather forced a return. At the second attempt, on 6 April, the Kamikaze-go left Tachikawa at 2:12 and 4 seconds a.m. According to the encyclopaedia’s article on the life of the pilot, Masaaki Iinuma, after take-off it made a celebratory pass over the Murayama Reservoir, passed Omaezaki at 2:55 a.m. and the Kii Peninsula at 3:08. A plane that had just left Tachikawa first went to circle a lake in the Sayama Hills to the north and say hello. A greeting before dawn: the lake must have been surprised too.

According to the encyclopaedia’s entry on Iinuma, there were eleven stopovers: Taipei, Hanoi, Vientiane, Calcutta, Jodhpur, Karachi, Basra, Baghdad, Athens, Rome and Paris. According to Azumino City’s profile of him, the distance flown was 15,357 km, the time taken 94 hours, 17 minutes and 56 seconds, the actual flying time excluding refuelling and naps 51 hours, 19 minutes and 23 seconds, and the average speed 300 km/h. Sources differ on whether it reached London on 9 or 10 April. The encyclopaedia gives the afternoon of 9 April, local time, and a paper by a Teikyo University researcher also says it reached Croydon at 3 p.m. on 9 April, the fourth day.

According to the encyclopaedia, crowds overflowed at Croydon and, before that, at Le Bourget in Paris. The two men were awarded the Légion d’honneur by the French government. A British aviation magazine is said to have praised, with surprise, a long-distance record set by Japanese airmen in an aircraft and engine made entirely in Japan.

What I want to see is Tachikawa four days earlier. What was on the airfield at two in the morning? One photograph from the time, kept on Wikimedia Commons, shows men in hats and coats standing in the dark beside a plane marked “KAMIKAZE.” The caption says the weather has cleared and the airman Iinuma is preparing to depart. Every time I take an early flight I am afraid of oversleeping, so I cannot quite imagine how it feels to set off for the far side of the world at two in the morning.

The plane was flown by a young man of 24 and a flight engineer of 36.

Masaaki Iinuma and Kenji Tsukagoshi: the boy who looked out of the classroom window, and the engineer with an English mother

The pilot, Masaaki Iinuma, was born on 2 August 1912 in Toyoshina-Hosogaya, Nagano Prefecture, now part of Azumino City. According to the encyclopaedia, in 1924, from his primary-school classroom, he watched an aviator flying from Kakamigahara in Gifu to Matsumoto circle over his village. That, it is said, was the start of his longing for aeroplanes. A boy who was looking out of the classroom window flew halfway round the world thirteen years later. Before scolding a child for gazing outside during lessons, it may be worth pausing to think.

Iinuma graduated from the Tokorozawa Army Flying School in October 1931 and joined the Asahi Shimbun the following October. In April 1935, when a great earthquake struck Taiwan, he set a Japanese record for long-distance high-speed communication flight on a liaison flight between Taiwan and the Japanese mainland. At the time of the Kamikaze-go he was 24. The English-language encyclopaedia says this flight made Iinuma a national hero, hailed as “the Japanese Lindbergh.”

The flight engineer, Kenji Tsukagoshi, was born in Tokyo in 1900. His father was a lawyer from Gunma; his mother was an English nurse. According to the encyclopaedia, Tsukagoshi worked for many years as an engineer in the Asahi Shimbun’s aviation department, and at every event connected with the Kamikaze-go he always put Iinuma in front and kept himself in the shadow. Iinuma looked up to him, called him “Tsukagoshi-san,” and praised him as a researcher and a scholar, “probably the best flight engineer in Japan,” the same article says. His mixed parentage, it seems, was not made public during his lifetime.

Another anecdote survives about Tsukagoshi. To celebrate the Kamikaze-go’s success, Nissan presented him with a Datsun car. But Tsukagoshi had no driving licence. When he went to the police to ask, a licence was issued without fuss, on the grounds that a man who held a pilot’s licence could hardly be unable to drive a car. According to his son’s recollection, his driving was hair-raising, and he drove along sounding the horn. The engineer called the best in Japan up in the sky was just a beginner on the road.

The name “Kamikaze” was chosen from more than half a million entries

The plane’s name was chosen by public competition. According to the encyclopaedia, more than 500,000 entries came in. From them, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko picked “Kamikaze.” The Asahi also ran a competition in its pages for a song of support, and the winning entry was released as a record by Nippon Columbia. The design of the plane’s livery was by the painter Shingo Yamaji.

Half a million entries tell you about the fever of the time. More than 500,000 people racked their brains over the name of one aeroplane. And the fever did not stop at the name. In its related entries, the encyclopaedia says the ring name of the sumo wrestler Kamikaze Shoichi came from the Kamikaze-go. The composer Hisato Osawa wrote a piano concerto that year subtitled “Kamikaze Concerto.” A plane that left Tachikawa left its name in the sumo ring and the concert hall.

This is also the moment to remember the name of the man who waved the flag for the flight: Masaichi Midoro, a managing director of the Asahi Shimbun. According to the encyclopaedia, Midoro became interested in the sky in 1910, when he reported on the first aeroplane flight in Japan, and in 1933 he also took on the post of head of the aviation department. In 1937 he directed the Kamikaze-go’s flight to Europe. His name will appear again later in this article.

The Kamikaze-go by the numbers

• 2:12:04: the time it left Tachikawa. In the morning. Long before the first train.
• 500,000-plus: entries in the contest to name the plane. If someone read every single one, that job deserves a record too.
• 15,357: kilometres flown from Tachikawa to London. Nearly 40 per cent of the way around the Earth (about 40,000 km), in four days.
• 94 hours, 17 minutes, 56 seconds: from departure to arrival. Of that, 51 hours, 19 minutes and 23 seconds were spent actually flying. The rest was refuelling and naps.
• 11: cities where it landed on the way. From Taipei to Paris, almost every day was a connection.
• 24: the age of the pilot, Masaaki Iinuma.

Wayfarer’s detour quiz

After leaving Tachikawa Airfield and making a goodwill tour of Europe, the Kamikaze-go flew home to Japan. At which Tokyo airfield did it finally land? (A) Tachikawa Airfield (B) Haneda Airfield (C) Tokorozawa Airfield. The answer is revealed at the end.

By the time the Kamikaze-go took off, the airfield at Tachikawa was already reserved for the army. But only a few years earlier, it had been Japan’s civilian front door to the sky. I want to dig up the story of that time.

Tachikawa, capital of the sky: why it was chosen over Kawagoe and Kodaira

Why was an airfield built at Tachikawa in the first place? According to issue 15 of “Tachikawa Monogatari” (Tachikawa Stories), a newsletter published by the city’s history-compilation office, in 1921 the candidate sites for the army’s 5th Air Battalion included, besides Tachikawa, Kawagoe (now Kawagoe City in Saitama), Ogawa (now Kodaira City) and Kamimizo (now Sagamihara City in Kanagawa). Tachikawa was chosen from among them, and the airfield was built the next year, in 1922.

Had Kawagoe been chosen, the capital of the sky might be remembered under the name of the town known as “Little Edo”. The forks in history’s road sometimes run straight across the names of the towns we live in.

Construction used tractors, rare at the time, and woods, wild grassland and mulberry fields turned into an airfield. The newsletter also prints a sentence describing the landscape before construction. The airfield’s main gate was about 300 metres north of Tachikawa Station. Apart from the roads towards Sunagawa and Tokorozawa, it was almost all wild grassland and fields, very dark at night, a place even locals needed courage to approach. Today that area is the brightest station square in Tachikawa. On the North Exit at night, nobody is walking with courage.

The airfield quickly became a place for civilians too. In 1923, after the Great Kanto Earthquake, the Asahi Shimbun’s aviation department and others moved from Suzaki on Tokyo Bay to Tachikawa. In 1925 the Mikuni Aviation Research Institute, later the Mikuni Flying School, opened. A map from 1930 shows, around the airfield, the hangar of Japan Air Transport, the Mikuni Flying School, the Asahi Shimbun’s hangar and the Japan Flying School. The newsletter describes this as typical of the period of joint military-civilian use that lasted until 1933. Next to an army airfield, a newspaper, an airline and flying schools stood side by side.

Aircraft came from abroad, too. According to the city’s document “The History of Tachikawa Airfield,” in September 1927 a Soviet ANT-3 flew into Tachikawa, the first foreign aircraft to arrive there. Foreign aircraft followed one after another, and the newsletter says that in 1929 the Ministry of Communications designated Tachikawa an international airfield. With famous foreign aviators visiting one after another, the city writes, the name TACHIKAWA became known worldwide as a “capital of the sky.”

The same “History of Tachikawa Airfield” contains one photograph whose caption reads: the American “Miss Veedol,” the first aircraft to fly across the Pacific. In 1931, Pangborn and Herndon flew it non-stop across the North Pacific from Sabishiro Beach in Aomori to Washington State. According to the encyclopaedia, shortly after arriving in Japan the two were detained for flying around a no-fly zone set up to protect military secrets, which they did not know about. I could not confirm from the documents where this photograph was taken. But in the city choosing this aircraft for the page that tells the airfield’s story, I sense the pride of the era when Tachikawa was called the capital of the sky.

The town put its boom into song. According to the newsletter, in 1930 “Tachikawa Kouta,” a ditty celebrating the prosperity of Tachikawa as it buzzed around the airfield, was released. A hometown song for a town of aeroplanes.

Fares five times the train: Japan Air Transport and its “curious” passengers

Scheduled civilian flying in Japan began with a newspaper. According to a paper on a hundred years of Japanese aviation published in a Teikyo University bulletin, the Asahi Shimbun’s Tozai Teiki Kokukai (East-West Scheduled Air Association) began operating in January 1923, linking Tokyo and the Joto parade ground in Osaka via Hamamatsu. The Tokyo end was Suzaki, later Tachikawa. At first it carried only cargo, and the freight it took on was carried free. The aim was less profit than helping sell newspapers, and also testing the aeroplane as a new means of transport. According to the encyclopaedia, the association flew 4,009 times over six years, logging a total of 5,767 flying hours.

Then came aircraft that carried passengers. According to the same paper, new models such as the Dornier Komet, the Dornier Merkur and the Mitsubishi MC-1 all carried two crew and four passengers. The encyclopaedia says that in August 1928 the association began scheduled passenger service between Tachikawa and Osaka with a Dornier Komet, and that the fare was 35 yen, while a third-class ticket on the limited express train for the same route cost 7 yen. Travel by air cost five times the train.

The state stepped in. On 20 October 1928, with government backing, Japan Air Transport Co. was founded to handle all civilian air transport. Business heavyweights such as Eiichi Shibusawa and Junnosuke Inoue helped set it up. The East-West association was absorbed into it on 31 March the following year. According to the encyclopaedia, on 1 April 1929, when Japan Air Transport’s scheduled flights began, the Tachikawa airfield took the name “Tokyo Airfield.” (How that name later moved to Haneda is told in this series’ article on Koku Jinja, the aviation shrine.)

The city’s document records that in July 1929 Japan’s first scheduled civilian passenger service began between Tachikawa and Osaka. According to the encyclopaedia, the Tokyo–Osaka route opened at that time cost 35 yen, with an average flight time of about three hours. The company was a national-policy firm granted a monopoly over Japan’s skies, but the paper is frank about its reality. Demand was very low; business trips by civil servants, policy-company staff and military personnel made up more than a third of passengers, and the rest, it is said, were almost all flying out of curiosity. The company fell into financial trouble and came to depend on government subsidies for 90 per cent of its total income. Over nine years, from 1928 to 1936, subsidies for domestic and international routes together reportedly reached 16.44 million yen.

Nearly two-thirds of the passengers were not on business or errands; they flew because they wanted to try it. There were people who paid five times the train fare to set off from a field in Tachikawa for a three-hour sightseeing ride to Osaka. Somehow I find the phrase “out of curiosity” something to be proud of. The history of Japan’s passenger aircraft began in Tachikawa, together with people pushed along by curiosity.

But Tachikawa’s civilian sky did not last long. In August 1931, Japan Air Transport’s passenger planes and others moved to Haneda, and according to the city’s chronology, in September 1933 civil aviation as a whole moved to Haneda. The newsletter says that once Haneda was completed and civil aviation moved, Tachikawa Airfield became exclusively military. By 1937, when the Kamikaze-go took off, this was already an army airfield. After the civilian front door to the sky had moved east, a civilian newspaper’s plane took off from its old nest for the first time in a long while. So where did the people in that newspaper’s hangar go afterwards? The answer leads to the name of an airline you see today at Haneda and Narita.