Kurashi - News From Japan

If you have ever been to Tokyo, you must have taken the Yamanote Line around town. Here are the melodies for the different stations. Sometimes, when I have an hour to spare, I take the Yamanote Line one way around, but I do hate the recent all-video trains. Let's keep the stress level down, shall we. Please, less ads, more train pleasure. Still, the JR East Yamanote Line has to be the best service around.

The wonderful things that happen. Or not. In 1991, Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu was invited by American director Jim Jarmusch to write the original music for his film "Night on Earth", but his finished work was subsequently rejected by the director. The supposedly lost music by Takemitsu was aptly titled “L.A., New York, Paris, Rome, Helsinki” - five cities featured in Jarmusch’s film.

Amazing images from April, 1937 as the Kamikaze-go landed at Croydon, London. From my new friends at the HCAT Archives, Peter Skinner and Ian Forsyth. Record breaking flight from Tokyo. Can you spot Tsukagoshi climbing out of the airplane in the first picture? That's the easy one. Finding Iinuma in the last image may be more difficult, what with all the London policemen escorting him. He smiles a lot, holding on to a bunch of flowers, and is rather sun burnt from the long flight over the desert. Don't you think he was the happiest man on earth, that day. It inspired my wish to write about his long flight from Japan to Europe. And you can order my novel about it here, Kamikaze to Croydon . Bonus image: I took this photo of Iinuma Masaaki's pilot licence at his museum in Nagano:

First time I heard of this guy and his great story. Harry Ohara was born in Japan, studied at Waseda University in Tokyo, went to British India and worked for a newspaper. When war broke out, he joined the British Army. Later he flew after having started as a mechanic. Kyodo notes that he is thought to be the Royal Air Force's first - and only - Japanese pilot: O'Hara applied to become a pilot at exactly the right time, according to RAF Museum curator Peter Devitt. A portrait of an intense looking O'Hara stands out among the heroes -- the only Asian among the portraits -- that decorate the wall at the RAF Museum. More details at the Great War London blog , that notes (correctly) that he must have been flying for the Royal Flight Corps, not the RAF (RAF was formed on 1 April 1918): In March 1917, O’Hara transferred to the RFC as a 2nd-class air mechanic (the basic rank for RFC men – equivalent to his rank of private in the Middlesex Regiment).  He was soon ...

If you have read my novel, Kamikaze to Croydon, you know that our two Japanese flyers went straight from Karachi to Basra. Their Mitsubishi Ki-15 had that much power. Out in the desert, there were many other established aerodromes or airfields, but what were conditions there and what did they actually look like? You can order Kamikaze to Croydon here at Amazon as a paperback, and also at Kindle as an eBook. I hope you will also be kind enough to leave comments and rate it. Here is an excerpt: Our altitude was again near 3,000 metres, which the Ki-15 seemed to find most agreeable, no matter what the conditions were. We had Iran on our right, and there was Arabia proper and Oman, according to the new maps. Tsukagoshi read the names. We reached Musandam and the Strait of Hormuz, which was just 54 kilometres wide. I clearly recalled all we had back a few months ago was a terrible old chart, with no elevations indicated, and Charles Lindbergh’s new maps were such a revelation...

Update: And wrong I was. It was President Truman who had to deal with General MacArthur, as Pandamonium kindly points out in the comments.  Original post: Great video of the project to save the Columbine II and get it to fly again in 2018: ...Because this is the plane that took President-elect (correct me if I'm wrong) Dwight D. Eisenhower to South Korea in 1952, in order to stop General MacArthur, who was proposing atomic bombs all over the border inside Communist China,  Later in 1955, Eisenhower was promoting much the same as the New Look , a policy to expand American nuclear weapons, now against the Soviet Union. Image (left) from Ladies Love Taildragger s (Kurashi loves blog names like that!) Known as the Columbine II , this beautiful aircraft, a Lockheed Constellation, was the very first "Air Force One" and now it has been restored and flies again. From Warfare History Network : After World War II, Eisenhower went on to serve two terms as Pres...

Back when flying was a luxury, or at least a lot more comfortable than today (except for the smoking!). The destinations were a lot more exotic too... The Stratocruiser was flying from the US to Honolulu, Wake Island, and arrived at Haneda in Tokyo. Pan Am started flying DC4s to Japan in 1947 and the B-377 was introduced in 1949. 10 years later in 1959, they introduced the B-707 jets which were much faster than the old propeller planes. Here is a longer promotional film about the Stratocruiser, with some interesting history about the civilian mail services that started flying in the late 1920s.