Request for (English) sources: Nakajima Chikuhei, an important naval officer, industrialist, and politician.

by edwardtaughtme
y_sengaku

Well, if you drop the specification of 'English', there might be some chance, though I'm afraid that you have to stay in Japan to check the related sources/ references.

Asajima summarizes the basic source situation of Nakajima Aircraft industry as well as its President, Nakajima Chikuhei as following [Asajima 1985: 2] :

'It would be needless to say that the hither to dearth of the study on the Nakajima Company group should chiefly ascribed to the lack of (extant accessible) primary sources on the management of Nakajima group. We surmise that almost all of the management/ statistical sources of the Nakajima group had been not disclosed to the public due to the sole investment from the Nakajima family as well as the military secrecy, and they also went lost after WWII also without been seen'.

After the publishing Asajima's article, the remained sources seemed to be published by the Fuji Heavy Industries, Nakajima's successor (and now as Subaru Corp.) as: Fuji Heavy Industries Gunma Factory (ed.), Sources on Nakajima Chikuhei & Nakajima Aircraft Company, Ota: Fuji Heavy Industries Gunma Factory, 2001. If you are interested in Nakajima Air Company, you should at least check the literature published after this date or consulting the then unpublished sources in Fuji's Gunma factory as Asajima did.

There are certainly some memoirs by the engineers who worked at Nakajima Air Company in Japanese, but I'm unfortunately not sure whether any of them has been translated in English. On the other hand, there is at least one aerial shot of Nakajima's Musashino plant in western Tokyo taken by US airforce, as shown in Musashino City's homepage on the special lecture on Nakajima's factory, with reference no.

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