World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseBorn in Fujioka, Japan in 1903, Jiro Horikoshi attended Fujioka High School in his home town and First Higher School, Japan in Tokyo, Japan. In 1927, he graduated from the Aviation Laboratory of the University of Tokyo with an engineering degree and shortly after gained employment at the Mitsubishi Nagoya Aircraft Manufacturing Plant. As a member of the design staff, he played a junior role in the design of the 1MF10 monoplane in 1933. The first major project in which he had a leading role was the A5M design, which took flight in 1935. It would be his second project, however, that would ensure his name in history: Starting in 1937, he led the design of Prototype 12, which, when completed in 1940, would be designated A6M Zero. He also played a role in the J2M Raiden and A7M Reppu designs. After the war, in 1953, Horikoshi and Masatake Okumiya jointly authored Reisen: Brief History of Japanese Naval Aviation. In the late 1950s, he joined Hidemasa Kimura in the design of the YS-11 turboprop short-haul passenger aircraft. He left Mitsubishi in 1963 to become a lecturer at University of Tokyo's Institute of Space and Aeronautics. Between 1965 and 1969, he was a professor at the National Defense Academy. He published the autobiographical Reisen: From Birth to Glory in 1970. Between 1972 and 1973, he was a professor of the Faculty of Engineering of Nihon University in Tokyo. Horikoshi was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Third Class in 1973. He passed away from pneumonia in Tokyo in 1982.

Photographs

Jiro Horikoshi Timeline