Press competition circa 1969

I was just reading a sweet TIME article from May 1969 entitled “Japanese Air Force.” It’s about the fleets of small aircraft which Japanese newspapers used to move reporters and information around at high speeds, back before they had bullet trains or broadband.

This passage is particularly exciting to read, and does a lot to help restore the credibility of a certain everyday newspaper:

Mainichi’s newsmen still gloat about a photo they got of the Rising Sun replacing the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima last summer, even though the ceremony marking the return of Japanese sovereignty ended just 15 minutes before the paper’s evening deadline. As the ceremony ended, a Beechcraft took off from Iwo Jima, 775 miles south of Tokyo, and negatives were processed aboard. Another plane sped toward Iwo, received the photos by radio when the planes were 250 miles apart, then turned toward Hachijo Jima, 175 miles south of Tokyo. While still in the air, the second plane radioed the pictures to a ground station at Hachijo, which then transmitted them to Tokyo by undersea cable. No other evening paper pictured that historic event.

I can’t help but think that as technology continues to advance, logistics will become a lost art. Nowadays we can use e-mail and FedEx to get anything done in short time–what will happen when we have, say, networked matter replicators?

Incidentally, a google image search for “japanese air force” turns up the following picture, which according to a humor blog is some sort of Jieitai training:

One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures

Jade OC, a long time reader and commenter of MFT, has graciously posted a detailed comparison of his experiences passing through both US and Japanese airline security and immigration checkpoints as a comment on an earlier blog post on the subject. As I suspect that many of our readers look only at the actual posts and not the comments, I thought I would promote this one to the front page.

As promised, here is my short report on the fingerprinting-immigration process in the US and Japan from the POV of a non-citizen of either (though a resident of Japan).

First big complaint. I never wanted to go to the US at all, at least not the first time. But you cannot bloody transit in the US – there’s no such thing as a transit lounge. Everyone who enters a US airport from outside the country, even if, like me, you are just taking a flight to Canada in about 90 minutes, needs to go through Immigration and Customs. This is seriously Fucked Up.

Continue reading One foreigner’s perspective on American and Japanese immigration security procedures

More unintended consequences… or were they?

Several weeks ago I wrote a brief post about how the famous destruction of Korea Air Lines flight 007 by the Soviets led rather directly to the development of commercial GPS technology. I just happened across another surprising result of the same incident, in this Vanity Fair article on, of all people, Larry Flynt.

In 1976, Mr. Flynt, publisher of Hustler and several other pornographic magazines, put out a $1 million bounty for “documentary evidence of illicit sexual relations with a Congressman, Senator or other prominent officeholder.” As the article says, “A few years later, Flynt published pictures of Representative Larry McDonald, a Georgia Republican, in bed with a mistress,” but Rep. McDonald was on the ill-fated KAL007 when it was shot down by the Soviets.

Naturally, the presence of Congressman Larry McDonald on a jet which was shot out of the sky by the USSR was taken by some to be more than a coincidence. While McDonald was, and still is, the only member of Congress killed by the Soviets, there were in fact three other Congresspersons schedule to fly along-side him on KAL007; Republicans Jesse Helms, Senator of North Carolina and Steve Symms, Senator of Idaho and Congressman Carroll Hubbard, a Democrat of Kentucky. All four-McDonald and the three who whose flights were rescheduled-were known for their strident anti-Soviet views, and there were naturally conspiratorial accusations made against the USSR. For example, Wikipedia cites the following quotation of the (despicable) Reverend Jerry Falwell from the September 2, 1983 Washington Post:

There is a real question in my mind that the Soviets may have actually murdered 269 passengers and crew on the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in order to kill Larry McDonald

Natural responses to this may include the thought that the assassination of either one or four members of the US Congress by the Soviet Union might provoke a rather harsh reaction, or perhaps the thought that there was in fact nothing to gain from the murder of these four relatively minor congresspersons- McDonald was himself not known for legislative accomplishment, and although Jesse Helms might have been a tempting target when he was head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he did not ascend to that post until a decade later, in 1993.

McDonald was himself a well-known conspiracy theorist, who had made the following statement:

The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and communism under the same tent, all under their control…Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent.

While more rational thinkers may question the wisdom of this statement, and perhaps of the voters who elected a paranoiac to Congress, it does seem likely that Representative McDonald would have agreed with the Reverend Falwell about the circumstances surrounding his own death.

For the truly sophisticated conspiracy buff, however, we have a more complex, and utterly contradictory theory, brought to us by-of all places- Hustler Magazine. Now, while Playboy is well known for its mix of dull soft-core pornography and oddly serious articles, I had no idea that Hustler printed in-depth political conspiracy articles (much less articles at all) mixed with its rather harder-core pornography. However, if this piece is indicative of the quality of Hustler’s political “reporting” I think I’ll stick with publications more along the lines of The Economist for my real news- although, a paranoid and elaborate conspiracy theory can provide some entertaining flavor to more staid coverage. I will not try and summarize this inane theory, which involves such things as a “$100,000 computer” full of illegal spying data-in a garage, the Moonies, and Reagan’s decision to make a martyr of “the leading anti-Communist in the American government,” I will provide what I thought were a few of the highlights.

  • “So let’s assume that the CIA, FBI and all federal agencies that worked with McDonald – particularly the Pentagon – wanted him silenced immediately.”
  • “A more likely possibility is that the crew had been the victim of hypnosis and mind control – receiving instructions in advance, before they left Anchorage, that could not be picked up on any messages recorded later.”
  • “His response to what was going to happen, given his years of experience and expertise, was that of a programmed zombie instructed to fly continuously – disregarding any external sights or sounds on the flight equipment.:
  • “The upshot of these reports is that the Pentagon had the capability, if it so desired, to link mind control with satellite defense systems. And a logical use of mind control, of course, would be to program a pilot – perhaps even turning a normal flight into a kamikaze mission.”
  • “After McCarthy died in 1957, it is reasonable to assume that Larry McDonaid – through Louise Bees – took over the massive computerized files [known as Odessa, which was formed (by the Nazis) between 1943 and 1945 when it became obvious the Third Reich could not win the war against the Soviet Union]that now contain millions of names worldwide.”

As implausible as all of this is, the fact most destructive to the theory that President Reagan ordered the plane led off-course into Soviet airspace so that the plane would be shot down, killing Congressman Larry McDonald, is perhaps Reagan’s action described in my previous post on KAL007: namely the opening of the formerly military-exclusive GPS network to civilian use. While I might not put it past the Reagan administration to commit assassination, if murder-by-Soviet-airspace-intrusion-disguised-as-navigation-error was such an effective and untraceable method of assassination, why then immediately turn around and introduce protocols that would make further use of the tactic implausible? Naturally, the conspiracy fan will turn around and say “that’s just what they want you to think; it’s the ultimate cover-up!” But credulity has its limits, and Occam’s Razor is powerful.

McDonald may have had a powerful hate for the USSR, but he was certainly was not important enough to deserve such elaborate machinations, the blood-enmity of a Soviet Premiere or an American President, and secret mind control rays from space itself. Like the other 268 passengers on KAL007, he was simply a victim of bad luck and incompetence, like so many others.

And this brings us to the heart, the essential nature of what conspiracy theories are all about: a fear of powerlessness. There is a common misconception that the conspiracy theorist is a cynic of the highest order, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The conspiracy theorist is actually a romantic. Unable to accept the reality of a chaotic universe in which all of us humans come from dust only to return to dust, the conspiracy theorist, somewhat like the believer in divine preordination, requires a conscious actor in all things to explain the misery in the world, and to alleviate the crushing fear of oblivion and hopelessness that lies within themselves.

Perhaps the most popular subject for conspiracy theorization in our time is the coordinated hijacking/kamikaze attacks of September 11, 2001. Details vary, including theories that the Pentagon was hit not by a jet but by a military cruise missile, or that the Twin Towers were felled not by steel girders whose tensile strength could not hold up to burning jet fuel but by a controlled demolition triggered by the CIA at the instant of airplane impact, or that the the hijackers were not in fact Islamic fanatics belonging to a shadowy terrorist network with a history of rhetorical and physical attacks against the United States, but Israeli Mossad agents, working in concert with the highest levels of US intelligence. The exact details are not really important, because all of these conspiracies share a common theme and a common purpose. The common theme is the attribution of enormous, almost supernatural, levels of power to the United States and other well understood state actors such as Israel, combined with the discrediting of obscure and occult non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda. The purpose is the reinforcement of their conventional world view to the extent that they can maximize a feeling of safety.

This may seem counterintuitive to some, but I believe that there is a misconception regarding what exactly conspiracy theorists are scared of. One might logically think that bu attributing such nefarious intent and grand power to our government, their primary fear is in fact the government. I would argue that the opposite is true. It is apparent to anyone that a world in which planes are shot out of the sky or crashed into buildings is more dangerous than one in which they do not, but anyone with even the most tenuous grasp on reality will accept that we live in a world in which these things happen; the distinction is over why, and how. If a world of death and pain is taken as a given, then how is fear of that minimized? By reducing the randomness and chaos with which that death is meted out. Conspiracy theorists ascribe nigh-omnipotence to the government not because they are so scared of the government but because they are far more terrified of the alternative- that terrorism, assassination, airplane failure, and so on, are the products of forces unpredictable and uncontrollable.

To a conspiracy theorist there is always a larger cause. Take the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, each of which was the premiere subject of conspiracy theorizing for many years, and remain popular subjects to this day. In both cases the official, and most widely accepted, version of the story is that a lone troubled soul, albeit one whose sympathies were shared by many others, shot and killed the President of the United States, the most powerful man in what was, at least during the time of JFK, the most powerful country in the world. If such random tragedy could strike such a man, how can any of us possibly feel safe? In a world in which even presidents are murdered and airplanes are crashed into buildings or explode in the sky due to fuel tank errors (the TWA 800 tragedy, which has its own crop of conspiracy theories) how can any of us feel safe on an airplane, or going to the theatre, or simply riding their car down an open street?

There are a few alternatives. For most people the answer is simply to be realistic; while tragedy can be random, it is also rare and a life lived in perpetual terror is a poor life indeed. Others do live in fear, barely functioning, and living a terrible agoraphobic life of isolation. And others find solace in a false order, of complex constructed narratives in which they either assign enormous power to the relatively powerless actor behind such tragedies, or assign an entirely imaginary actor in cases that truly were due to chance or sloppiness. It is easier to sleep at night when you believe that JFK was killed as a result of a vast and shadowy conspiracy, because by extension that is what it would take. If tragedy requires such incredible effort and resources, then we are all relatively safer, because who would bother with us? By arguing with such venom for the existence of a reality in which all of the world’s random accidents and low-tech terrorism are in fact the result of elaborate conspiracies conducted by the ostensibly powerful, conspiracy theorists are actually choosing order over chaos: a world in which they can sleep at night, because the knife in the shadow never misses its intended target.

Unintended benefits

Joe’s post on the history of East/West flight routes led me to read the Wikipedia article on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down by the USSR for entering Soviet airspace without authorization. The article then linked to this US State Department history of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which you may remember was built by the United States military, which contained the following fascinating bit of info.

In 1983, Soviet jet interceptors shot down a Korean Air civilian airliner carrying 269 passengers that had mistakenly entered Soviet airspace.

Because crew access to better navigational tools might have prevented the disaster, President Ronald Reagan issued a directive guaranteeing that GPS signals would be available at no charge to the world when the system became operational. The commercial market has grown steadily ever since.

So in short, if KAL007 had not accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace (their registered flight plan took them within 17 miles of the boundary) the US government might never have opened up the GPS network to unrestricted civilian use, and might even have restricted its use to military/government use, or perhaps only to large corporate customers in the private sector, or used the little-known GPS encryption capabilities (which are built into the network, and only supposed to be invoked for military reasons.) While GPS probably would have made its way into commercial aircraft like KAL007, it is unlikely that the unfettered, unencrypted, subscription-free access that allows us to our automobile navigators and GPS-equipped cell phones and digital cameras would have been granted. I’m not saying that every one of us who enjoys consumer GPS should be thanking the Soviet military for their Sept 1, 1983 massacre of civilians, but this is a good example of how so much progress is based on unexpected and unplanned connections.

Recalling the “golden age” of air travel: when the quality of the booze was the only thing that made you forget how long the trip was taking

Since I’m between jobs this week I have a lot of time to catch up on some of my passions: Japan, history and airplanes. One of my recent wastes of time online (taking up some of the time I would have otherwise spent blogging) is FlyerTalk, a massive online message board system populated by people who are excessively interested in travel and flying. Many of the fogeys in the crowd constantly complain about how bad airline service has become in recent years, and how they pine for the “good old days” when the stewardesses would carve ice sculptures at their seats. Also, more people are now able to fly in private jets through private jet charter services provided by companies like Jettly.

JAL route map, 1968There is an awesome article on Japanese Wikipedia which talks about airline routings between Japan and Europe. Until 1991, it was basically impossible to do this directly, because the Soviet Union was in the way and they would not let planes fly over unless they were approved to fly into a Soviet airport. You can see the effect this had on routing in the 1968 JAL route map shown to the right (click to enlarge—courtesy of the awesome Airchive site—also note how they were using the dorky “Japanese government publication font” even back then).

Here’s a brief history of how things progressed:

  • 1952: BOAC (the predecessor of British Airways) inaugurates Japan-Europe service using de Havilland Comets, the very first jet airliners, now principally remembered for busting open at their poorly-designed windows. The routing is Tokyo – Manila – Bangkok – Rangoon – Calcutta – New Delhi – Karachi – Bahrain – Cairo – Rome (- London). Eight stops! It almost sounds like a pleasure cruise, except that it’s being conducted in a big aluminum pipe filled with mustard-yellow burlap seats.
  • 1957: SAS says “screw that” and begins service from Copenhagen to Tokyo via Anchorage. Several other airlines decide that Anchorage is a good stopping point—among them JAL, KLM, Alitalia and Lufthansa. Although it’s out of the way, it’s slightly more convenient than avoiding Russia to the south. Once travel restrictions are lifted in the early 1960s, the airport in Anchorage becomes a little hub of Japanese tourist activity.
  • 1961: Air France begins service in Boeing 707s (which are basically like today’s Boeing 757s except louder and less efficient) on Tokyo – Bangkok – Calcutta – Karachi – Kuwait – Cairo – Rome ( – Frankfurt – Paris). That brings it down to five stops, which I suppose is progress.
  • 1967: Japan and the Soviet Union negotiate to permit JAL to fly to Moscow, allowing connections to Europe through the Aeroflot network. Which would be cool, except that the service is actually operated by Aeroflot, using a dodgy Russian aircraft that looks like this, and as well as Japanese consumers avoid US airlines nowadays you’d better believe they wouldn’t touch a Russian one.
  • 1979: Air France manages to cut the southern route down to three stops: Tokyo – Beijing – Karachi – Athens (- Paris).
  • 1983: Finnair finally manages the first nonstop flight from Japan to what can almost be considered Western Europe: Helsinki. They accomplish this using DC-10 aircraft, by flying all the way across the pole, through the Bering Strait and back to Japan nonstop. Other airlines eventually figure there is no reason to continue stopping in Anchorage and follow suit. Also this year, KAL 007 was shot down, proving that the Soviets were serious about not letting airliners fly over Siberia.
  • 1991: The Soviet Union collapses. Airspace restrictions cease to be an issue. Schedule-sensitive executives rejoice.
  • 2007: The food sucks and the stewardesses are all pushing sixty, but I appreciate the fact that nobody wants to shoot me down. Besides Bin Laden. And maybe some ex-girlfriends.

JAL joins oneworld. Yawn

On April 1, Japan Airlines is joining the oneworld airline alliance, whose largest members include American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific and Qantas.

This is not really news, because JAL has been in the process of joining oneworld for years. They just happened to run into a number of issues, chief among them an oddly-structured merger with JAS, and barely compatible booking systems that required an overhaul of how JAL sells its tickets. (ANA, on the other hand, has been an integral member of the Star Alliance for years now with no major issues. Not to mention a much better safety record.)

Anyway, the main effect of the JAL-oneworld consummation is that you can include JAL on one of oneworld’s special round-the-world-type tickets. All the other benefits (frequent flyer mile sharing, code sharing, lounge sharing, etc.) were already more or less in place.

Nonetheless, JAL took out a full-page ad in US FrontLine, one of the weekly Japanese tabloids published in the US, to announce how totally awesome this transaction is. Opening line: “JAL’s New World Begins!”

Who are they kidding? I’m really into the airline industry, and I’m freaking yawning here. Get a life, JAL. The rest of us already defected to Star Alliance.

Lame “no liquids” rule coming to Japan airports

From Bloomberg:

South Korea, Japan to Limit Liquids on All Overseas Flights

By Seonjin Cha

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) — South Korea and Japan will expand restrictions on carrying liquids on board international flights from Thursday, to thwart terrorist attacks.

Passengers on all international flights from South Korea, including transit flights, will only be allowed to bring in liquids, gels and aerosol items in containers no larger than 100 milliliters (3.38 oz.), which must be placed in transparent plastic bags, the Ministry of Construction and Transportation said yesterday on its Web site.

The same restrictions will go into effect for all international flights from Japan, the country’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said on its Web site on Dec. 19.

The move is an expansion of current restrictions on flights to the U.S. and EU countries that began last year based on guidelines from the International Civil Aviation Organization, the Korean ministry said.

Food for infants and medicines will be exempt from the restrictions but must be reported to security staff in advance, the ministry said.

I thought the “liquid bomb” theory was already discredited! There needs to be some kind of multilateral negotiating body where cooler heads can veto very bad ideas like this liquid rule and infinite copyright term extension.

Ethnicity and airline routing

Over the past couple of years, I’ve made six flights between Japan and the US. Five of these were on American Airlines’ Narita-Dallas/Fort Worth route, which I use because it’s cheap (both of my parents are retired AA employees) and fairly easy to connect to the Carolinas where my family lives.

I’ve noticed over time that there are very few Japanese people on this flight. The usual composition seems to be one-third Southeast Asians (particularly Vietnamese and Filipinos), one-third US military and DoD civilians, and one-third white guys connecting to and from flights to Asia. There are a handful of Japanese sprinkled about the cabin, but not many.

I’m sure that this is largely due to geography. Japanese expats and Japanese-Americans are clustered around the West Coast and the New York metropolitan area: there aren’t that many in Texas, or in any of the neighboring states for that matter. The Asian community in that part of the country is dominated by Southeast Asians.

But I also wonder whether Japanese people are just unwilling to fly American because the economy class service is so poor. I also flew the JFK-Narita route once last summer, and while there seemed to be more Japanese people on that flight, it was still the “local Asians” (mainly Koreans) who seemed to dominate the Asia/Pacific group on board.

Any other experiences of interesting ethnic combinations on particular flights?

Your seatmate is NOT your psychologist

This NYT article struck a chord with me:

WHAT is it about flying in an airplane that seems to remind some passengers of a church confessional?

I remember flying overnight from New York to London next to a dour-looking middle-aged man who kept his peace until his second Scotch. Which is when he revealed that he was a civil engineer. A very, very unhappy civil engineer.

“My profession gets no respect,” he griped. “We design all your bridges and roads, but when do you hear anything about a civil engineer?”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“That’s right,” he continued, “only when a bridge collapses! And why should I be blamed when the contractor probably chose the lowest bidder?”

Another seatmate, a young Navy enlisted man, spent the first several hours of a transcontinental flight studying a book whose pages contained all kinds of triangles, arrows and symbols. He closed the book as our plane began descending to land and spoke to me for the first time.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he confided in a low voice, “but I am actually flying the plane.”

It all had something to do with an arcane kind of witchcraft, the key to which was in the book he held closely, he said. I hoped his job in the Navy involved a desk, not weapons.

I don’t fly nearly as much as the author, but I must be a magnet for this kind of behavior. I’ve had a 13 year old girl brag to me about making out with restaurant valets, a Japanese emigrant to America tell me about her 50 year long marriage to an Army officer, a half-Japanese chemist talk of suing to protect his farmland near Narita Airport, and several others who for some reason thought I was just the right person to tell about their problems. It would be one thing if I actually made friends with someone on a flight, but in these cases I always end up feeling used like the proverbial hole in the ground. Sometimes it is marginally interesting to hear some random person’s whole life story, but it almost never cancels out what I lose in reading or sleep time. People should really just keep their mouths shut unless they actually know how to have a conversation.

William R. Gorham, a forgotten father of Japanese industry

[Note, this article as posted had been screwed up by a couple of misplaced cut/paste operations, and I believe has now been fixed.]

Currently caught up in a fit of techno lust over Canon’s recently announced
EOS 400D/Rebel XTi/Kiss X and feverish speculation over what they may be announcing next I’ve been spending quite a lot of time reading article and forums about their latest camera technology.

Kwanon logo

In the results of a routine Google search for “Canon history” I stumbled across this forum post on the very active photogrpahy discussion website photo.net, which in responding to a link to Canon’s own camera museum website says that he “was very interested in the brief reference to the involvement in Canon development by the American consultant, William R. Gorham, who became a naturalized Japanese citizen shortly before WWII.”

Mr. Gorman is mentioned only in a sidebar of the company history section, entitled “Valuable Suggestions Received from an Individual Outside the Company.

There was an unusual American engineer whose name was William R. Gorham. He became a naturalized citizen of Japan in l941, and made strong contributions to the establishment of Nissan Motor Company. He had his Japanese name as Katsundo Gorham, and visited Canon often during the 1940s to provide valuable suggestions and recommendations regarding the procurement of machinery and technological innovation. He proposed and implemented the concept of “Scheduled Daily Production,” in which the daily target of the production was predetermined to achieve the uniform flow of camera production. Gorham also suggested a system in which the product inspection department becomes independent of the plant manager and is placed directly under the president. In this manner, the inspection could be performed without regard to the whims of the plant manager. In addition to the introduction of the rational improvement plan, which was somewhat akin to the American method, Gorham made a tremendous contribution to the modernization of Canon through his warm and energetic personality. When Gorham passed away in October 1949, at his bedside was none other than Takeshi Mitarai.

Takeshi Mitarai was the president of Canon from 1942, and longtime friend of Saboru Uchida, co-founder of the company formed to produce the “Kwanon” Camera, which was later renamed Canon-a brand which eventually became the name of the company itself.

Amazingly, this single paragraph is virtually the only information online in English about Mr. Gorham, with scarcely more avaliable in Japanese. This one mention though is intriguing enough, with my strong interests in both history and photography, to inspire me to gather all of that information.

Probably the single best source I found is a small press / vanity press English language translation of a biography said to have been written by his colleagues following his death in 1949. Interestingly, the translator is his son Don Cyril Gorham. We will return to Cyril later on. Luckily, Lulu.com offers this book both in a $12.99 paper version and a digital download, refreshingly priced at a mere $4.41. Or perhaps I should say, potentially the best source. For the moment, I have only bookmarked this page. I will buy the download later on tonight, but only after I have finished this exercise in purely online research. While one might be able to make a case that this digital download counts, I believe that a file which a: required payment and b: is not indexed by search engines does not count.

William R. Gohram 1918
William R. Gorham ca. 1918, courtesy of Nissan

I also did a search for William R. Gorham in Amazon’s search inside a book feature, and found only a handful of mentions worth noting (Amazon does not seem to carry the biography, for some reason). No book seems to mention him more than once, or give any more information than the following three.

The first is from Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry by James M. Rubenstein, which on page 339 says “Nissan was founded in Yokohama in 1933 by an entrepreneur, Yoshisuke Ayukawa, with engineering provided by an American expatriate, William R. Gorham.” This is the only mention in the book.

The other book which mentions Mr. Gorham is Datsun 280, Nissan 300 Zx, a coffee table format book for fans of this discontinued automobile written by Brian Long. Like the Rubenstein book, it mentions Gorham just once, in this brief passage which begins at the bottom of page 9 and continues onto page 10, in a section on the history of automobiles in Japan.

In 1925, Kaishinsha had changed its name to the DAT Jidosha Seizo Ltd (the DAT Motor Car Manufacturing Co. Ltd) following a merger with the Jitsuyo Jidosha Seizo. This firm had been founded in 1919 to build three-wheelers designed by the American engineer William R. Gorham, who later helped with the design of the Mitsubishi Zero fighter aircraft. Although the three-wheelers were unsuccessful financialy, they did provide the basis for the four-wheeled Lila light car of 1921. Many were used as taxis in Japan, and the continued to be made for several years after the DAT merger.

The third is Japanese Industry in the American South, by Choong Kim, which on page 7 says:

And if the Japanese had been too ingrown to learn from William R. Gorham, the American electrical engineer who is considered the founder of the Datsun (Nissan) motor company in terms of technology, Nissan might not be the success we see today.

The same Google search also provided me with the Japanese edition of the same Canon history page, which gave me Gorhman’s Japanese name, 合波武克人(ごうはむ・かつんど) pronounced Gohamu Katsundo, that he had taken upon naturalization as a Japanese citizen. I then searched for his Japanese name on Japanese Google. There were exactly three results. The first was the same Canon history page from which I had learned his Japanese name in the first place.

Gorhman automotive tricycle
Gorham automotive tricycle, 1920, courtesy of Nissan

Next was this page on Nissan’s pre-war history, which credits Gorham as one of the two fathers of the company for his invention of the “Gorhman automotive tricycle,” (picture above from Nissan) which combined a harley engine with a rickshaw to produce a primitive automotive vehicle that could be affordably produced in an as-yet industrially underdeveloped nation. Gorham’s design, which should strike a cord with anyone familiar with more primitive automotive vehicles such as Thailand’s tuk-tuk or the Phillipino jeepney currently being manufactered in some less developed yet partially industrialized economies, and which became the basis for the first 4-wheeler produced by Jitsuyo Jidosha Co., Ltd, one of the three companies that formed the modern Nissan company.

Last of all was a really special find- a photograph of Gorham’s grave with two-paragraph biography on the homepage of the Tamarei’en cemetary in Tokyo (described on Wikipedia as the first public cemetary in Japan), where he is buried. The cemetary web page has similar info on many dozens of notable figures interned there (note: in Japan, cemetaries are usually Buddhist style, only containing the cremated ashes of the deceased within or under a memorial), including several other foreigners, such as the man who introduced Indian curry to Japan or a Russian who fled to Japan due to the revolution, lost his citizenship, and became a pro-baseball player for the Giants when the players were increasingly called away for military service in the 1930’s.

Anyway, here is my translation of the mini-bio from the cemetary website.

GraveWilliam, R. Gorham

Lived 1888 (Meiji 21) to October 24, 1949 (Showa 24)

A machine technician of the Taisho and Show periods

Burial location: Ku 24 Shu 1 Soku 11

Born near San Francisco, in the United States of America. Came to Japan in 1918 (Taisho 7) to introduce and use his technology, with the goal of developing air mail systems and establishing an aeroplane manufacturing company. He designed and introduced Engines, airplanes, automobiles, telephone switches and fast turret lathes. He also imported single engine biplanes and sold them to the Japanese military. In later years he became a consultant for Canon and assisted them by developing a more efficient production system. He also worked as a consultant for Kokusan Seiki (Later became Hitachi Seido Co., Ltd.) and was also involved in designing machine tools. In the early 1940’s the international situation began growing tense, and the Japanese government started deporting foreigners. After painful consideration, Gorham became a naturalized Japanese citizen on May 26, 1941. He took the Japanese name of Gouhamu Katsudo (合波武克人).

His son, Don C. Gorham, graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in March of 1941, and although he wanted to continue his study of Japanese literature in graduate school, in accordance with his parents wishes he instead returned to the America, received his Doctoral degree in literature, and found a job related to the improvement of Japanese/American relations. Thinking of the circumstances of the antipathy towards gaijin at the time and the Tokko [Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu; Special Higher Police, Japan’s equivalent to the Gestapo], one can understand how heroic Gorham’s decision was, and how much he must have loved Japan. Postwar Gorham became an employee at Nissan Automobiles and challenged himself in the industrial field. He worked not just for the sake of his own company, but became a key figure in the rebirth of Japan’s industrialization and economic development, and was a forerunner to the later high growth period. He died a premature death due to illness in 1949. Grand Prix press’s, “The legend of William Gorham: the American Engineer who became Japanese”and others have appeared.

When I read this I was happy to see that it confirmed my strong suspicion that the translator of the biography on Lulu.com was in fact William Gorham’s son. There was, however, one thing I had overlooked. On the biography page there is actually a link to view the back cover of the book, which would have told me this fact earlier. Since the low-res jpeg is very hard on the eyes, I will transcribe it here.

Don Cyril Gorham, the translator, is the younger son of William R. and Hazel H. Gorham. Born in California, but taken as an infant to Japan an 1918, Don Gorham is fluent in Japanese, having spent his entire pre-war education in Japan–from nursery school through graduation from Tokyo Imperial University in March of 1941, with a degree in Japanese language and literature. Shortly after graduation, he returned alone to the United States, where he was commissioned into the U.S. Naval Reserve and served on active duty for the next six years, followed by further U.S. civil service work. In 1972, he retired from the U.S. government and began his career as a freelance interpreter/translator. He has served as interpeter for senior U.S. and Japanese government officials, including two U.S. presidents, several U.S. Cabinet members, as well as several Japanese Prime Minsters and Japanese Diet members.

In addition, Don Gorham is a graduate of the Naval War College and has been a member of the American Translators Association (ATA) for over 30 years. In 2000 the ATA made him an honoraary member, an award reserved for individuals who have distinguished themselves in the translation/interpresting profession. At present, the ATA has only seven living honorary members.

Don Gorham has three grown children and lives with his wife of 61 years in Silver Spring, Maryland.

While it does not directly tell us anything new about his father, this back-cover authors biography of William’s son Don Cyril was interesting, and I figured I should also try running a search on Don Cyrcil to see what else I could turn up. What I found was this article at the ATA Japanese Language Division newsletter from Spring 2000, announcing his selection as an honorary member, as referred to on the book cover. The article does not have much new in the way of information, but does have this picture, captioned “Gorham (in university student uniform) practices shodo with family and friends in Tokyo.”

So now that I have found probably almost all I can about this man’s live using only Google searches, let’s say that I was going to prepare a genuine biography of William R. Gorham. Where could I look, what sort of resources could I turn to?

Even though the information collected so far is somewhat sketchy, it does give us several good leads. The most obvious place to start would be with his son, who at least as of 2005 was still living in Maryland. Since Don Cyril Gorhman cared enough about the story and life’s work of his father to translate and arrange some form of publication for the biography that had been written by his father’s colleagues after his demise, I think it is probably a good bet that he would be forthcoming with documents and information about his father.

Probably the the next most fruitful place to turn would be the companies in Japan that honor him in their official company histories: Canon and Nissan. If both companies care about their own history enough to keep an official timeline on their website, then there must be someone in the company whose job includes supervision of the archives, and they would probably be willing to help dig up the needed information. These certainly were not the only companies with which Gorham was involved, and if others are discovered they would also be worth investigating as well, but he seemed to have had more impact on the early development of Canon and Nissan than any other to which he contributed.

Next might be government records. Certainly there are record of his naturalization-a very rare event in that period, and probably not too difficult to track-and his death (we even know exactly where his grave is), and upon finding his place of residence it may be possible to find other documents, such as his koseki, juminhyo, not to mention all of the US government documents, birth certificate and so on, that may exist in dusty filing cabinets in some basement or geneaological databank.

We could search for correspondence beyond what his son possesses. Although none of Gorhman’s contemporaries are likely living today, their own children or grand-children, probably are, and may have preserved their personal effects as well. Calling upon the descendants of, let’s say, Canon’s Takeshi Mitarai might uncover some more information.

Of course, the existing English biography must contain a wealth of information itself, although as a book written by his own friends is probably more of a third-party memoire than a scholarly biography. I will purchase and download the PDF shortly after completing this post, since having access to it would have ruined my Google only experiment. The ATA newsletter article on the honorary induction of Don Cyril also tells us that their was a biography of William R. Gorham reviewed a few issues ago, by the name of 日本人になったアメリカ人技師、桂木洋二著(The American Engineer Who Became Japanese, by Yohji Katsuragi). This may or may not be the same one translated by his son, but either way a Google search for the author’s name produced no useful results. Perhaps one of the many rare book dealers in Kyoto would be able to locate it.

This experiment, of choosing an interesting seeming but obscure figure and attempting to research as much as possible about that person, is really an exploration of the limits of what information is readily avaliable online. While I was lucky enough to find something as unexpected as the photograph and exact location of his grave, and a number of general facts about his life, the overall picture remains very sketchy. There was no biography longer than a couple of hundred words, no quotes from him or about him, only a single photograph of the vehicle he designed for Nissan’s predecessor, no clear details on the contents of his work for Canon, etc. The important thing, however, is that there was just enough information to suggest the several possible avenues for research, and even these modest results would probably have been considered an almost unfathomable resource by historical researchers before the age of Internet searching.