Last week I attended a nearby airshow. Airshows themselves don’t impress me much, I much prefer looking at the planes on the ground, especially WWII ones. I primarily went to listen to F-4 pilot Dan Cherry and MiG-21 pilot Hong My discuss their encounter over the skies of Vietnam, and reunion over 30 years later. The story is outlined here, and the encounter is re-enacted in the episode “Hell Over Hanoi” of the History Channel’s show Dogfights.
Anyways, after the presentation I walked among the (literally) hundreds of planes around the airport, hoping to find my two favorite WWII planes: the Grumman F6F Hellcat and the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. I ended up not seeing either, though I did find a F4F Wildcat, the Hellcat’s predecessor.
Sometime after snapping a picture of the Wildcat, in the distance I spotted the telltale meatball of a Japanese plane. Getting my hopes up, I walked closer and I saw there were in fact two Japanese planes. They weren’t Zeros but Fuji LM-2s, postwar training aircraft of Japan’s Self-Defense Force. One of them looked to have a relatively new pain job, complete with Japanese labels.
Here’s a picture of the side of the plane, the large white characters read 陸上自衛隊 – “Ground Self-Defense Force.”
However, it was the small bit of text above which caught my attention, for I couldn’t read it all.
I didn’t recognize the first two characters of the second line, so the next day I sought the meanings in my kanji dictionary. Oddly, the SKIP method didn’t return any matching characters, so I resorted to scanning through the entire dictionary. I soon found two possible matches and tried translating the sentence. I ended up with バッテリは右衛後風防の下方にある – “The battery is below the right defense windshield.” Sure enough, the day before, I saw the battery compartment labeled on the right side of the plane, below the rear window. And it’s no wonder I couldn’t find the kanji with the SKIP method, the characters on the plane were missing strokes!
This is how the sentence should read.
Comparing the images, you can see why I had trouble with the two characters. Not only were they missing strokes, but sloppilly drawn! Given these errors and other, well, unnatural Japanese markings on the aircraft, I reckon the original markings were damaged over time, and so weren’t reproduced accurately. If admission to the airshow wasn’t a whopping $30, I likely would have gone back to contact the owner and submit corrections. Oh well.
