“At one stage they found themselves in a two-man Kawasaki Ki. They completed many successful missions together. But there was an enemy spy amidst the ground crew and the man sabotaged their parachutes so that they wouldn’t open. It was a week later that their aircraft was hit by enemy fire and the engine cut out. Neither man could have expected to survive the crash. Aki tumbled and fumbled with his parachute, attempting to repair it as he fell. The weight of it sent him plummeting to the ground like a rock. Ako witnessed this. He unbuckled his parachute and let it go. He unfastened the top of his leather jacket, which filled with air, and he spread himself as he’d seen the birds do so many times. He had no wings, of course, so he was still technically falling rather than flying, but he was able to catch air currents that slowed his descent a fraction. Not far below there was a lake and he attempted to steer himself in its direction. And there was a wind that day that caught him and projected him sideways so he hit the water at an angle.

“Onlookers had witnessed the whole thing. They saw Ako hit the lake at a tremendous speed and gave him no hope of surviving it. Fishermen went to look for the body and were astounded to find the boy floating thanks to the air trapped in his jacket. He was close to death, broken like a crushed sparrow, but he had endured. He was the only man ever to survive a fall from such a height.”

Tetsukimo had a tear in his eye.

“Flying an airplane is one thing,” I said. “You sit and stare at the instruments. You can’t hear anything apart from the growl of the engine. All you smell is gasoline and you show no respect to nature. When you hit conflicting currents you call it turbulence. It’s a foe rather than a friend. And the more competent you become as a pilot, the further you are from nature. In a Kawasaki Ki you find yourself in a glass bowl with no wind in your hair. You might as well be in a private cinema watching the sky on a screen.”