Jirou Horikoshi's fascination with flight goes back to childhood in rural Japan—he's been obsessed with the idea of flying for as long as he can remember. His severe nearsightedness ruled out a career as a pilot, but that didn't kill the dream. Instead, he set his sights on becoming an aeronautics engineer, convinced he could still shape aviation from the ground.
He taught himself English partly out of sheer determination, working through aviation magazines with a dictionary in hand. His real turning point came when he encountered the work of Caproni, an Italian aeronautics legend. The guy became something of a spiritual mentor to Horikoshi—or at least, that's how Horikoshi saw him. Caproni's approach hit him hard: the idea that you could design beautiful, elegant aircraft even knowing full well they might be weaponized, that creating something magnificent could matter even if you couldn't control how it was used. That philosophy ended up defining Horikoshi's whole approach to engineering.
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