Although few people may be aware of it, Japan's modern-day rocket and automobile industries have their roots in the ingenuity of the engineers who developed radial engines for the Zero fighter in the late 1930s.
Particularly notable among the engineers with links from the Zero to today's state-of-the-art technology are Ryoichi Nakagawa, chief of the team of Nakajima Aircraft Co. engineers that developed the Zero's Sakae-21 engine, and Yasuakira Toda, a physicist from Hokkaido University.
Toda, who joined Nakajima Aircraft in 1937, later helped another scientist, Hideo Itokawa, another Nakajima engineer. Itokawa was known as "the father of Japan's space development program," which began with the launch of 29 Pencil rockets in 1955.