Kyushu J7W1 Shinden by Hasegawa
1/48 scale
Kit No. 09122
Retail: $34.00
Decals: One version, Prototype No. 1, August 1945
Comments: Raised and engraved panel lines, detailed cockpit with raised relief on main and side instrument panels, cockpit features raised sidewall detail for internal ribbing and instrumentation, boxed in wheel wells, one-piece six-bladed propeller
History
Japan’s J7W1 Shinden was the only World War II aircraft of canard configuration that any combatant ordered into production. Canard is a French term that has an obscure original meaning used by aircraft designers. Then, as now, canard describes an aircraft with the main wing mounted at the rear of the fuselage and a smaller wing fixed to the front. In the United States, the Curtiss-Wright company and the Army Air Corps also experimented with a canard aircraft, the Curtiss XP-55 Ascender. However, the J7W1 was more advanced. Though innovative and unusual, neither aircraft progressed past the early prototype stage.
Captain Masaoki Tsuruno led the effort to design the Shinden. A member of the Technical Staff of the Japanese Navy, he envisioned a radical design to counter new Allied aircraft with superior performance over existing Japanese types. From the beginning, Tsuruno believed a turbojet engine would ultimately propel the Shinden. To prove the fundamental concept, the staff of the First Naval Air Technical Arsenal based at Yokosuka, designed and built three MXY6 canard gliders out of wood. These aircraft began flight trials in the fall of 1943. They featured a moderately swept wing with two vertical tail surfaces mounted on the main wing inboard of the ailerons. The Navy later powered one glider with a small 4-cylinder engine.
After a promising series of tests, it was time to build and test a pre-production prototype. The Navy ordered the Kyushu Hikoki K. K. firm to design a high-performance, canard interceptor despite the company’s lack of experience with such unorthodox aircraft. Availability, not expertise, dictated this choice. Firms that were more capable were already operating at full capacity and could not accommodate a brand new aircraft design. The Navy had to reinforce the Kyushu design staff with additional engineers, including Tsuruno, transferred from Kugisho. Work began in June 1944 and the first of two prototypes was finished ten months later.
Kyushu engineers mounted the engine backwards inside the rear half of the fuselage. The radial, air-cooled power plant, a Mitsubishi Ha-43 Type 42 of 2,030 horsepower drove a six-bladed pusher propeller on the end of an extended drive shaft. With the propeller fitted at the tail, it was necessary to use a tricycle landing gear consisting of one wheel and strut mounted under the nose and two under the wings. An auxiliary wheel was attached to the bottom of each vertical fin and these wheels were fixed and not retractable. The pilot could retract the three main landing gear struts and wheels.
Armament consisted of four nose-mounted 30mm Type 5 cannon, intended to bring down B-29 bombers which from 1944 wreaked increasing damage on Japan’s cities and war production plants. The weight of these large cannon helped to balance the weight of the engine and propeller at the back of the fuselage, allowing the Shinden to sit on its landing gear at a “nose up” angle. This was a very powerful armament package for the time; each gun could fire 450 rounds per minute.
In an unusual move dictated by the urgent needs of the war, the Navy ordered the Shinden into production even before the first flight. They planned to produce 150 of these machines each month at two production plants. Engine cooling problems, delays in the delivery of critical equipment for each airframe, and nationwide chaos felt in every part of the aircraft industry, partly due to increasing B-29 raids, kept the J7W1 grounded until August 3, 1945. On that day, Captain Tsuruno made the first flight. He took the Shinden aloft only twice more, on the 6th and the 9th of August, ironically the same days as the American atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The war ended on August 14th, when the Japanese government surrendered in the wake of the atom bomb strikes combined with the launching of the Russian invasion of Manchuria, which was going alarmingly well for the Soviets. Tsuruno must have suspected that the end was near but he remained a cautious and conservative test pilot. In flight, he never raised the landing gear and the Shinden clocked just 45 minutes of total flying time. These short flights revealed several potentially serious problems. The airplane pulled hard right with applications of full power at takeoff due to the torque of the powerful engine, and the propeller and drive shaft exhibited strong vibrations. Kyushu also delivered a second prototype but this aircraft never flew. The company was troubleshooting the design and hard at work developing a turbojet-propelled version when the war ended.
The first prototype is located at the National Air and Space Museum outside Dayton, Ohio. Naval intelligence specialists dismantled it and shipped the fighter to the U. S. at the end of 1945 for testing and evaluation, along with about 145 other Japanese airplanes. There is no record that the J7W1 has ever been flown since its arrival in the United States.
Here is the J7W1 Shinden prototype photographed in the defunct Kyushu factory in Fukuoka, Japan, on Oct. 10, 1945. Patchy skin panels suggest a largely hand-built prototype, one of only two Shindens in existence at war’s end. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Joseph R. O’Donnell via National Archives)
The Kit
Hasegawa’s Kyushu J7W1 Shinden in injection molded in grey plastic and consists of 55 parts, three of which are clear plastic and will form the cockpit canopy and windshield. The cockpit is nicely detailed, featuring raised relief on the main as well as side instrument panels, along with separately mounted seat, control yoke, rudder pedals and main instrument panel. While the airframe features mostly raised panel lines, there are engraved lines for all control surfaces.
All wheel wells are boxed in, and the kit has detailed landing gear, although the wheels for the main gear will require some light sanding to eliminate injector pin marks. The landing gear doors all bear interior detail. Speaking of landing gear, this kit is a sure-fire tail-sitter without the addition of a nose weight, as it will sit on its gear with the nose pointed slightly and one look at photos of the actual aircraft reveal that its center of gravity had to be aft of the cockpit, which sits fairly far back on the fuselage. Modelers should definitely be prepared to add a substantial amount of weight as far forward in the nose as possible.
The forward canards, which are not movable, and the cover for the gun bay in the nose, form a single part which may require puttying and sanding to hide the resulting join seam. One side of this cover features integrally molded machine guns, which the other features separately mounted gun barrels in recessed apertures. There are separate intake covers to be cemented to the fuselage just aft of the cockpit, although the intake wells are not particularly deep and are blocked off, consistent with the fact that Hasegawa opted not to provide intake trunking.
In addition to the canards, the one-piece rudders are fitted to the trailing edge of the wings, giving the Shinden its unique and unorthodox appearance. The airscrew assembly, fitted to the rear of the fuselage in a pusher configuration, consists of six parts, two of which are a single six-bladed propeller and a separately mounted spinner. The three-part canopy allows the cockpit to be displayed open or closed, and the kit is rounded out by the rare addition of a pilot figure holding his gloves.
Markings
The kit decals are fully serviceable but unremarkable, consisted of six large Hinomarus and a small number of stencils for the prototype aircraft. They have aged well so far (the kit was issued in 2020), still exhibiting a nice seme-gloss finish and no yellowing as yet.
Conclusion
This is a fascinating kit of what may have been an effective late-war bomber interceptor, had World War II dragged on a few months longer in the Pacific Theatre. While it is fortunate for the Americans that the Shinden never entered production in large numbers, at the time the war ended there were a number of bugs still to be worked out in the prototype, and the limited number of test flights left no record of its service ceiling or overall maneuverability in combat. While we do not know if it would have been an effective high-altitude interceptor, under General Curtis LeMay’s leadership the B-29’s were mostly bombing at low altitudes by 1945. Part of the Shinden’s appeal is the mystique surrounding its performance in combat, had the Japanese equivalent of speculative Luft ’46 confrontations ever taken place: Would it have been able to counter the B-29 raids, and how well would it have coped with the P-51 Mustang? For these reasons and more, this kit is highly recommended.
References
- National Air & Space Museum/Smithsonian online – https://airandspace.si.edu/
- www.silverhawkauthor.com
- www.nevingtonwarmuseum.com