FEATURE: 'Zero' engineers paved way for auto, rocket industries.

Japan Transportation Scan, January, 2004

TOKYO, Jan. 8 Kyodo

Although few may know it, Japan's 21st-century 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 Japanese state-of-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 state-run Hokkaido University.

Toda, who joined Nakajima Aircraft in 1937, later helped another scientist, Hideo Itokawa, dubbed ''the father of Japan's space development program,'' which got under way with the launch of 29 Pencil rockets in 1955.

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