>>8773173Exhausted and overworked, Horikoshi fell ill with pleurisy on 25 December and remained bedridden through early April. During this time, he recorded in detail the horrors of the increasing air raids on Tokyo and Nagoya, including the devastating Operation Meetinghouse Tokyo incendiary raid of 9–10 March. A massive air raid on Nagoya the following night, with B-29s hurling "tens of thousands of incendiary bombs," destroyed most of the largely wooden city.
Though greatly weakened by his long illness, Horikoshi returned to work at Mitsubishi in May. He was assigned to the company's No. 1 Works, located at Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture. While on the train to Matsumoto, he witnessed the true scale of the war's impact on Nagoya:
For the first time, I really saw the effects of the incendiary raids on Nagoya. The city is a wasteland, charred and unspeakably desolate. My former factory is a ghostly, steel-ribbed wreck, shattered by bombs and torn apart by the dispersal crews. It is hard to believe that all this is true. I knew that soon I would be well. Strangely, though, I had little desire to return to work. The impression of the shattered city and the wrecked factories will not leave me.[2]:401–2
Still very weak, Horikoshi was sent home to rest after only a week back at work. In his diary, he recorded how they could still hear distant explosions as the Allies bombed nearby Takasaki and Maebashi. During the war's final months, Horikoshi recorded Japan's descent into chaos and exhaustion. Though he returned to work at the Matsumoto plant on 22 July, as Matsumoto had been spared from air raids, he found the workforce demoralised and operations in chaos as a result of the emergency evacuations which had scattered employees and workshops around the country.
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I feel like this could have spiced things up and they could have kept things more authentic
