No problem Tony. While I've got a few JDA postcards around someplace (I used to "commute" with my parents on JDA in the '60s when we flew from Tokyo to my Grandma's in Kyushu and had my first ever 880 ride with them) wife left them back in Sydney when we moved here to Kuala Lumpur. So I'm afraid I'll have to rely upon some alternative sources. But believe me, the writing on the starboard side is indeed backwards.
Japanese written on the sides of vehicles is tricky since it is not uncommon with trucks and buses today (as well as prewar aircraft) for the characters to be aligned to be read from front of the vehicle to the rear. From a western perspective, this means the port/left side of the vehicle "reads" a comfortable left-to-right, but the right/starboard side the text goes from right-to-left. When I started reading Japanese and none of my family told me this, I was a bit perplexed till it was explained. But it would be like seeing...
Japan Air System on the port side of the fuselage and...
meysyS riA napaJ on the starboard side.
The way it appears on the JDA 880M, it looks like this
Taking a composite of components F2 and F3 from the JDA 880M textures and overlaying the Japanese characters for Japan Domestic Airlines between the port and starboard sides, you get this;
The characters on the starboard side are the mirror image of those on the port side, not a reversal of their order.
If JDA used reverse-order characters, you could merely 'flip' each character and maintain them in their current order to read right-to-left. But that's not how JDA painted their planes.
Pictures of JDA's 880M are notoriously hard-to-find, and what few I have managed to show only port, as this was the loading side when seen from the viewing deck at the old Haneda terminal. Here's an example, albeit of the wrong side of the plane...
The green-outlined insert is a not-so-clear enlargement of the words
Nippon Kokunai Koku from the 880's port fuselage. The first character (looking like a tall rectangle with a line mid-way across it) is the "Ni" in Nippon and is pretty distinctive, especially alongside the "ku" in Koku, the final character.
Lacking a shot of the 880M's starboard side, what if a picture of the starboard side of a JDA Convair 240 shot on the same day is substituted instead? Kinda like this one...
Again, the lettering outlined in green (and no less clear) indicates that the "Ni" character was on the left-hand-side.
Finally, I need to confess that I mixed up the port and starboard sides of the F1 element of the fuselage textures, and the starboard side Japanese characters for "Ginza" are indeed reversed, though they're fine on the port side.
Sorry to babble on so long about something at ultimately is sort of unimportant, but meybbe because it's my adopted first language, the mistake stood out to me like dog's balls and really wasn't up to the standard I've come to expect from HJG.
For what it's worth I've corrected the fuselage textures on my own copy and if you'd like the affected ones (F1 through F3), let me know and I'll pass a set along to you.
That's all. Keep up the great work, but please give me a line if you need or want help with Japanese, okeh?
bwob
