Naoki Kodachi (born 1963) is a Japanese photojournalist and nonfiction writer from Osaka Prefecture. After graduating from Nihon University College of Art with a degree in photography, he worked as a staff photographer for Kodansha’s weekly magazine “FRIDAY,” covering crime, politics, business, sports, and disasters. An encounter with a former Zero fighter pilot in 1995 led him to begin recording the memories of wartime participants. He has since interviewed more than five hundred former servicemen, relatives, and other witnesses, combining photography with extended oral-history research. His work addresses not only combat but also the long postwar lives of veterans who remained silent about their experiences. His representative book, “Sofutachi no Zero-sen,” centers on squadron leaders Saburo Shindo and Minoru Suzuki and draws on approximately two thousand hours of interviews with 124 former Zero pilots to reconstruct their experiences from the opening battles of the war through defeat and postwar life.
