Clyde 'Upside-Down Pangborn and his co-pilot Hugh Herndon, Jr., were under house arrest in Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. Charged with espionage and making an illegal flight, they had been detained for seven weeks since landing in Tokyo on August 8, 1931. The two American airmen had strutted onto aviation's world stage 12 days earlier. They had taken off from New York's Roosevelt Field in a blaze of publicity, with high hopes of beating the around-the-world speed record set by one-eyed Wiley Post and his Australian navigator Harold Gatty.

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Pangborn, a daredevil stunt pilot, was well-known in American aviation circles. He had been chief pilot and half owner of the fabled Gates Flying Circus until it closed down in 1928. His playboy co-pilot, an aviation novice, was better known in society circles. A Princeton dropout who loved the good life, Herndon was the son of Standard Oil heiress Alice Boardman. Anxious to see her son make a name for himself, the socialite had not turned a hair when he asked her for $100,000 to finance the flight.

Their hopes of beating Post and Gatty's flight time had come to an end in Khabarovsk, Siberia, where, landing in a teeming rainstorm, their Bellanca Skyrocket Miss Veedol had slid off the runway and become hopelessly bogged down. Already well behind their strict schedule, and with no hope of taking off for several days, the despondent pair abandoned their world flight. They decided, instead, to salvage something from the trip by competing for a $50,000 prize offered by Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper for the first nonstop flight across the Pacific. They carried no maps of Japan, so Pangborn cabled the editor of the English-language Japanese Times, asking for a track and distance from Khabarovsk to Tokyo and requesting that the American Embassy obtain landing permission from the Japanese Aviation Bureau.

The field at Khabarovsk had dried out before their cable was answered, so Pangborn decided to take off before it was swamped again by threatening storms. Flying a rough heading for Japan, they received a radio message giving a track and distance and advising that landing approval was being sought. After landing at Haneda to get directions, they finally reached Tachikawa airport, where they were met by angry officials demanding to see their landing papers. Japan was at war with China and, understandably, did not take kindly to foreign pilots arriving unannounced and photographing military-restricted areas. Pangborn recounted: We were arraigned on three counts. That we had flown over fortified areas and that we had photographed these areas. True we didn't have a flight permit with us, but we assumed it would be routine for our embassy to arrange it. As for flying over fortified areas and taking pictures, we were just tourists taking what we thought were pretty landscape shots.

Their seven weeks under house arrest gave Pangborn and Herndon the time to plan their transpacific attempt. They were also able to consider the efforts of the other teams, Japanese and American, that had already unsuccessfully competed for the Asahi Shimbun prize.

The Japanese decision to sponsor a Pacific flight had been sparked four years earlier by Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic triumph. Lindbergh's New York­Paris solo flight had electrified the world. Overnight, the American had become an international hero–the most photographed person of his era. The Japanese believed that the first successful transpacific flight, which was a longer and more demanding undertaking than crossing the Atlantic, would help focus attention on Japan's emergence as the industrial powerhouse of Asia–particularly if a Japanese pilot and plane were first across.

While the world still bathed in the afterglow of Lindbergh's success, Japan announced its transpacific intentions. The Imperial Aeronautics Association declared that a Japanese pilot, flying in a Japanese-owned and -manufactured aircraft, would cross the Pacific. Shortly afterward, the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi Shimbun placed an order with T. Claude Ryan for an exact replica of Lindbergh's long-range monoplane.

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