There is something oddly familiar-looking about the decommissioned passenger aircraft sitting in a grassy field a few kilometres from Tokyo's Narita airport.

"Some people say it looks like a bullet train," says Hikotaro Kaneda, curator of the Museum of Aeronautical Sciences, which owns the field and the four decade-old turboprop - a Japanese-made YS-11, one of about 180 built as part of the country's bid to revive its commercial aerospace industry after the se-cond world war.