Horikoshi graduated from the newly established Aviation Laboratory (Kōkū Kenkyūjo) within the Engineering Department of the University of Tokyo,[1] and started his career in Mitsubishi Internal Combustion Engine Company Limited, which later became Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Nagoya Aircraft Manufacturing Plant.

One of Jiro Horikoshi's first works was the flawed Mitsubishi 1MF10, an experimental aircraft that never passed the prototype stage after some flight tests.

However, lessons learned from this design led to the development of the far more successful Mitsubishi A5M (Allied codename "Claude") which entered mass production in 1936.

We were convinced that surely our government had in mind some diplomatic measures which would bring the conflict to a halt before the situation became catastrophic for Japan.

[2]: 401–2 On 7 December 1944, a powerful earthquake in the Tokai region forced Mitsubishi to halt aircraft production at its plant in Ohimachi, Nagoya.

Horikoshi, who had been at a conference in Tokyo with Imperial Navy officers to discuss the new Reppu fighter, returned to Nagoya on the 17th, in time to experience another air raid on the Mitsubishi factories the next day.

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.

On 12 March, Horikoshi sent most of his family, including his elderly mother, children and brother-in-law, to his home village near Takasaki to be safe from the bombings, though his wife, Sumako, remained with him in Nagoya.

In 1956, Horikoshi collaborated on a book about the Zero with Okumiya Masatake, a general in the JASDF and a former Imperial Navy commander who had led Zero fighter squadrons during the war.

On a trip to New York, he travelled to Long Island and stayed in the Garden City Hotel, where Charles Lindbergh had spent the night before his solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.

[3] Horikoshi is the subject of The Wind Rises, a fictionalized biographical animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, released in 2013, in which his voice was provided by Hideaki Anno (and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the English dub).

[6] In particular, although the film follows the progression of his aircraft designs, the details of his personal life are mostly fictitious (for example, he had an older brother, not a younger sister).