TOKYO: Flights resumed at a small Japanese airport on Thursday (October 3) after an old World War II US bomb burst less than a minute after a passenger jet taxied by.
Miyazaki Airport in southern Japan was established in 1943 as an imperial Japanese navy base, dispatching hundreds of “kamikaze” aircraft on suicide missions. AFP video captured a cloud of soil exploding at least 10 meters into the air on the edge of a taxiway at the airport on the island of Kyushu.
The explosion, which caused a few-meter-wide hole on the tarmac, happened barely less than a minute after an aeroplane rolled past on its route to a runway, according to video footage.
The Self-defence Forces’ (SDF) bomb disposal team examined and determined that it was a “US-made 250kg bomb,” an SDF spokesman told AFP.
Other unexploded US munitions was reportedly discovered in the airport in 2011, 2021, and at a nearby construction site in 2009. Prior to the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the United States Air Force heavily bombed dozens of Japanese cities. Hundreds of thousands of residents were killed, including around 100,000 in Tokyo on a single night in March 1945.
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