Japanese airport reopens after WWII US bomb blast

Flights have resumed at a regional Japanese airport after an unexploded World War II US bomb blew up less than a minute after a passenger jet taxied past.

Miyazaki airport in southern Japan originated in 1943 as an imperial Japanese navy base, sending dozens of "kamikaze" aircraft on suicide missions.

Footage obtained by AFP showed a plume of earth blasting at least 10 metres into the air on the edge of a taxiway at the airport on the island of Kyushu.

The explosion, which blew a hole in the tarmac a few metres across, occurred just less than a minute after an aircraft rolled past towards a runway, footage showed.

There were no reports of injuries but dozens of flights were cancelled, affecting more than 3,400 passengers.

The Self-Defense Forces' bomb disposal team investigated and concluded that it was a "US-made 250kg bomb," an SDF spokesman told AFP.

Other unexploded US ordnance dropped was reportedly found in 2021 and 2011 in the airport, as well as at a nearby construction site in 2009.

Before the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the US airforce heavily bombarded dozens of Japanese cities.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens were killed, including around 100,000 in Tokyo on one night in March 1945 alone.

In the year to April 2024, the military safely removed 2,348 unexploded devices, 441 of them in the southern region of Okinawa, according to the SDF.

Okinawa was a major area of conflict, causing an estimated 200,000 casualties – 60% of them civilians - and more than 1,800 tonnes of unexploded bombs are estimated to litter the area.

"Most of them are US bombs from World War II, but some of them are leftovers from the Japanese military," a spokesman for the joint staff office told AFP.