Under a blazing mid-afternoon sun, 1st Lieutenant Toshikazu Nakano squats in a muddy pit at the edge of a housing development and brushes rocks away from a shiny metal object lodged firmly in the ground. He stops for a moment and barks orders to the rest of his team.
“This one might explode,” he yells. “Everyone take cover.”
Like former battlefields all over the world, the southern Japan island of Okinawa — home to more than 1 million people and the site of some of World War II’s most savage fighting — is a tinderbox of unexploded bombs, thousands and thousands of tonnes of them, rusted and often half buried.
PHOTO: AP
The bombs are the bane of construction crews, divers and unsuspecting children. Because of their age and the layers of crusty dirt that usually cover them, they often don’t seem dangerous.
“On the outside, these bombs look harmless — but inside, they are as good as new,” said Lieutenant Colonel Hidenori Miyata, commander of the Japan Ground Self Defense Forces bomb squad on Okinawa.
A series of incidents this year — including the death last month of a US Marine involved in their disposal — have caused an uproar on Okinawa.
“In Okinawa, even today, residents have to evacuate every two weeks,” Okinawan lawmaker Osamu Ashitomi told parliament after one of the most recent accidents. “The reality in Okinawa is that the war is not over yet.”
A Japanese tourist recently was stopped at Okinawa’s main airport for packing an old grenade he had found in his bags as a souvenir.
In late January, a group of Okinawan children brought some bombs to show off at an elementary school, forcing teachers to evacuate the area and call in members of Nakano’s military bomb squad. No one was injured.
Just a week later, however, a power shovel operator was blinded and badly burned, and windows were blown out of a retirement home nearby. He hit a 250kg bomb in the middle of the booming city of Itoman on Okinawa’s southern end, where some of the worst fighting of World War II took place.
Then, on March 24, Okinawa suffered its first bomb fatality in years, when US Marine Staff Sergeant John Roy III, 32, of Muscogee, Georgia, was killed while preparing a bomb for detonation at a US military disposal range. Another Marine and a sailor were injured. The US military, which has several bases on Okinawa, destroys the recovered bombs.
The blast on Camp Hansen was one of the worst accidents caused by the wartime ordnance since 1974, when three people were killed, including a two-year-old girl, during sewer repairs near a kindergarten in Okinawa’s capital, Naha.
The danger is common at former battle sites around the world, said the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which won a Nobel Prize in 1997 for its work.
Though not involved in Okinawa, MAG has run clearing operations in 35 countries, from Angola to Vietnam. Its main concern is the removal of landmines, but it also cooperates with local authorities in recovering other explosive remnants of war.
MAG officials say much work remains to be done.
“There are still numerous countries contaminated by landmines, anti-personnel or anti-tank, and there are regions and countries contaminated by unexploded ordnance, for example Lebanon with cluster munitions,” MAG spokesman Diderik van Halsema said. “Its severity differs per country and region. Heavily contaminated countries are Afghanistan, Iraq, Angola. But there are also areas where not much is being done, such as Morocco, Algeria, and North and South Korea.”
Okinawa is one of the worst hotspots because of the sheer scale of the battle that raged there. The island was not mined, but it was bombed relentlessly. More people were killed in the April 1945 battle of Okinawa, called the “Storm of Steel,” than by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The bombs, mortars, bullets and artillery shells that rained down on the island left 12,000 US troops dead and killed as many as 250,000 Japanese, including many civilians who were caught in the crossfire in 2002.
All told, about 200,000 tonnes of explosives were used by the US and Okinawa’s Japanese defenders. An estimated 10,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance was left scattered across the island, mainly in the south.
Much of the ordnance had been recovered by the time the US returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. About 1,500 tonnes have been recovered since, a pace of about 30 tonnes a year.
Along with responding to emergency calls, Nakano’s squad deploys on regular missions once a week.
“Today we went to 19 places and collected 42 explosives, from hand grenades to 5-inch artillery shells,” he said after a 10-hour convoy through sugarcane farms, beachfront parks and numerous construction sites. “There is ordnance everywhere.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
OPTIMISTIC: A Philippine Air Force spokeswoman said the military believed the crew were safe and were hopeful that they and the jet would be recovered A Philippine Air Force FA-50 jet and its two-person crew are missing after flying in support of ground forces fighting communist rebels in the southern Mindanao region, a military official said yesterday. Philippine Air Force spokeswoman Colonel Consuelo Castillo said the jet was flying “over land” on the way to its target area when it went missing during a “tactical night operation in support of our ground troops.” While she declined to provide mission specifics, Philippine Army spokesman Colonel Louie Dema-ala confirmed that the missing FA-50 was part of a squadron sent “to provide air support” to troops fighting communist rebels in
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
RSS