Residents evacuated a swath of the city of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, and Higashinada Ward in Kobe on Sunday morning as military explosives experts prepared to move two World War II-era artillery shells.
Around 10,000 Hamamatsu residents were forced to evacuate and rail and road traffic near the site of the latest find, a 860-kg shell, had to be halted. The dud was apparently fired by a U.S. Navy ship toward the end of the war, the municipal government said in a statement.
A Ground Self-Defense Force bomb squad was scheduled to blow up the shell on a nearby beach later Sunday.
In Kobe, meanwhile, around 7,100 residents were evacuated to allow GSDF officers to remove a 250-kg shell that was discovered last month at a depth of 3 meters.
Almost 70 years after the end of the war, GSDF bomb squad personnel are still clearing unexploded ordnance throughout the nation, including, occasionally, in central Tokyo. They have dealt with some 6,000 tons of duds since the government began keeping records in 1958, according to Defense Ministry records.
The 41-cm naval artillery shell found in Hamamatsu, home to Suzuki Motor Corp. and Yamaha Corp., was unearthed last Oct. 11 by construction crews working at a maintenance facility of Central Japan Railway Co.(JR Tokai), which operates shinkansen services between Tokyo and Nagoya.
GSDF Sgt. 1st Class Makoto Ohashi and five of his bomb disposal specialists, a job portrayed in the 2008 Hollywood movie “The Hurt Locker,” got to work on removing the shell early Sunday morning for transport to a 4.5-meter-deep hole dug in a local beach.
Evacuations along the route began at 8 a.m., with residents taking refuge at 12 sites that included local schools and a gymnasium. Bullet train services also were temporarily halted between Hamamatsu and Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture, affecting about 14,000 passengers.
Ohashi, who has disabled 12 bombs over the past decade, follows the same routine each time to settle his mind, including a precise placement of the tools in the order they will be needed. Last year, he and his team safely defused a 225-kg shell discovered in the Moto-Akasaka district of Tokyo, near the grounds of the Imperial Palace.
“The shell is on its way to the beach for detonation this afternoon,” Hiroyuki Nakanishi, an official at Hamamatsu City Hall, said. “We have not received any reports of accidents or trouble during the procedure.”
Construction work at sites across the nation routinely uncovers bombs and other ordnance dropped by U.S. forces or left at former Imperial Japanese military munitions sites. Special disposal teams handled 38 tons of the explosives in fiscal 2012, according to the Defense Ministry.
U.S. Air Force records show that around 160,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Japan’s main islands, mostly from B-29 aircraft, during the last five months of the war. However, the Defense Ministry has no estimate of the number of duds that may still remain, according to the head of the GSDF’s ammunition section, Col. Takeshi Yoshizuka.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose Liberal Democratic Party returned to power following December’s Lower House election, is pledging to boost publics works spending to stimulate the economy. That may lead to an increase in the number of World War II bombs discovered, said Noboru Yamaguchi, a professor at the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture.
“As more and more construction projects are started, there is a possibility we’re going to find more unexploded shells,” said Yamaguchi, a retired GSDF lieutenant general.
No Japanese disposal specialists have ever been injured during missions, said GSDF Lt. Col. Masataka Takahashi, who leads a bomb disposal unit that covers central and eastern Japan.
“Our mission is to continue that legacy,” he said.
Click to enlarge