There was once a large military garrison centered on Tachiarai Airfield, which the Imperial Japanese Army boated was the greatest airfield in the East. The big military town played an important role in history but ultimately suffered devastating damage from US military air raids resulting in many people including civilians being killed.
This airfield also acted as a place of transit for many young Kamikadze pilots destined to carry out their missions. Now on airfield is abandoned and there is the Chikuzenmachi Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum.
The Japanese Army established in 1919 the Tachiarai Air Base, located in Fukuoka Prefecture on Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyūshū. The Tachiarai Army Flight School opened in 1940 and trained many pilots who took part in kamikaze operations in the last year of the war. The Tachiarai Flight School had a branch school in Chiran (Kagoshima Prefecture), where many Army pilots departed to make suicide attacks on the American fleet near Okinawa. Operations at Tachiarai came to an end when American B-29s destroyed the base on March 27, 1945.
Mr. Muneshige Fuchigami opened the Tachiarai Peace Museum in 1987 and continues as the museum’s director. He selected the former Tachiarai train station as the museum site because he wanted to preserve the place where families gave their final farewells to young men departing for the battlefront (Nishinippon Shimbun 2000). Since the museum’s opening, numerous individuals have donated items about the air base and the personnel who were stationed there. The museum’s goals, as stated in its brochure, are to preserve peace and to maintain repose of the souls of those who died during the war. The main exhibition room has an altar in one corner in remembrance of those who died.
