Ōsawa aircraft bunkers, Musashino no Mori Park

photo by Hiroyuki Sato · CC BY-SA 3.0

photo by Hvhv · PD — rilascio dell'autore nel pubblico dominio (la pagina recita: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain)

Of about sixty, four remain, and you see these two from behind a fence

The park borders the runway of Chōfu Airport, and as you walk, the small planes to the islands pass overhead. At the far end, on the grass, there are two concrete shells open on one side, as tall as a room: they are the shelters where the fighter planes were hidden. You can get right up to them but not inside: they stand behind a fence, and you look at them through it.

An entaigō is a reinforced-concrete shelter, open on one side and with a vaulted roof, built to keep an aircraft safe from bombs. Around Chōfu Airport, which during the war was an army airfield, about sixty were built around 1944: about thirty in concrete and about thirty in horseshoe-shaped rammed earth. They served to scatter the fighters instead of keeping them in a row, so that a single pass of bombers would not catch them all, and to hide their number from anyone photographing from above. The aircraft were pushed in and pulled out by hand. Today four remain: two here, in Musashino no Mori Park in Mitaka, and two in Fuchū. The park keeps them as war ruins, and explains them as shelters built to preserve the fighters for the final battle on home soil, which is the phrase the Japan of 1944 used for the invasion it expected and that never came.

ℹ️ Public park, always open, free. The two bunkers can be seen from outside, through the fence: you cannot go in or climb on them. From time to time the park management organises a guided visit with a talk about Chōfu Airport: in 2023 there were two sessions, 11:00–12:00 and 14:00–15:00, free, twenty people per session and booking required. It is not a fixed date on the calendar: if you are keen, you have to call the park's service centre and ask whether and when.

🚉 調布飛行場 · 7 min walk

Sources: monumen.to · ja.wikipedia.org · tokyo-park.or.jp · guidoor.jp

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