Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum

In case you didn't know, this is one of the major launching points for the infamous kamikaze zeroes! During WWII, Kurume City was burned to ashes by the allies. There's an unspoken, but clear sense of strong pride by the locals of the courage these pilots had and the sacrifice they made. The richness of history here is understated in the history books.

This is great little museum pity very little English on the displays. The air base was a launch pad for many kamakazi missions and this is dedicated to the horrors of war and what man would do to another and themselves. There is a recovered Mitsubishi Zero as the centre peace. Behind that are wreckages of recovered planes on suicide missions.

Small museum which costs 600 yen to enter. There is some English writing present but it mostly focusses on the destruction of the air base that used to be here. I have also been to three other museums like this on Kagoshima so I have seen more than most

A portion of most signs were in English. I felt the museum did an excellent job of conveying that Tachiarai Airfield started in 1919 and was an airfield that had commercial service as well as military purposes. That Tachiarai grew from nothing to a decent sized town along with the airfield. That they had exceptional engineering and were proud of their their craft. This where the lack of English signs grew challenging because they seem to allude that those engineers went on to design the shinkansen bullet train, but there were only pictures, no English. Then there are 1/200 scale airplane models, and old uniforms and gear next to the zero fighter. They had information and maps about the seven times the airfield was bombed in 1945. They had pictures of women and children along side 11 American airmen, and around 100 or more Japanese soldiers and airmen killed presumably around the airfield as a reminder to the importance of peace. Also near the entrance they had an origami bird that Barrack Obama had folded with Carolyn Kennedy in the White House with two excellent letters he had written to various Japanese to explain reinforcing the importance of peace. The reason for four stars was that you can only take pictures of the zero fighter. They did have wonderful docent with a translation to point out the B29 silhouette on the ceiling, the map of the airfield on the floor, and there were more exhibits on the second floor and on the other side of the entrance. It was a great experience. One that will stick with me more than most of my history classes.

Said to be the best in the East at the time, the Japanese Imperial Army’s Tachiarai Airport and its related facilities were positioned in the vast expanse of land that straddled the borders of Asakura City, Ogori City, Chikuzen Town, and Tachiarai Town before World War Ⅱ. However, these facilities were destroyed by the air attacks that occured primarily on March 27 and 30, 1945, claiming many victims (including children who were going home from school). Chikuzen Town’s Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum was modeled after the airplane hanger that the Tachiarai Airport housed. It offers an introduction to the Tachiarai Airport, its related facilities, and Japan’s aviation technology, as well as facts about the air attacks and the Kamikaze Special Attack Unit who graduated from Tachiarai Fly School. The museum also displays the only Type 97 Fighter plane in the world (hoisted from Hakata Bay and restored in 1996) and an actual Mitsubishi A6M Zero Fighter plane. As its name suggests, the Tachiarai Peace Memorial Musuem’s primary goal is to stress the importance of peace. At its center, the museum honors the victims of the air attacks by displaying their portraits. There is also a reading room where volunteer readers and people who survived the war share their expertise and experiences, as well as a theater.