16,000 evacuated as WWII dud bomb disposed of in western Tokyo

Monday 19th May, 02:42 AM JST

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

Latest 15 of 22 Total Comments Show All

brandonklex at 05:08 AM JST - 19th May

i saw a guy still living on a farm with an unexploded bomb under his house in germany on discovery channel.japanese officials must have watched it too!And i dont understand how come a bomb does not explode.what is their failure rate?
UnagiDon at 05:15 AM JST - 19th May

Probably they evacuated people only during the removal process since that must be the most dangerous time to be around a bomb that's lain dormant for almost 60 years.
Stallion at 05:41 AM JST - 19th May

I am surprised that with all of the rail work that has been done since the war, bombs are still being found.
DenshaDeGO at 10:28 AM JST - 19th May

I think during WWII the failure rate of bombs was likely higher than it is now. From what I've read early torpedos for example, quite often failed to go off and kept sailing off into the sunset.
superesonator at 10:46 AM JST - 19th May

Finally JapanToday has some coverage on this. I posted about it here last week, and sent a letter of inquiry to the JapanToday editor two weeks ago.

The news delay is quite like the bomb disposal delay.
romulus3 at 11:25 AM JST - 19th May

supersonator,

that is very disturbing if indeed its the same unexploded ordnance.
ranjithpanakal at 11:31 AM JST - 19th May

Thank GOD !! nothing happened. But I also dont get , the cause of 2 months delay for diffusing ???
USNinJapan2 at 03:14 PM JST - 19th May

UnagiDon

Probably they evacuated people only during the removal process since that must be the most dangerous time to be around a bomb that's lain dormant for almost 60 years.

If this is what they did then they (the authorities) are incompetent. Once UXO is discovered it is treated as if it can detonate any second, regarldess of how long it has remained dormant. This is SOP anywhere. In this business you don't take chances, particularly with other people's lives, and a dud bomb like this one discovered in an extremely heavily populated area is/should be rendered safe as soon as humanly possible, not when convenient. I don't know what actually was the cause for the two month wait, but the JGSDF EOD team should have taken care of this within the first 24 hours.
pathat at 05:09 PM JST - 19th May

USNinJapan: Most people here are not/have not been in the military so go easy on the SOP(Standard Operating Procedure)military jargon, O.K.?

I read this article in full elsewhere and it also says that the local authorities evacuated about 150 patients from a nearby hospital to another further away.

Regardless, this is a strange story and I think the authorities involved should be more forthcoming as to why it took them so long to dispose of the dud bomb, and their "excessive response" when they finally did.
USNinJapan2 at 07:22 PM JST - 19th May

pathat

Sorry, I assumed most people know what SOP means...
usaexpat at 11:32 PM JST - 19th May

Interesting that they are still finding unexploded bombs. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I read an article about 10 years ago concerning members of a bomb squad in France who's full time job is taking care of WWI bombs that farmers till up from time to time.
Cos at 03:04 AM JST - 20th May

Usaexpat, the situation of bombs in France (from 1914-1918 and even from 1870)is different, there were fights there, both sides whould dig and hide with their weapons. Certainly half of the stuff are still buried, scattered away on a surface that makes 1/4th of the country. We'll never be able to check everywhere with powerful metal detectors, and dig to get every suspect object. There are still dozens of squads of "demineurs", but they are not full time as far as I know, findings are seasonal. In winter, they blow the luggage you forget in the hall of the airport.

But bombs don't fall like that in the middle of a city and go unnoticed. It's possible to check every square meter of Tokyo. In Japan, only one side could possibly conceal war material (including fallen bombs), and the guys are still there, still in charge, they have the maps somewhere in the Yasukuni archives.
In Osaka, near the river, a few years ago, homeless people started to dig to make a sort of garden and the cops quickly came to stop them. Everybody was approving, I told them they were really bad with the homeless. After a while, neighbours explained me there was another reason. During the war, the riverside area was used by Japanese army and locals suppose they had chemical weapons around. Why not taking that away after 45 ? Because during years, the American army and then an American company had used that industrial land, and locals don't think the Japanese army revealed them all their secrets, and even if the Americans knew there probably were weird thing under, they didn't insist (the company had a polluting activity too). Then, in the 1980's, that was too late to talk about unpleasant old stories. So they screen the plots little by little, discretly, when they make new buildings. Why don't locals say anything ? Well, that's be bad for the real estate business, prices of houses and flats could be affected. They think that if nothing happened in 60 yrs, that's Ok as long as you don't dig. Well they hope it's OK. Surely that's not as if earthquakes were frequent in this area... I guess that in Tokyo they are playing the same game and authorities took a long long time to confirm and decide an action.

Well I hope the Japanese, knowing this situation, won't support the countries that drop clusterbombs.
USNinJapan2 at 12:07 PM JST - 20th May

Cos

Japan itself is armed with cluster bombs.
Cos at 06:38 PM JST - 20th May

I know, all I ask is they don't drop them. This is more than a war weapon, that's a device to revenge long after the war has ended.
USNinJapan2 at 11:06 AM JST - 21st May

Cos

Well, since the cluster munitions the JSDF posesses in its inventory are strictly for defensive purposes, it would be pretty silly for them to drop cluster bombs on its own territory wouldn't it? Kind of makes you wonder why they have them in the first place...