IJA 36th Air Squadron

The 36th Air Squadron (第三十六航空隊) of the Imperial Japanese Army was based at Taichung Airfield (台中飛行場, postwar Shuinan Airport) in central Taiwan. The designation is known chiefly from Taichung City's heritage register: surviving workshops and barracks on the airfield were listed in October 2009 as the "Army 36th Air Squadron Workshops and Barracks" and later renamed the "Shuinan Airport Barracks". Japanese army aviation was normally organised into air regiments (sentai), airfield battalions and air sector commands, and the exact unit and lineage behind this name could not be confirmed from the material available to this site; what follows places it in the context of the airfield and of army aviation in Taiwan.

Army aviation in Taiwan began at Pingtung, where the 8th Air Regiment moved from Kyushu in 1927. As the war in China widened and the southern-advance policy took shape, military airfields were built or enlarged across the island. Taichung Airfield, on the north-western edge of the city, served both military and civil aviation and had hangars, repair shops, barracks and defensive works; a surviving machine-gun tower dates from 1940. The unit operated from hangars and barracks on the airfield and formed part of the air defence network protecting Taiwan and supporting operations across the western Pacific.

Late in the Pacific War Taiwan became an air staging area linking the home islands, Okinawa and the Philippines. In 1944 the Army formed the 8th Air Division to command its air units on the island. From the Formosa Air Battle of October 1944 onward, U.S. carrier aircraft and later land-based bombers from the Philippines repeatedly attacked Taiwan's airfields, Taichung among them. During the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 the 8th Air Division flew special attack sorties from Taiwan, and special attack units are reported to have been stationed at Taichung in the final months.

After 1945 the airfield passed to the Republic of China Air Force and long served as a centre for aeronautical research and manufacturing; from the 1970s it was also the civil Shuinan Airport. It closed in 2004 when civil flights moved to Ching Chuan Kang, and the site was redeveloped as the Shuinan Economic and Trade Park and Central Park, with nearly all Japanese-era structures demolished. The gun tower, registered as a Taichung historic building in 2006, and the remaining barracks are the airfield's last physical traces.