Metabaru Airfield Ruins

Metabaru Airfield was planned from 1941 and constructed on approximately 200 hectares of fertile agricultural land centered on the Kaminakazue area (present-day Mameda, Yoshinogari Town) in Kanzaki District, Saga Prefecture. Local farmers were forcibly displaced to make way for the airfield. Construction was completed by October 1943, when the facility opened as the Metabaru Branch of the Tachiarai Army Flight School (大刀洗陸軍飛行学校目達原分教所), the main school being located in Fukuoka Prefecture.

From October 1943, university students and higher technical school students mobilized under the gakuto shutsujin (student mobilization) policy began training as apprentice officers (見習士官) on trainer aircraft. Pilots were billeted at local temples including Meizen-ji and Saiō-ji (西往寺), and triangular wooden barracks were erected in the surrounding area. Aircraft were reportedly pushed by hand along pathways through Hagiwara district to reach the runway.

From 1944, as Japan's strategic situation deteriorated, the airfield came to be used for special attack operations; the plaque at the site records that members of the 273rd Shinbu Squadron (第273振武隊), an Army special attack (tokubetsu kōgeki) unit, took off from here. The Shinbu squadrons were Army kamikaze units formed under the Sixth Air Army for the defense of Okinawa; units that passed through Metabaru, such as the 72nd, flew Mitsubishi Ki-51 Type 99 assault planes (九九式襲撃機, Allied code name 'Sonia').

Metabaru served as a transit and staging base within the broader special attack logistics chain. Shinbu squadrons assembled and trained at bases across Kyushu — including Metabaru, Tachiarai, Kikuchi, Kumenoshō, and Ozuki — before being routed to forward departure airfields at Chiran and Bansei in Kagoshima Prefecture for their final sorties against American naval forces near Okinawa. The famous 72nd Shinbu Squadron, whose members included 17-year-old Corporal Yukio Araki (the youngest known kamikaze pilot to die in the war), was formed at Pyongyang in March 1945, advanced to Metabaru on May 17 and on to Bansei on May 25, and sortied from Bansei on May 27, 1945, in an attack that heavily damaged the destroyer USS Braine.

Young men from units based at Metabaru departed on special attack missions from which they never returned. The base was also subjected to American air raids in the closing months of the war.

After Japan's surrender in August 1945, the airfield was decommissioned. In 1954, the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF) established Camp Metabaru on the former airfield site. Today it houses the JGSDF Kyushu Logistics Depot (九州補給処), the Western Army Aviation Group, and helicopter units; part of the original runway is used as a heliport (ICAO code RJDM).

Outside the base perimeter, the former main gate pillars (正門跡) remain standing on a rural road southwest of the garrison, surrounded by farmland. In July 1992, Mitagawa Town (now part of Yoshinogari Town) erected a memorial monument (慰霊碑) beside the gate pillars bearing inscriptions commemorating the young pilots who departed from Metabaru. Two stone plaques display memorial poems. The inscription references the 273rd Shinbu Squadron and exhorts future generations to remember the young men who 'took off one after another to search for enemy ships.' A memorial service is held periodically at the site.