AFP, TOKYO

Flights resumed yesterday at a regional Japanese airport after a World War II US bomb blew up less than a minute after a passenger jet taxied past.

Miyazaki airport in southern Japan originated in 1943 as an imperial Japanese navy base, sending dozens of kamikaze aircraft on suicide missions.

Footage showed a plume of earth blasting at least 10m into the air on the edge of a taxiway at the airport on the island of Kyushu.

A photograph taken from a helicopter shows a small crater, bottom, center, on a taxiway at Miyazaki airport in Japan on Wednesday.

Photo: AP

The explosion, which blew a hole in the tarmac a few meters across, occurred less than a minute after an aircraft rolled past toward a runway, footage showed.

There were no reports of injuries, but dozens of flights were canceled on Wednesday, affecting more than 3,400 passengers.

The Japan Self-Defense Forces’ bomb disposal team investigated and concluded that it was a “US-made 250 kilogram bomb,” a military spokesman told reporters.

Other unexploded US ordnance dropped was reportedly found in 2021 and 2011 in the airport, as well as at a nearby construction site in 2009.

Before the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the US Air Force heavily bombarded dozens of Japanese cities.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, including about 100,000 in Tokyo on one night in March 1945 alone.

In the year to April, the military safely removed 2,348 unexploded devices, 441 of them in the southern region of Okinawa, the Self-Defense Forces said.

Okinawa was a major area of conflict, causing an estimated 200,000 casualties and more than 1,800 tonnes of unexploded bombs are estimated to litter the area.