Absolutely Nothing to do with Space

I haven't been focusing on space-related news lately. Mostly I spend my time saving my job and saving my house from foreclosure, so space news hasn't been much of a priority. Still I felt this entry was worth writing.

A long time ago, I worked with a company that had me frequently traveling to an obscure corner of Japan called Ipponmatsu, a smallish village nestled between two fishing towns, located on the southwest corner of the smallest of the four main islands of Japan. I visited this place thirty or thirty two times over a ten year period. To get to Ipponmatsu, one first flew into Tokyo or Osaka, then took a local jet to the town of Matsuyama, then took a two hour train ride to Uwajima, then took another hour ride to the factory in a company bus. It was in one of my treks through Matsuyama that I noticed peculiar, concrete, airplane shaped quanset hut-like structures near the airport. I scratched my head for awhile before I realized they were aircraft bunkers, no doubt dating back to World War II.

You can't find much on the net about the air field at Matsuyama and World War II, but I gather it was fairly heavily bombed at one point. I found nothing about the bunkers themselves, except to locate two of them on Google maps. So to supply a little browsing fun to the world, the coordinates of the two bunkers follow:



33.826047,132.712794 -- 33.826047N,132.712794E
33.824447,132.711454 -- 33.824447N,132.711454E

By the way, the photo for this entry is courtesy of Google Maps. Perhaps the only thing space-related about this entry is that satellite imagery is radically changing the way we can interact with geology.