I’m working on a large piece about Sasebo and the Japanese homefront in World War II, so tonight I’m putting up a short piece about an artillery battery in neighboring Saikai City.

Sasebo and Nagasaki Prefecture are close to the Asian mainland and during their wars with China the Japanese realized they needed to increase their coastal defenses to protect assets from seaborne attack. To accomplish this task a number of artillery bunkers where set up in the area around Sasebo and Omura Bay, such as the one at Ishiharadake.

Ishiharadake is an obscure place, and that’s probably why it was put there. Rounding a forested hillside road there is a sideroad that leads off past stone walls that rise out of the hill and flank the road. Otherwise its completely hidden within the trees.

The bunker facility was commissioned in 1897 and designed to support six Krupp Type 38 10cm cannons that protected the southern approach to Sasebo. It was active during the Russo-Japanese War and World War I but never fired a shot in anger as neither the Imperial Russian Navy nor Kaiserliche Marine ever attempted to get within bombarding range of Sasebo or its naval arsenal. The hilltop fortification was decommissioned in 1929 and lay abandoned, even through World War II, until about fifteen years ago when the city of Saikai had it cleaned up, reopened and it became a public park. An inoffensive military relic from another age, like a castle, that showcases the Japanese military architecture of its time. I really like the rough-hewn stone outer walls, which you can see in other military buildings from not too long later, such as the Hario Transmitting Station (1918-22) and the Katashima Torpedo Testing Range warehouse (1918) in Sasebo and Kawatana, respectively.

The fortification is small and easy to visit; most of it is in a trench sunk into the hill, except for the batteries topside and some smaller side bunkers. Everything has been removed, so there are neither guns nor any other signs of its original purpose inside the empty spaces. Since all the rooms are empty and there are no explanations as to what anything was or how the facility worked, my friend and I could only make educated guesses on what rooms had been used for. The bunkers beneath the gun mounts were possibly ammunition rooms, though it would have been a chore dragging the shells up to the guns, but the row of stone rooms in the trench were possibly administrative offices or housing for troops and there is a well too. One of the rooms contained a tunnel that went and split off into two rooms with what look like a wall of inward-facing narrow rifle firing ports, but that’s speculation.

Ishiharadake is perfectly safe to visit as it’s not an unstable ruin and is maintained for visitors, there’s even a handrail in the bunker tunnel, though you have to bring your own flashlight. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in a lesser explored part of Japan’s military past or just looking for a good park to walk about or picnic in.