Alddreu Airfield

Character

Nineteen of Alddreu’s original twenty hardened aircraft shelters still stand among cultivated fields. The concrete bunkers look almost misplaced until the surrounding farmland is understood as part of the same history: local land was militarized, expanded for war and later returned to agricultural use around structures too massive to disappear

The airfield began with forced labor. From the 1920s into the 1930s, Japanese military authorities mobilized residents of the Moseulpo area to clear and build runways, hangars and storage facilities. What had been pasture and farmland became one of imperial Japan’s key aviation sites on Jeju

Its geography made the field useful. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, aircraft staged through Alddreu for attacks on Chinese cities including Nanjing. Later expansion pushed the base far beyond its initial footprint as Japan prepared Jeju for a possible final defense of the home islands

The surviving shelters make that history unusually blunt. They are low, thick concrete forms built to resist air attack, and most remain embedded in the same open agricultural landscape rather than isolated inside a museum precinct

The experience

The site is read in fragments. A hangar may appear beyond a vegetable plot; another sits with Sanbangsan or Songaksan behind it. The runway is no longer the visual center, so the field has to be reconstructed mentally from shelters, bunker forms and the distances between them

One hangar contains Park Kyung-hoon’s life-size Zero fighter sculpture, originally created for a 2010 exhibition marking one hundred years since Japan’s annexation of Korea. Placing the aircraft form inside a surviving shelter changes the building from an empty military shell into an argument about what it protected and what the airfield was built to do

The farmland matters as much as the concrete. The current Visit Jeju page notes that the military-owned land is largely leased for cultivation. Potatoes and vegetables grow around fortifications designed for aircraft, producing a landscape where wartime infrastructure and ordinary agricultural work occupy the same ground

**Keep the chronologies separate.** Alddreu’s airfield and hangars belong to the period of Japanese colonial militarization. Nearby Seotal Oreum carries a later history: former Japanese military facilities there became connected to killings during the Jeju April 3 period after liberation

History

Japanese naval planners began developing Alddreu as an emergency landing field and expanded it repeatedly as war in East Asia intensified. A 2013 study of the airfield describes its strategic value as a point linking Japan, Korea and China

By 1937, Alddreu was being used intensively by aircraft involved in attacks on China. Later Pacific War expansion increased the field from about 66 hectares to roughly 264 hectares, while hardened shelters, underground structures and other defenses multiplied

The construction burden fell heavily on local residents, who were forced into years of military labor. The late-war enlargement continued even as Japan’s position deteriorated, leaving a heavily fortified landscape whose final planned role was overtaken by defeat

After liberation, the site did not simply disappear. The Korean War brought new military use, including an army training center. In 1988, a South Korean military-airfield proposal met strong local resistance and was abandoned, according to historical research on Alddreu

That sequence leaves the site in an unusual condition today: neither restored airbase nor empty ruin, but agricultural land threaded with structures from successive military ambitions

Before you go

Alddreu spreads across a broad working landscape with no single entrance. Fields and local roads separate the surviving hangars and related remains, so the site is encountered as several short stops across the area