KG Sugud in Penampang, Sabah, is preparing to turn its long-kept secret – the wreckage of a World War 2 Japanese fighter plane – into a tourist attraction. 

Some 3km from the village in the adjacent Kg Sugud forest reserve sits an unnamed hill where the Japanese airplane and its pilot met their end some 75 years ago.

The discovery of the wreck had never been reported to the authorities, although it was known to villagers, who, over time, cannibalised it for parts.

Michael Basol, a Penampang village community management council member, said they plan to integrate the crash site into a hiking trail in view of the growing popularity of hiking activities in Sabah.

“The site where the Japanese aircraft crashed could be as successful as Bukit Botak in Sepanggar,” Basol told The Malaysian Insight, referring to a popular Sabah hiking trail.

While the terrain can be sloping and difficult in parts, hikers on the hour-long trek will be rewarded with a close-up look at the relic and spectacular views of Likas Bay.

Basol said when he raised the idea with the site’s landowner, he was equally excited about its prospects.

However, turning the site into an attraction requires funds and Basol said he is preparing a proposal to submit to the authorities.

And because some elderly villagers still remember the crash, the events of that fateful day decades ago have not been lost to history.

In 1944, on a nondescript evening during the padi harvest season, villagers were going about their routine of gathering the harvest and tying up their buffaloes.

Suddenly, they were interrupted by the roar of engines overhead.

In the air above them, they witnessed a short but breath-taking dogfight over the hills, with two Japanese aircraft tracing the skies and four British fighters in pursuit.

One villager, Jetain Honsiung, who was 12 at the time, told villagers that he had seen one of the Japanese planes hit by British fire, with smoke billowing behind it as it fell.

He watched it plummet into a nearby hill and minutes later, the dogfight was over.

Jetain was among some of the villagers who rushed to the crash site, where they found the plane largely intact. The group did not linger, however, as they were afraid of encountering Japanese soldiers.

Basol said the pilot’s body was later extracted by the Japanese and buried in an unmarked grave elsewhere in Sabah.

The wreckage then lay largely untouched until 1988, when village folk revisited the site to take its metal body apart bit by bit, some to sell to scrap-metal dealers, some to keep for themselves.

“They were used to make kitchen utensils and for farming uses,” said Harry Colin, a Kg Sugud villager.

Colin said Jetain, who had been the village’s main source of information about the crash, died a few years ago.

He said Jetain had also been the source of information for a group of form two pupils from Kg Sugud, looking to complete a history project on the downed aircraft.

“The crash was never reported. I don’t think the state Museums Department is even aware of it,” he added.

Today, only two engines are left and can be seen protruding from the ground, covered by vegetation and surrounded by jackfruit and rubber trees. 

However, this Japanese plane is not the only World War 2 relic that met its end in Sabah.

Three shipwrecks of Japanese transport vessels lie in Usukan Bay, Kota Belud – the Higane Maru, Hiyori Maru and Kokusei Maru – which had been en route to Manila when they were sunk by torpedoes fired from an American submarine in 1944, a year before the Japanese occupation in North Borneo ended. – July 30, 2019.