All 157 passengers and eight crewmembers were evacuated on emergency inflatable chutes, minutes before the China Airlines Boeing 737 exploded.
Local police said one crewmember and one Naha Airport worker were in hospital but the degree of their injuries was not yet clear.
The local fire department said two passengers, a 57-year-old man and a seven-year-old girl, were in hospital suffering shock, but were not injured.
After landing at 10:27 a.m. local time (1:27 a.m. GMT) on Okinawa Island, a popular tourist resort halfway between Taiwan and the Japanese mainland, one of the airliner's engines caught fire. Investigators cited leaking fuel as a likely cause of the explosion on the plane, which had flown in from Taipei.
Taiwan-based China Airlines has a patchy safety record, with several fatal accidents since the early 1990s.
