Narita Airport: Sanrizuka Farmers, a Control Tower Raid and a Bent Taxiway

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By the early 1960s Tokyo's Haneda Airport was boxed in by dense neighborhoods and out of capacity, so in 1966 the Transport Ministry chose the farming villages of Sanrizuka and Shibayama in Chiba Prefecture, about 60 kilometers east of central Tokyo, for a five-runway hub. It finalized the site without consulting residents and planned to take the land by eminent domain, and many families learned of it from the evening news. Conservative farmers joined radical New Left students, including the Chukaku-ha and Zengakuren, in the Sanrizuka-Shibayama Union. They barricaded survey roads from 1967, built steel towers in the planned flight paths, and three police officers were killed in the clashes. The first terminal was finished in 1972, but no runway could be built.

On March 26, 1978, four days before the scheduled opening, protesters stormed the control tower, smashed equipment and caused about half a million dollars in damage, delaying the opening by two months. Narita opened on May 20, 1978 with 14,000 police facing 6,000 protesters, while another cell cut power to the air traffic control center in Tokorozawa and shut Tokyo's airspace. Only one of five planned runways worked. In 1986 eight farming families still owned about 53 acres in the way, and the government had renounced forced expropriation. Runway B opened in 2002 for the World Cup at 2,180 meters, 320 meters short, and its taxiway bent around a three-story concrete protest building until a 2008 Supreme Court ruling and a 500-officer operation in 2011 cleared it. Until 2015 everyone entering the airport had to show ID.

• From about 2006 Narita grouped airlines by alliance: SkyTeam in Terminal 1 North, Star Alliance in Terminal 1 South and oneworld in Terminal 2.
• Terminal 3, opened in 2015 for low-cost carriers, uses floor decals instead of hanging signs and outdoor air stairs instead of jet bridges, and Skytrax ranked it the world's second-best LCC terminal in 2024.
• A 47-kilometer underground pipeline from the port of Chiba City had pumped 130 billion liters of jet fuel by its 30th anniversary in 2013.
• Helsinki is Narita's busiest European route because the polar route makes it the first major gateway.
• Runway C, a 3,500-meter strip built over two road tunnels and due in fiscal 2028, will lift annual slots from about 300,000 to 460,000.