TOKYO’S WHITE ELEPHANT FIERCE OPPOSITION TO NEW AIRPORT CHECKS OPERATION

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33653, 1 October 1974, Page 16

TOKYO’S WHITE ELEPHANT FIERCE OPPOSITION TO NEW AIRPORT CHECKS OPERATION

(By

ROBERT WHYMONT

in the "Guardian.")

(Reprinted by arrangement)

A guard dog barking at a sparrow is the only sound at the end of the unused runway. Guarding tins inactivity’ are two watchmen, wearing leather coats and carrying walkie-talkies. They patrol inside two eight-foot electrified wire fences which enclose a concertina of barbed wire. Lurking around the miles of silent airport, another 300 security guards and riot police wait for the Last Battle of Narita.

It will be the bloodiest, some people say, in a bloody struggle that has gone on for a decade. Narita became the front line of a people’s fight against corrupt and insensitive government, against the Ministers who rammed a white elephant! down the local farmers’ throats, and the handsomely rewarded New Tokyo Airport Corporation officials who live like flies on the elephant’s back, wining and dining lavishly in Narita’s restaurants. So far a draw of sorts: an airport, but no aircraft.

The New Tokyo International Airport at Narita, 40 miles from Tokyo, displaced 180 farming families, 700 cows on the imperial ranch, and acres of fertile farmland when the first) phase was authorised nine years ago.

The severity of the struggle is indicated by the delays: the target opening date was April, 1971 — nine postponements later the Transport Ministry and New Tokyo International Airport Corporation are sensibly vague about the opening schedule. In the past few weeks it has become clear that the tentative opening date of spring, 1975, will not be met either. So Narita will remain for some time to come an ultramodern airport in search of a plane. The 4400-yard runway, the hangar for two Boeing 747 s and a DCB, the terminal building were finally completed 18 months ago. Nearly $7OB million worth of concrete and steel are shimmering like a mirage of an airport, decaying amid the rich countryside. Part of the runway is cracking, the buildings coated inside and out with yellow volcanic dust of the Kanto plain, and a staggering $70,800 is spent daily simply for the upkeep of the facilities, the electricity, and the army of guards that protect the idle monster.

The airport is outwardly ready for planes and passengers, but some crucial hindrances remain. The most obvious and dramatic is a 200 ft structure rising like a small Eiffel Tower, directly in the flight path. The guards are watching it from the nearest safe point, at the southern end of the runway. Periodically they raise binoculars to check for movements in the tower, on a wooded slope half a mile away across the double fence, and the ricefields that are a no-man’s land between authority and people’s protest.

Bloodiest airport The 200 ft tower, and a less obtrusive one in the background, must be removed before aircraft fly into the airport. Around the towers may take place the last stand in the battle that has cost three lives, thousands of injuries, and earned Narita the title of the bloodiest airport in the world. In the fight against land requisitioning local farmers, joined by students, dug underground fortresses, built barbed wire barricades, and erected steel towers repeatedly torn down by squads of vicious riot police with bulldozers.

In Narita Town I saw a

[copy of a plan, supposedly [secret, showing the emplacements and strategy the will employ to tear down the towers one day [before the first test flight is ■ due to take place. The antii airport movement, which mans the towers day and night, vow to cling to the symbolic towers to the bitter end.

The leader of the airport opposition league, an elderly businessman, Tomura Issaku, says: “Our struggle is one against the state power now, rather than the airport. Should people be forced to give up their land for the sake of tourists?” Thirty students are permanently stationed here, and when the day arrives, hundreds more will arrive to protect the towers.

But the police have abandoned their plan to pull 'them down this autumn. If the towers are tom down too soon, the farmers and students will erect new ones, so first other problems plaguing the airport must be solved. That of transporting jet fuel, for instance: without this vital life-line the appearance of completion will remain a mirage.

Here again, the people’s movement has thwarted the planners, through determined resistance. The original plan to lay a 30-mile pipe-line from Chiba Port met with fierce opposition that blocked three miles of pipelaying.

An alternative scheme to transport jet fuel from Chiba port and Kashima port by rail to Narita City and from there to the airport via a three-mile pipeline also met resistance — when residents found recently that Narita water had been polluted by a chemical earth-hardener used in the digging of the pipeline.

Noise campaign The corporation (New Tokyo International Airport Corporation: N.T.1.A.C.) is now considering a scheme under which jet fuel would be brought by truck from a port on Tokyo Bay, an idea that is almost certain to provoke objections from local residents on safety grounds. When the towers are toppled, as they some day will be, and the jet fuel flows, as it must if the planes are to be fed, the people will harass the bureaucrats with another protest movement, one of proven success: the anti-noise campaign. In 1966, the Japanese Government sought and obtained the approval of the International Air Transport Association for Narita by promising the new airport would be open 20 hours a day. Now I.A.T.A. is bristling because the Transport Ministry is singing quite another tune: night operations will be limited, possibly more severely even than at Osaka International Airport, where local residents earlier this year won a court ruling that banned all night flights between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Residents around Narita Cropose to press for a roader ban, which would cause havoc in international flight schedules. One I.A.T.A. official is on record as saying: “Japan doesn’t give a damn whether planes leaving

'Japan arrive in the countries in the middle of the night.” The international airlines have turned against Narita i for other reasons too. When ithe Government first announced its plan to build a new Tokyo International Airport, 11 years ago, it was a decision they warmly welcomed. Tokyo’s International Airport at Haneda where some 460 flights land and take off each day is probably the smallest major airport in the world, aviation people say. It is so congested that in the peak tourist season it is not uncommon for take-offs to be delayed the whole day. All the airlines agreed that Tokyo needed a new airport, but were stunned by the choice of Narita as its location.

The principal objection was inconvenience. Narita’s location 40 miles from Tokyo puts it among the remotest airports in the world. The fastest access by electric railway takes 80 minutes from the centre of Tokyo.

A bus service that will connect the airport with Tokyo will take more than two hours one way during rush hours or in bad weather. Japan National Railways had to abandon their plan to build a line for bullet trains due to local residents objections — to the noise made by the 80 m.p.h. trains.

Taxpayers’ drain In the meantime, heavy vehicles trundle up and down the runway to prevent softening of the surface, workmen patch up cracks, and 30 women sweep the runway’s 4400 yards. The airport fire brigade swill down their engines, as they have done every day for the past 18 months, and in the Jumbo hangar, a fleet of ultramodern airport buses gather the fine yellow sand that is seeping into all the buildings. Also collecting dust are the huge investments. Keisei Electric Company pays out $7OBO in daily interest for its special rail extension to the airport. The airport corporation pays nearly $53,100 a day in interest charges. While at the specially built city terminals in central Tokyo the employees occupy their days by playing indoor golf. How many more rounds they will get to play nobody can foretell. The use of this taxpayers’ drain is a warning of how not to build an airport. Here the whole spectrum of problems; scarcity of land, environmental disruption, soaring costs, inaccessibility, stretched over ten years and magnified by the battles that began when people refused the impositions. For the farmers aided by students who shed blood fighting, the private armies of the corrupt politicians in power, the riot police, there is the sweet revenge of end* less delays in opening Narita. The luminous cathedral of a terminal and the sweeping runways and apron gobbled up the rich soil, but Japan Airlines flight due to depart from Narita to San Francisco — announced with grotesque optimism on a dusty flight indicator for the past two years — still hasn’t come m to land.

Across 1— Five receive sign of defence. (11) 9—Flower could be a big one. (7) 10— A bit of quiet, say (5) 11— Heading for recognition of nobility. (5) 12— Trooped round naval missile. (7) 13 — Bear witness during trial. (6) 15— Perhaps played wind instrument ornamented with grooves. (6) 18— Crush strangely alert M.P. (7) 20— Glare in a royal way. (5) 22— Frequently to one decimal place. (5) 23— Feels the cold from splinters. (7) 24— Supplication in revolution? (6-5) Down 2— At home acquired metal bar. (5) 3— Bull’s eyes get 500 and good meals? (7) 4— Hurry after a hundred to become virtuous. (6) 5— He drinks and reaches the summit with hesitation. (5) 6— Be a glutton in charge of tea-making. (7) 7— Visionary notion of sailors being given means of propulsion. (11) 8— Not the best pupils, presumably. (6-5) 14— Pamphlet or farm vehicle. (7) 16— Rather big girl has to reform. (7) 17— A terse problem. (6) 19— Open nylon purse and find coin in it. (5) 21— In Rome, see great birds rising. (5) (Solution tomorrow) Yesterday’s solution Across: 1, 1 Mentally; 5, Arid; 9, Pair; 10. Absentee. 11, Spain; 12, Reports; 13. General reader; 18, Integral, 19, Pipe; 20, Tarried; 21, Fibre; 22, Rule; 23, Adoption. Down: 2. Example: 3, Termite; 4, Liberal-handed; 6. Retired; 7. Dresser; 8, Temple: 13, Glitter; 14, Natural; 15, Regain; 16, Appoint; 17, Esparto.