By the early 1960s, Tokyo's Haneda Airport was choking. Hemmed in by Tokyo Bay's industrial waterfront, it could not expand to meet the jet age's demands. The transport ministry studied alternatives beginning in 1963, initially selecting the village of Tomisato for a five-runway airport. The site shifted northeast to the villages of Sanrizuka and Shibayama, where the Imperial Household owned a large farming estate. The plan went public in 1966 -- and the local residents learned about it from the news. Nobody had asked them. Farmers who had worked the land for generations were told their fields would become runways. The government held legal eminent domain power but had rarely used it, preferring consensus. This time, there would be none. Local residents joined forces with student activists and left-wing political parties to form the Sanrizuka Struggle, a resistance movement that would last decades.

Construction of the first terminal building was completed in 1972 by Takenaka Corporation, but the runway took years longer as protesters occupied land in its path, building towers directly in the flight line. When Narita finally opened on May 20, 1978, it did so behind opaque metal fencing and guard towers. From 1978 to 2015 -- 37 years -- Narita was the only airport in Japan that required identification checks simply to enter the building. The violence was not symbolic: people died in terrorist attacks connected to the airport in 1983, 1988, and 1990. A three-story concrete building the resistance had erected in 1966 sat squarely in the taxiway path until August 2011, when 500 police officers oversaw its removal while 30 opponents protested. Even today, a farmhouse sits between the runways, its owner refusing to sell ancestral land. The trauma of Narita directly influenced the decision to build Kansai International Airport in Osaka on reclaimed land offshore, avoiding any possibility of repeating the conflict.

Despite its turbulent origins, Narita became Japan's premier international hub. In 2018, 33.4 million international passengers and 2.2 million tonnes of international cargo passed through its facilities. Japan Airlines, All Nippon Airways, Nippon Cargo Airlines, and United Airlines all use Narita as a primary international hub. The airport pioneered alliance-based terminal organization: since 2006, SkyTeam carriers use Terminal 1's North Wing, Star Alliance carriers use the South Wing, and Oneworld carriers use Terminal 2. The original five-runway vision was scaled back to two parallel runways after the protests, with a third Runway C approved in January 2020 and scheduled for completion by fiscal year 2028. That expansion will push the airport's annual capacity from 300,000 to 460,000 flight slots. In 2022, Skytrax ranked Narita the fourth-best airport in the world.

One legacy of the struggle persists in the airport's daily rhythm. Because residential neighborhoods press close on all sides -- including that solitary farmhouse between the runways -- Narita shuts down every night. From midnight to 6:00 AM, no aircraft may take off or land. In a global aviation industry that runs around the clock, this enforced silence is extraordinary, a nightly reminder that the airport exists on contested ground. The planned Runway C expansion will extend operations slightly, covering the hours between 12:30 AM and 5:00 AM, but full 24-hour operations remain unlikely. A fuel pipeline stretching to the port of Chiba City has pumped 130 billion liters of jet fuel to the airport since 1983. The Skyliner express train covers the distance from Nippori Station in central Tokyo to Terminal 2 in 36 minutes. Yet for all its modern efficiency, Narita carries its history in every compromise, every curfew, every chain-link fence.