Expansion of Tokyo Airport Still Grounded by Militant Protesters : Japan: Farmers refuse to sell their land for new runways. Passengers using crowded Narita can expect more frustration.

Many a visitor to Japan has a horror story, or two, to tell about Narita Airport.

Minutes after arriving at the gateway to this land of affluence and high technology, the typical traveler must wade through endless lines at an immigration inspection, battle ludicrous crowds to board a limousine bus and grind molars during a frustrating two-hour freeway jam to a downtown hotel.

It gets worse on the trip home. One-way taxi fare to the airport, built on farmland 40 miles east of Tokyo, easily exceeds $140. Police in full riot gear examine the bags of even the most unassuming tourist passing through a gate fortified with steel barricades and barbed wire. Inside the terminal lurk more nightmarish lines and security checkpoints.

Authorities say they hope to fix the airport’s crowding and transportation problems in a couple of years, once a new rail link, two additional runways and a second terminal building are completed.

But nobody is betting on it. A handful of farmers are still growing vegetables on land that the bureaucrats sketched into their plans as new runways. Propped up by a bickering coalition of student radicals and professional protesters, these farmers refuse to sell their property, which the government has only limited powers to seize.

Now, after nearly two decades of political stalemate and occasionally violent confrontation, tension is rising anew at Narita. The Transport Ministry invoked a special airport security law this month to deploy a brigade of 1,200 riot police and engineers with water cannons, cranes and bulldozers to tear down a “fortress” built by radical protesters on the disputed land.

Defenders wearing helmets and masks threw firebombs from steel towers over their makeshift shack in a scene reminiscent of the fanatical protest movement that delayed the opening of the airport, first conceived in the mid-1960s, until 1978. Already, Phase 2 of the airport construction plan is more than a decade behind schedule.

Authorities did not report any serious injuries in the latest melee. But four police officers and two protesters were killed and scores of others were injured in violence during the initial stage of airport construction.

The fighting is far from over. The Transport Ministry has threatened to forcibly dismantle several other fortress-like “solidarity huts” built by radicals over the years on the site. Protesters have vowed to dig in.

No solution is in sight for Narita, dubbed the “one-lung airport” by the Asahi newspaper for its single runway and its woefully inadequate facilities. And even if construction went ahead smoothly, some observers doubt that the $2.9-billion expansion would be sufficient to meet Tokyo’s needs very far into the future.

In a rare sign of conciliation, Transport Minister Takami Eto issued his agency’s first official apology recently for its failure to talk to local landowners before unveiling plans to build Narita back in 1966. That error in social consensus-building, Eto conceded, drove farmers into the arms of the radicals.

It remains uncertain whether the government can correct its legacy of bureaucratic bungling and persuade the farmers to sell--or use its powers of eminent domain to take their land without provoking further bloodshed.

A radical group called Chukakuha, or “Middle Core Faction,” terrorized the citizens panel charged with overseeing eminent domain at the airport until the panel disbanded itself in November, 1988.

Not all of the eight farmers who cling to their land inside the expansion site endorse violence. In fact, protesting landowners have splintered into three major factions, only one of which remains aligned with Chukakuha.

Yet Chukakuha is the dominant group among two dozen different sects from Japan’s “new left” that joined the Narita protest, searching for a symbolic cause after mass movements against the Vietnam War and the Japan-U.S security alliance began to fizzle. Many of the student supporters who came here more than 20 years ago have settled down.

To Naokatsu Ogawa, 45, a farmer who owns three acres on the expansion site, resisting the airport is as much a part of the life style he inherited from his father as tilling the land.

Ogawa was 21 when the government shocked the local community with a fait accompli-- that a new international airport would be constructed in their midst.

“I didn’t like farming all that much--I would have sold,” Ogawa said during a recent interview in a shack on the construction site, where he and a band of supporters pack organic vegetables to be trucked to sympathetic consumers in Tokyo. “But my father was dead-set against the airport, so here I am.”

About 325 farm households in Ogawa’s Sanrizuka hamlet were told in 1966 that they would have to move away from the plateau, a former imperial horse pasture that was opened to homesteading after World War II. About half sold out immediately.

But the rest were enraged by the attitude of Transport Ministry officials who decided to take their land without first consulting them. Mostly out of stubborn pride, they denounced the “arrogance of the state” and refused to budge.

Many were persuaded to abandon the site during protracted negotiations that followed. The government ultimately used the special eminent-domain powers to evict die-hards living on the phase-one site, sparking battles in which both sides drew blood.

Ogawa and the others living on the expansion site are resisting lucrative cash offers by authorities.

“I’ve developed too many ties within the anti-airport league to quit now,” Ogawa said. “People from the airport authority come around all the time and ask me to cooperate. I tell them I’m not interested.”

Makoto Tsubokawa, an official with the New Tokyo International Airport Authority, the agency in charge of Narita, said the government is promising to provide new farmland outside the area in addition to cash.

Still, Tsubokawa said the protest movement has become so politicized that outside supporters block constructive dialogue with the farmers. About 56 acres, or 4% of the construction site, remains in the hands of opponents.

“I’m ready to talk directly to them any time, anywhere,” Eto, the transport minister, told reporters. “I’m confident they can be convinced.”

But Ogawa, a member of the moderate Atsuta faction of the splintered anti-airport league, said he feels harassed by an atmosphere of intimidation that prevails in the construction zone.

“How can we talk to them with all this barbed wire around here?” he said, gesturing toward a 10-foot steel fence topped with coiled barbs that the airport authority erected a few months ago next to his vegetable packing shed.

On the other side of the fence is a moat and another steel fence. Beyond this is one of many watchtowers where riot police keep a 24-hour vigil with floodlights and binoculars. The fortress that police attacked early this month, belonging to the radical Battle Flag faction, stood just a few yards from Ogawa’s shed.

“The riot police stop and search us at every bend of the road, so we can’t go about our business,” Ogawa said. “I’m not a radical student. I’m just a hick from a farm village, but they’re still searching my car.”

Meanwhile, the existing facilities at Narita face inexorable pressure for expansion. The airport, conceived before anyone predicted Japan’s economic boom or the advent of nonstop, long-distance jumbo jets, handles two-thirds of the country’s flights and more than 80% of its international cargo. With its single runway, it already ranks first among the world’s airports in cargo volume and eighth in the number of international passengers.

Use of the existing terminal already exceeds its original design capacity of 13 million passengers a year by nearly 50%. And flights are up 14% this year to about 330 daily, a considerable strain on resources because of an 11 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew aimed at curbing complaints about noise.

Foreign airlines bemoan the shortage of terminal gates--most airliners must park on the tarmac and passengers are bused to and from the terminal. Baggage handling facilities are inadequate. Narita’s fuel and operating costs are the highest in the world, reflecting the airport’s burdensome debt service. Still, airlines from 39 countries are waiting for permission to land at the airport.

The airport authority believes the second-phase construction will sufficiently expand capacity, but concedes that the second main runway, at 8,250 feet, will be too short for anything but short-haul flights within Asia.

The most vexing problem with Narita--its formidable distance from the capital--is likely to be improved in early 1991, when the government hopes to complete a new rail link connecting the terminal to Tokyo Station in 60 minutes.

The original plan for a 30-minute “bullet train” route had to be scrapped, however. Landowners along the right-of-way would not sell.