other groups of Japanese citizens who had lost their homes during the war pushed resettlement in
the area. Cutting down the bamboo groves, clearing the land of obstructions, and building farms
was back breaking labor, these pioneers, as they were known, put their lives into the land (Narita
Kūkō Chiiki kyōsei iinkai, Rekishi Tenjō bukai 2002: 2-8). A good number of the local families
who were encouraged to settle and farm in the area after the War had little or no experience in
agriculture.
Planners within the Ministry of Transportation initially sought to construct the new
Tokyo international airport near Tomisato, in Chiba prefecture, but the protests of thousands of
local citizens soon caused them to back away from the plan. Further, within the cabinet itself
power brokers turned from the decision on the Tomisato site and pushed for the Sanrizuka site
instead, arguing that the central government held land there already. There was less privately
owned land necessary to purchase, as 22 percent of the land for the planned Narita Airport was
owned by the central government, with an additional 10 percent owned by Chiba prefecture, with
the remaining 68 percent in the hands of local citizens. Some of the land necessary for the
airport at the Sanrizuka site, 36 miles from Tokyo, had been Goryō Bokujō, or Imperial pasture,
held by the government since the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Narita Kūkō Chiiki kyōsei
iinkai, Rekishi Tenjō bukai 2001: 2). Also, government planners argued that they chose the Narita
area near Sanrizuka because they believed that would encounter a Liberal Democratic Party-
supporting farmer constituency in the area (Sumiya 1996: 17).
Although 80 percent or so of the local residents who were to be uprooted by the siting of
the airport in Sanrizuka agreed to negotiate and move out, the remaining 20 percent refused.
Many of those who refused to move were settlers or descendants of settlers who had been
farming the land for two or more generations. These farmers saw the government’s plan to
relocate them and place an airport over their land, which they had in many cases “broken in”
27
Convention