Sixteen former airport activists paid 104 million yen Friday to the government and the operator of Narita International Airport to compensate for their 1978 barricading of the control tower, using donations sent in by former comrades and sympathizers.

The 16 took over the control tower to block the opening of the Chiba Prefecture airport built on land expropriated from local farmers. The Supreme Court eventually ordered them to compensate the state and the airport operator.

Kenichi Nakagawa and other former activists handed the money in cash to officials at the Civil Aviation Bureau of the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry around noon.

The former activists, now mostly ordinary workers, managed to collect about 115 million yen in the past four months by soliciting donations over the Internet after the state seized their salaries earlier this year.

In 1995, the Supreme Court finalized an order for the former activists to pay about 44 million yen to the airport corporation and the state, but they refused to pay.

That expanded to more than 100 million yen over the years as interest payments on the debt accumulated.