A good portion of the airspace over central Japan has been reserved for the exclusive use of the U.S. military since the end of World War II, a fact that isn't widely known in Japan. Over the past several weeks, however, it has become a sudden reality to thousands of Tokyoites and residents of Kawasaki who live below new low-altitude flight paths that bring commercial aircraft in and out of Haneda Airport.

As the Asahi Shimbun outlined in a January 26 article, domestic authorities have been seeking U.S. cooperation to allow joint civilian-military use of the Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo in order to handle the expected increase in international visitors, even if it was only during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The U.S. military, which controls Yokota, refused to even negotiate the issue, even though they allow Japan's Self-Defense Forces to share the base. However, they did finally budge on the matter of the so-called Yokota airspace, which extends from the Izu Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean to Niigata Prefecture on the Japan Sea, allowing commercial flights to use special routes that go through a small portion of this airspace in order to access Haneda, but only for three hours a day. The government was relieved, but others are upset because those routes go directly over their homes.

The transport ministry said the new flights were a "test" that ostensibly ended a few weeks ago, but it appears they were always going to be fully implemented starting at the end of March, and there was already an earnest movement protesting the plan before the tests started. According to a Feb. 10 report in the Mainichi Shimbun, a symposium was held last December in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Ward, where residents expressed their fear of noise pollution and falling objects. Two of the speakers at the symposium were Kiwami Omura, a representative of a citizens group that opposes the new routes, and former Japan Airlines pilot Hiroshi Sugie, who discussed, from a technical standpoint, how dangerous the plan is.