This year has seen the publication of Wakayama Tadataka’s photo book Threshold from Akaaka, the latest in a growing corpus of photographic practices that engage with the legacy of the Narita Airport protests and the current landscape in the Chiba area of Sanrizuka, home to the farmers who opposed the development.
Wakayama Tadataka, Threshold (2026)
As the title of his collection suggests, Wakayama sees Sanrizuka as a liminal, marginal, and anonymous space in Japan. The publisher writes:
At first glance, the images presented in Tadataka Wakayama’s Threshold could be taken almost anywhere in Japan: suburban-seeming scenery, elements like pylons and fences that suggest construction work, bland roads and buildings, and the commonplace mingling of developed and undeveloped spaces. It is only the presence of airplanes in almost every shot that acts as a defining, uniting element. All the photographs were taken around Narita Airport, presented in the book by starting north of the airport and moving counter-clockwise to the west, south, and east.
Before the construction of Narita Airport in the 1960s, the area used to be home to the village of Sanrizuka as well as farmland. Construction was met with strong opposition, even violent riots, but nothing in today’s bland landscape suggests anything of the area’s history. Wakayama’s images – which single-mindedly depict simply what happened to be there at the time of photography – are less a probing of some kind of essence of the past than a gaze at a space where several boundaries – past and present, public and private, unique and common – emerge.
Wakayama writes in the afterword:
Looking up at the sky, you see airplanes repeatedly taking off and landing. But that alone does not give the space inherent meaning. What is it, then, that constitutes the reality of the Narita Airport environs that so starkly contrasts with the images of nostalgic pastoral scenery and the violence of protest movements?
By reconstructing my own recognition and conceptions of the Narita Airport environs and, by extension, the appearance and character of the land itself, I expected that the inherent uncertainty of the place would become apparent. That is to say, equating today’s Narita Airport area to a “threshold” seemed to involve the discovery of space that wavers within the complexity of social, regional and personal relations, while continually questioning the tacit assumptions that underlie them. The airport and its surroundings emerge as an uncertain existence.
Wakayama’s lens is drawn to Sanrizuka as an ambivalent blandscape (to borrow the writer Sarah Royston’s term), a place of dead space, of concrete placed almost arbitrarily in the rural environment. Only the planes indicate a purpose for the structures he captures. Of people we see almost none, just the backs of male planespotters at a gravelled viewing spot, or an anonymous figure in the distance, possibly watching the photographer while standing beside the grey asphalt of the road, sandwiched between a two-storey building that casts a long shadow and the edge of the airport, marked by a tall fence and a wall of even taller trees.
Wakayama Tadataka, Threshold (2026)
Wakayama Tadataka, Threshold (2026)
Like Wakayama, the photographer Sakata Haruto trains his camera on the landscape of Sanrizuka, devoid of the human but not nonhuman, in that the signs of construction and land management are present in his images, quietly yet with a certain degree of menace.
We are reminded of Mark Fisher’s distinction of weird and eerie: the tranquil farms and satoyama pastoral landscapes are disturbed by the out-of-place presence (the weirdness) of what should not be there (the barbed-wire fencing), while what is missing (the eerie) is the past struggle and its participants. In his two projects/series, Death of Landscape (2023–24) and History of Metanarrative (2023–25), Sakata has captured lusher, more agriculturally resplendent images. For all that has happened, the Sanrizuka area remains a fertile place, while in Wakayama’s photographs, there is sandy soil where there should be grass, and the bushes along a sloped verge seem wilted. The undulating contours of the brown land in one shot feature rectangular chunks of earth missing, like freshly dug graves. Only the lounging cows, moving cars, or newly built houses suggest any hint of vim and vigour.
Sakata Haruto, Death of Landscape (2023)
While it is tempting to read something sinister into Sakata’s photographs, not least because he purports to show the “death” of a landscape (or all landscapes in general), the viewer finds hope and warmth in the green hues, in which they try to locate what Sakata calls the “historical distance [lying] between transformed landscapes and the landscape of the era of struggle”.
In 2025, Sakata held a joint exhibition with Saitō Koyata at the Narita Airport and Community Historical Museum, Sanrizuka and Hitokuwada: Past and Present, that explored the relocation of houses and other buildings as Narita Airport moves towards the construction and completion of a third runway by March 2029. Sakata and Saitō’s photographs captured the current airport expansion and “improvements” that are affecting both Sanrizuka, the fulcrum of the struggle that began six decades ago, and the nearby Hitokuwada district. Sakata’s colour photographs showcase Sanrizuka (now part of Narita City); Saitō’s are in black and white, and focus on Hitokuwada in the town of Tako.
Sakata Haruto and Saitō Koyata, Sanrizuka and Hitokuwada: Past and Present (2025)
At a talk for the exhibition, the pair discussed their contrasting aesthetics. As reported in the Asahi Shimbun, Sakata explained: “The more I learned of Sanrizuka history, the more resistant I felt towards photographing people.” Saitō said: “Considering the gradation that exists in residents’ thoughts about relocation, shooting in black and white seemed the right approach.”
Given the close proximity of the museum to the area affected, and its collection of materials from the struggle donated by participants, the exhibition was framed as an opportunity for personal reminiscence, healing, and sharing.
We hope that this exhibition will provide an opportunity for residents, those affected by the relocation, and all visitors to this museum to reflect on the past struggle and the current situation. Furthermore, we hope that it will contribute to the recording and transmission of the “memories of the land” for future generations.
Memories of the Land is also the name of a series by Saitō, who has been photographing the Hitokuwada since 2019 and, quite unlike Sakata and Wakayama, often features portraits of residents. But these are not presented as the faces of protest per se, but just as locals in their regular habitat. Sakata and Wakayama, too, generally keep signs of the opposition movement past and present literally to just that — some signs.
By dint of its personal focus, Saitō’s photography is warmer than the observational, detached style of Sakata and Wakayama. He is fascinated by how the expropriation of land for the third runway is proceeding without the violence of the past and almost without anyone outside the immediate area even aware. This is because, he notes, the local population is now elderly, like much of rural Japan, and vacant lots, empty houses, and necessary demolitions are a fact of life in a society that is rapidly ageing.
Many of the houses in the relocation area were built using cedar and cypress trees planted by ancestors and cut down from the hillside behind the houses for construction materials. Many of these trees are over a hundred years old, and they are gifts from ancestors, passed down through the generations. However, during the relocation, not only the houses but also these trees and fields must be cleared and handed over as vacant land. The lives and landscapes of people who have inhabited this ancestral land and sustained their lives by it are in the process of disappearing as March 31, 2029, approaches.
This issue of ancestry is particularly problematic in the case of Sanrizuka, where despite the perceived legitimacy of the struggle, a significant portion of the land originally expropriated for the airport was actually part of Shimofusa Imperial Stock Farm, operated by the Imperial Household Agency to breed horses, and some residents and farmers did not hail from the area, but had received land cheaply after the war as part of the mass resettlement of demobbed veterans and repatriated civilians from former colonies (though this may have contributed to the resolve of certain farmers not to give up what they won after the trauma of the war). Ownership in a non-legal sense is a slippery thing, and memory may not be as long as we might think.
Memory is also concomitant with change, which Morita Tomomi explores by using large-format photography to compare and contrast past and present Sanrizuka. He developed this project into Sanrizuka – Then and Now at Kyotographie 2018, exhibited on airport-style wire mesh fencing and with past protest slogans from the time installed on the white walls.
Morita Tomomi, Sanrizuka – Then and Now (2018)
Given his previous interest in Minamoto and the Ashio Copper Mine, two of the most notorious ecological disasters in modern Japan, Morita is perhaps drawn to Sanrizuka as part of lineage of such human-made calamities brought about by interventions into the environment and landscape. Featuring as it does walls covered in vegetation and empty fields, as if Sanrizuka is a no-man’s land left to rewild, Morita’s photography seems to adopt a focus on a quietude and absence similar to Sakata and Wakayama, though close inspection of the images reveals the surveillance cameras that dot the landscape. This is no pastoral paradise free of human interference. Suddenly the barriers and roads take on another meaning: as signs of how late-stage capitalism parcels up the land to extract profit from it, and how the state monitors for signs of trouble in a place where blood was once spilled.
Morita Tomomi, Sanrizuka – Then and Now at Kyotographie 2018. Photo: Asano Takeshi
Rendered in their original font, the protest slogans appeared like phantoms on the white walls, the stark written messages barely legible under the light. In this way, the exhibitory format embodies how the distance of time renders the contemporary passion so inaccessible, and mutes any sympathy or understanding the present-day viewer might have.
While these four photographers are not all the same age, they notably hail from generations that appeared after the peak of the Sanrizuka movement. Born in 2000, Sakata is the youngest, while Morita was born in 1994, Saitō in 1986, and Wakayama in 1980. They have primarily experienced the airport protests through clips on occasional TV shows or through print publications. Boomers also experienced the protests indirectly, mediated through their newspapers and TV news, but it was still more immediate, and the weight of images — the spectacle, in a Debordian sense — had yet to exert its full pull on the reputation of the movement, on Sanrizuka as an idea.
The Sanrizuka struggle has resulted in the direct deaths of at least four police officers, two activists, and two construction workers, plus several indirect deaths through accidents and suicide. It is probably Japan’s longest continuous social movement, though its prominent inclusion in the displays at the Narita Airport and Community Historical Museum (which opened in 2011), to say nothing of the heavily reduced numbers of activists and locals engaged in the ongoing lawsuits, marches, rallies, and other modes of resistance, suggest that it is largely something of the past, consigned to a frozen historical narrative instead of a living, still-changing situation.
Though large-scale protests continued through the 1980s as the airport sought to open a second runway, the movement began to split apart and its strength waned as certain landowners made deals with the airport authority. The 1990s saw a surge of small-scale militant activities and violence, but by the time that Wakayama and Saitō were presumably old enough to follow such news events, the movement was largely regarded as a thing of the past, since the airport was certainly not going anywhere and efforts through lawsuits and so on to prevent its gradual expansion mostly only succeeded at slowing the process down rather than blocking it entirely.
By this time, Japan was in the Heisei era, widely seen as more subdued than the flashy, economically buoyant Shōwa years, and many of the most significant social movements gravitated to seeking alternative lifestyles and integrating these into a more reflexive, less dogmatic forms of activism: it was time of prefigurative, not instrumental, politics. The idea of donning helmets and charging a phalanx of riot police, or of planting bombs to sabotage construction vehicles would have seen not simply a thing of the past but of a whole other modality.
Photography is a reflexive medium, capable of exploring and projecting the photographer’s selfhood, and its relationship with their sociocultural circumstances. Previous photographers (especially at the height of the protest movement) were drawn to Sanrizuka’s violent spectacle of resistance, arguably out of political sympathy with the farmers and activists than a desire to exploit the struggle for visceral profit. The protest photography of Kitai Kazuo and Takashi Hamaguchi might, in hindsight, seem indistinguishable from the masses of news media images and photojournalism from the time, except for the intimate access the photographers enjoyed with protestors as fellow travellers: to wit, the largest influence on the aesthetic is possibly the subject matter and certain practical circumstances, not the individual photographer’s subjectivity (if, for the sake of argument, we discount ideology from subjectivity).
Example of image of Sanrizuka protests from the peak of the movement
Recent practitioners, by contrast, seem more interested in the Sanrizuka landscape as an incubator of anonymity, hidden trauma, and the nature of temporal change: in other words, how Narita Airport fits into a wider consideration of regional depopulation and forgotten histories. Sanrizuka becomes a place of peripheral memories, not the location of flashpoints and clashes documented in the media. This constitutes not simply a break from the past but a clear departure in terms of political stance, style, engagement with medium, and distance from the subject (not least because so many of the participants have now passed away).
That is not to say these photographers are apolitical. Far from it, since even to turn to Sanrizuka as a subject (and especially to return to it again and again, as several of these photographers have) is a political choice. Sakata explicitly asserts on his website that his practice is a “catalyst for thought” that aims to “incorporate political content”. And yet, this is not a politicality in the previous sense. It is more interested in crisscrossing boundaries of presence and absence than confrontation; more reflexive than didactic.
As I wrote before about Sakata, in an attempt to see how he keeps context out of the frame (and to the side of the gallery space) in terms of Barthes’s notions of studium and punctum:
The gesture towards neutrality and the landscape is not a flight from interpretation, but an expression of a certain interpretation in its own right: a decision to interpret Sanrizuka without explicit triggers of punctum, as a stripped-down aesthetic, and to banish the studium outside the frame to accompanying reference materials and artist statements in the venue. And yet this bare aesthetic provokes an emotional response by its very unembellished and unspectacular nature: the viewer fills in the blanks, sees the context behind the present-day landscape.
The quieter modality seems in keeping with these generations’ manner of political engagement, more at ease as it is with participating in single-issue social movements, which have dominated in Japan since 2011, beginning with the nuclear power protests sparked by the Fukushima disaster. It might seem that the Sanrizuka struggle is like that too, as many residents’ movements are, though at the time it was anything: the airport was originally positioned as a central element in the 1960s anti-war protests, whereby Sanrizuka was part of a nexus of issues related to the war machine and imperialism in Asia (and which it is why it attracted the attention of the New Left groups), not least the reversion of Okinawan sovereignty, the Anpo security treaty renewal in 1970, United States military bases in Japan, and Japanese government and private sector involvement indirectly in the Vietnam War.
These four photographers’ practices also share an affinity with Daishima Haruhiko’s two documentaries about the Sanrizuka movement: The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories (2014, co-directed by Ōtsu Kōshirō) and The Fall of Icarus: Narita Stories (2017). Though Daishima (who was born in 1958) focuses on interviews with participants, his films place an emphasis on the quietude of testimony and feature scenes of farmers farming and planes passing overhead, all of which consciously intended to create an affect of melancholic reflection on past failures and traumas. Daishima’s films, as well as his subsequent pair dealing with other aspects of the Long Sixties, adopt an explicit stance against political violence, which has drawn criticism from certain former activists and participants.
Daishima Haruhiko and Ōtsu Kōshirō, The Wages of Resistance: Narita Stories (2014)
There was always a tacit understanding that the filmmakers (like Ogawa Shinsuke) and photographers (like Kitai) embedded with the protest movement in 1960s and ’70s approved of the often violent means of resistance, even if it led to injury and death. The four photographers’ views on this matter are unclear from their practices (though Sakata’s website pointedly carries a stark non sequitur: “Website of photographer Haruto Sakata. I am a nonviolent person.”), nor is it even clear if they have explicit views even on the airport itself, but they do not engage directly with the ongoing nature of the protest movement, either to celebrate the stoic stance of the locals and activists, or to critique the futility of opposing an airport already open now for decades, but nor do they quite ignore it. The movement is in stasis, like the landscape itself: frozen in time, unhealed and unresolved; the participants and residents, former and current, have disappeared into the landscape like ghosts. This is especially ironic, given that airports facilitate movements of people across vast distances.
Given the recent surge in interest in Japanese landscape theory (fūkeiron), the body of practices and theoretical writings dealing with the relationship between landscape and power that began with Matsuda Masao’s publications between 1969 and the early 1970s, and is exemplified by the avant-garde film A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), it is tempting to credit these four photographers’ focus on Sanrizuka to a concern with political power. Since the opening of the airport, the local landscape is a semiotic nest of state power, even if (or perhaps precisely because) the protests and residents are absent. Sakata’s exhibition title seems like a direct reference to Matsuda’s The Extinction of Landscape (1971), which he must know, though it is actually derived from a Kitai book with a coincidentally identical title published in 1970.
Matsuda Masao, The Extinction of Landscape (1971), second edition (cover image from A.K.A. Serial Killer)
Whoever we ultimately assign as the target of Sakata’s homage is a parlour game. The viewer should look to the visuals to decipher what actually matters, since Sakata (and Saitō, Morita, and Wakayama) are obviously not seeking to emulate the likes of Kitai with subpar images of recent protests, which would only ever resemble a pale imitation of past radicalism both in terms of activism and its documentation in photography. But neither does this seem like a straightforward extension of landscape theory, since the lack of people suggests a different stance towards the sociopolitical implications of Sanrizuka. (A.K.A. Serial Killer, for instance, famous contains no images of its subject, the titular spree killer Nagayama Norio, but people are utterly pivotal to its visual language of landscape, along with vehicles.) Here, then, we perhaps see a focus not so much on power as on boundaries and change, examined within politically neutral modalities of quietude, stasis, and absence, and aiming seemingly for reflection and a degree of reconciliation.
An iconography of the Sanrizuka landscape without power or politics might, in the wrong hands, become merely elegiac, which is the more sentimental affect that Daishima’s films tend to produce. And therein lies the rub and risk: a failure of critical engagement. While didactic or sensational imagery serves little purpose at this stage, the danger is that not engaging with issues of power turns your visual practice into a superficial rendering of the leftist melancholy that has gripped much recent fictional and non-fictional portrayals of the Long Sixties in Japan.
Sanrizuka is a lived and living place, a lost and emergent landscape, absent and present — all at once. Finding and honing a visual language that captures that inherent ambiguity is the challenge.
WILLIAM ANDREWS
Throw Out Your Books 