Narita International Airport guide

Narita International Airport sits in Narita, Chiba Prefecture, between the city of Narita and the town of Shibayama. It opened on May 20, 1978, as New Tokyo International Airport after the Sanrizuka Struggle, a decade of protest by farmers whose land was expropriated for the project; a handful of privately held plots remain inside the airport perimeter today. Narita International Airport Corporation (NAA), a parastatal company, operates the site.

Two runways handle traffic: a 4,000-metre runway and a 2,500-metre runway. A third, 3,500-metre runway is under construction, though land-acquisition delays have pushed its planned March 2029 completion beyond that date. A mandatory curfew bars operations between midnight and 6 a.m. to limit noise over surrounding communities. In 2025 the airport handled 42.26 million passengers and 253,586 aircraft movements, and it remains one of the busiest cargo gateways in Asia, moving over two million tonnes of freight that year.

Skytrax has rated Narita a five-star airport for three consecutive years. The Narita Express and Keisei Skyliner run direct rail service into central Tokyo, and the Higashi-Kanto and Shin-Kuko expressways carry road traffic to the capital. Long dominant among Tokyo's two airports for international service, Narita now shares that role with Haneda, which has taken on a growing share of long-haul flights since 2020.