HYAKURI, Japan — Crouch ed in his lush green rice fields on this agricultural plain northeast of Tokyo, Masaru Umezawa works the land as his father and grandfather did before him.
On a humid late-summer afternoon, the only sound is the buzzing of the cicadas from a nearby thicket of trees. Then it starts — slowly at first and building in intensity until it reaches a deafening pitch: the roar of a supersonic jet lifting off the runway at the Japanese military’s Hyakuri Airfield.
Nearly 100 times a day, the jets take off and land, performing training maneuvers overhead and creating a racket that makes it impossible for the stocky farmer and his family to watch television or talk on the telephone, let alone hear themselves think.
“It’s probably why my wife and I have stayed married so long,” he said. “When we fight, we can’t hear what the other is yelling.”
Umezawa doesn’t just live near the air base. He lives inside it — just a few feet from where the planes take off.
The 60-year-old farmer is one of several local anti-war activists who over the past half-century have waged an often-tense turf battle with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces.
Residents here say the military co-opted much of the area’s farmland to build the present air base in the 1950s, casually pushing aside hard working farmers. Many argue that the base itself is illegal. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits the nation from maintaining armed forces with war potential, they insist.
And so in a bold defensive maneuver, they have surrounded the base and inhabit its confines. While Umezawa and another family hold on to land within the base, other families operate farms around its borders.
In the face of resistance from the landowners, the government has followed a less-controversial policy of trying to buy land rather than seizing it by eminent domain. But the activists have refused to sell — even when offered double the market value.
The farmers who continue to till the soil on the outskirts of the airfield block official plans for expansion. Umezawa’s family and the other one working small plots inside the base’s barbed-wire fences gain access to their land via court-protected farm roads settlers have used for generations.
Still others have used their property to create “peace parks” within the air base — a patchwork of well-manicured oases from which they watch the young jet jockeys inside the cockpits of their multimillion-dollar military hardware.
“We’re a small army of people,” Umezawa said, “but we’ve much more willpower than they do.”
Umezawa believes he has to make a stand.
“Armed forces just aren’t good for the human race,” he said.
Hyakuri Airfield officials declined to discuss the standoff.
The Imperial Japanese Navy developed the airfield in 1937, the emperor ordering many farmers in the area to sacrifice their land for the nation. After the war, locals used sledgehammers to break up the single runway and feeder roads. They repossessed the land and began farming again.
In 1956, the Self-Defense Forces reopened the air base, to the disgust of farmers.
Many farmers were again pushed aside, their land taken a second time. Others were allowed to continue farming.
Then, in 1966, locals tapped into a well system to better irrigate the land for a wider variety of crops. The farms suddenly flourished, to the dismay of base officials.
The owners of the peace parks had their own survival plan: They sold 6-by-6-foot swaths of land to other anti-military activists — further complicating the government’s effort to buy the land.
The passing years have led to an uneasy truce.
Umezawa inherited his farmstead when his father died last year. He knows that he too will go one day. But he has a plan.
“We’re raising our children to continue the fight,” he said. “We’re not just thinking about today but the next 100 years.”
The government recently offered Umezawa $5 million for his homestead and farmland. He turned them down flat.
