Haneda machi 羽田町
In September 1945, the residents of Haneda-machi were given hours to leave a village their families had fished for centuries. What the airport couldn't erase — and what Shinto cosmology says was left behind — is what this essay attempts to recover.
This is a deep-history travel essay about the ground beneath Tokyo's Haneda Airport and the five extraordinary stories buried under its runways. Most visitors to Japan know Haneda only as their first or last experience of the country — a threshold they cross without thinking. But in Shinto cosmology, thresholds are among the most charged places on Earth: sites where the sacred and profane negotiate, where the rules of both worlds apply imperfectly, and where the consequences of getting the crossing wrong tend to linger. Haneda has been getting it wrong — or more precisely, has had it done wrong to it — for eighty years. Here is what the tarmac is buried over.
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