The Tokyo High Court's recent ruling upholding a lower court decision that ordered the government to suspend nighttime flights by Maritime Self-Defense Force aircraft at the Atsugi military base near Tokyo underlines the need for Japan to make serious efforts to get the United States to reduce the noise from its military aircraft at the base. The Atsugi base, which straddles the cities of Yamato and Ayase in Kanagawa Prefecture, is jointly used by the MSDF and the U.S. Navy, but nighttime noise comes primarily from U.S. Navy aircraft as the MSDF has refrained from operating its aircraft between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. in principle since before the May 2014 ruling by the Yokohama District Court.
The lawsuit, the fourth legal action taken over the noise from the Atsugi base, was filed in 2007. The high court ruling gave a total of ¥9.4 billion in compensation to about 6,900 local residents from eight cities, including Machida in western Tokyo as well as Yamato and Ayase — ¥4,000 to ¥20,000 per person a month — surpassing some ¥7 billion ordered by the Yokohama court, which had represented the highest level of compensation in this kind of lawsuit. The high court decision was also the first ruling to grant compensation that takes into consideration the noise damage from future operation of aircraft at the base. A ¥1.2 billion portion of the damages covers a period through the end of 2016 — since U.S. carrier-based planes responsible for a large part of the noise are scheduled to be transferred to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture at the beginning of 2017. It also represented the first high court decision to order a halt to flights by aircraft of any branch of the Self-Defense Forces.
However, the high court rejected a call by the plaintiffs for a ban on nighttime flights by U.S. military aircraft using Naval Air Facility Atsugi, as the base is officially known, on the grounds that under the Japan-U.S. security treaty, controlling the operation of U.S. forces aircraft is beyond the government's jurisdiction. It followed a Supreme Court ruling on the first lawsuit filed in 1976 over the Atsugi base noise, which said the Japanese government has no power to regulate activities of the U.S. forces deployed in this country. The top court also said local residents cannot take a civil action seeking to ban SDF flights. The plaintiffs this time sought the grounding of aircraft using the Atsugi base via administrative litigation while seeking damages through a civil suit.