In October 1931 two Americans, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr., dragged a Bellanca monoplane off Sabishiro Beach, the strip of sand a few miles east of the present runway, and flew it without stopping to Wenatchee, Washington. It was the first non-stop flight across the Pacific, and it won a 25,000-dollar prize offered by the Asahi Shimbun. The 35th Fighter Wing’s own history dates the departure to 4 October 1931; the American memorial foundation dates it to 3 October, because the two ends of the flight lay on opposite sides of the date line.

Military flying came eight years later. The Imperial Japanese Naval Air Force began cutting a runway out of the same sand on 1 September 1939, and the first aircraft to land at Misawa, in March 1942, was a G4M “Betty” bomber. The field was laid out for long-range bombers but ended up a training and aeronautical research station, with Lake Ogawara next door used as a seaplane training water. On 7 August 1942 the Misawa Air Group flew its G4M1s south to Rabaul against the American landings at Guadalcanal, and lost most of them within days.

Pacific Air Forces states plainly that Imperial Japanese Navy units at Misawa used Lake Ogawara to practise for the attack on Pearl Harbor. By September 1944 one of the units on the field had been designated a training division for kamikaze crews, and the roughly 50 pilots of Misawa’s only kamikaze unit went south to Kyushu in June 1945; close to half of them did not survive the war. On 8 and 9 August 1945 about 30 United States Navy carrier aircraft destroyed 45 aircraft on the ground and roughly 90 per cent of the base.

American troops reached the wrecked field on 15 September 1945 under Captain Davis K. Stark of the 32nd Army Engineering Construction Group, and spent that first Christmas rebuilding it. Japan completed the transfer of the property on 5 September 1946. The 49th Fighter Group brought F-51 Mustangs in 1948. Eight different organisations took turns as host unit over the next two decades, which is why Misawa’s lineage reads less like a single base history than a relay race between commands that each wanted the northern end of Honshu for a different reason.

The Korean War turned the place into a workshop. On 28 September 1950 the 49th Fighter-Bomber Group fitted its F-80s with an enlarged drop tank that the Air Force went on calling the “Misawa tank”, because a standard tank did not give an early jet the range to reach Korea and still fight when it arrived. The 39th Air Division stood up on 1 March 1952 to run the air defence of northern Honshu and Hokkaido, and after a shoot-down in 1954 it began escorting American reconnaissance aircraft flying near Soviet territory.

Nuclear weapons were part of that posture, and the record is thin on purpose. The Eisenhower administration approved moving the non-nuclear components of atomic bombs to bases in Japan in December 1954; those components stayed until June 1965, and the precise circumstances of the withdrawal remain classified. A declassified Far East Command procedure of 1956–57 lists Misawa among the nuclear-capable base locations. The fissile cores were held elsewhere, which allowed both governments to say that no complete weapon sat on Japanese soil — a distinction Japanese critics have called a semantic technicality.

The listening station on the rise north of the flightline is older than the fighter wing and outlived most of its own equipment. Its landmark was the AN/FLR-9, a circularly disposed antenna array built between 1963 and 1965 by the Nishimatsu Construction Company for about 3.3 million dollars: three concentric rings of elements, 137 feet tall, able to intercept and fix high-frequency radio transmissions out to roughly 4,000 nautical miles. Local people called it the elephant cage and, according to the Air Force’s own account of its demolition, treated it as a symbol of luck.

What it fed was the Misawa Security Operations Center, the one place in the Western Pacific where all four American services work the same intelligence problem inside one building: the 373rd Intelligence Group, Naval Information Operations Command Misawa, the 403rd Military Intelligence Detachment and a Marine Corps detachment. The Navy activated its security group at Misawa in July 1971, and for years it was the longest continuously serving American unit on the base. The 373rd Intelligence Group activated on 7 September 2000.

Technology and money ended the array rather than any change in the mission. Demolition began on 15 October 2013 after 48 years of service, and the teardown became a local employment programme in its own right: the work put about 4.97 million dollars into the Japanese economy and employed more than 250 Japanese workers, with completion set for September 2015. The matching array on Okinawa had already closed in 2007. The last surviving example of the type stands at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.

Misawa’s fighter era restarted on 2 April 1985, when the first F-16 trainer landed with Colonel Michael E. Ryan at the controls — a future Chief of Staff of the Air Force delivering the first of a type the base would fly for four decades. The 13th Tactical Fighter Squadron activated on 1 June 1985 and the 14th on 1 January 1987, both under the 432nd Tactical Fighter Wing, which had held the field since Pacific Air Forces returned to Misawa in 1978.

The 35th Fighter Wing replaced the 432nd on 1 October 1994, bringing a lineage with aerial victories in the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. Conversion to the F-16CJ finished on 17 September 1995. On 18 June 1996 the tail flash changed from MJ to WW — Wild Weasel — and the wing’s history records the 13th Fighter Squadron firing the first combat AGM-88 HARM launched from an F-16CJ on 27 September 1996, in the operations over Iraq that followed Operation Desert Strike.

The mission then went to work for a decade. F-16CJs from Misawa flew Operation Southern Watch and Operation Northern Watch over Iraq through the late 1990s, and on 21 March 2003 the 14th Fighter Squadron flew the first non-stealth missions of Operation Iraqi Freedom and fired that operation’s first HARMs. Weapons training happens at Draughon Range about 12 miles north of the base, held by American forces since 6 June 1949 and renamed in April 2003 for Petty Officer Matthew Draughon, a Navy diver lost in 2001.

The Air Force’s own fact sheet calls Misawa “the only combined, joint service installation in the Western Pacific”. The runway is shared three ways: the 35th Fighter Wing, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s 3rd Air Wing, and a civil terminal operated by Misawa Airport Terminal Co., Ltd. under Japan’s transport ministry. Scheduled civil flying began on 19 January 1953, stopped in 1965, and resumed on 10 May 1975 with a new terminal that was rebuilt and enlarged in 1986.

The civil side is small but real — 336,869 passengers and 3,986 aircraft movements in 2024, on services to Tokyo Haneda, Osaka Itami and Sapporo Okadama — and the arrangement is not frictionless. When a United States Air Force B-1B Lancer made an emergency landing on 29 April 2025 the airport shut for about 90 minutes, a Haneda service turned back with its return flight cancelled, and both Misawa city and Aomori prefecture protested, noting that they had asked for civil stability measures eleven days earlier.

Outside the fence the economy is fishing and farming. Lake Ogawara is a working shellfish water, and when something from the base lands in it the money that follows is Japanese: the Status of Forces Agreement and Japan’s host nation support package route compensation through Tokyo rather than Washington. Under the special measures agreement signed in December 2021 and running five years from April 2022, Japan committed about 1.06 trillion yen — roughly 9.33 billion dollars — to the upkeep of United States forces in the country.

The magnitude 9.0 earthquake of 11 March 2011 shook Misawa violently and left it with minor damage and a blackout; the tsunami that wrecked Hachinohe’s waterfront and the coast to the south spared the base itself. Its emergency operations centre happened to be manned for a readiness exercise when the ground moved, which is why damage reports came in fast. Within days Misawa was a forward operating base for American and Japanese relief forces and took in 14 helicopters for distribution flights.

The nuclear emergency at Fukushima Daiichi did what the earthquake had not. The Department of Defense authorised voluntary departure, and between 9,000 and 10,000 family members left Japan, about 7,800 of them on military-funded orders. The first chartered flight bringing Misawa families home landed on 22 April 2011 with more than 150 passengers aboard. Across the whole of Operation Tomodachi the Department of Defense committed 88.5 million dollars, about 24,000 personnel, 189 aircraft and 24 ships.

The change now under way is the aircraft. The Pentagon announced on 3 July 2024 that Misawa’s 36 F-16s would give way to 48 F-35As, the first American F-35s permanently based in the Indo-Pacific and only the second such basing outside the United States after RAF Lakenheath. Upgraded Misawa F-16s moved to Osan in South Korea in late June 2025; the first F-35As landed on 28 March 2026 for the 13th Fighter Squadron, and the wing unveiled the fleet on 24 April 2026.