Atsugi was built by the Imperial Navy in 1938, and by 1945 it housed the 302nd Naval Air Group, charged with defending the Tokyo area against American bombers. Wikipedia’s Atsugi article claims the group shot down more than 300 bombers; that figure is not supported by the other sources consulted and should be treated as a claim, not a fact. Its night fighters included the Nakajima J1N, which Wikipedia describes as more effective against B-24s and B-17s than against the B-29.

When Emperor Hirohito broadcast the surrender on 15 August 1945, the group’s commander, Captain Yasuna Kozono, refused to accept it. His airmen printed leaflets and dropped them over the Kanto area, calling for the war to be fought to the end. The revolt lasted only days: 33 pilots left the base, and the Imperial Navy arrested Kozono and 69 others. Court-martialled for disobeying orders, Kozono was sentenced to life imprisonment, cut to 20 and then 10 years; he was paroled in December 1950 and amnestied in 1952.

An American advance party landed at Atsugi on 28 August 1945, and on 30 August General Douglas MacArthur stepped down from his aircraft here to take charge of occupied Japan. US Army Air Forces units used the field until early 1946. Navy Seabees rebuilt it in 1950 and it reopened as a Naval Air Station in December 1950, just in time for the Korean War.

Through the Cold War Atsugi was the US Navy’s main air base in Japan, supporting carriers in Korea and Vietnam. U-2 reconnaissance aircraft operated from here from at least 1957, and Lee Harvey Oswald served as a Marine radar operator with Marine Air Control Squadron 1 from September 1957 to November 1958. The American presence also brought tragedy: on 27 September 1977 a Marine RF-4B Phantom from Atsugi crashed into a Yokohama neighbourhood, killing two small boys and, five years later, their mother.

The JMSDF arrived on 25 June 1971 with an Atsugi detachment of the 4th Air Wing, and in 1973 the Fleet Air Force moved its headquarters here from Shimofusa. The airfield has been shared with the US Navy ever since; the Americans call it Naval Air Facility Atsugi.

The 4th Air Wing’s 3rd Squadron, formed in 1962 with nine P2V-7 Neptunes, took P-2Js in 1974 and P-3Cs in 1984. The wing also formed the JMSDF’s first P-3C unit, the 6th Squadron, on 30 March 1983, and sent the first two P-3Cs to Djibouti for anti-piracy patrols on 28 May 2009. The Kawasaki P-1 arrived on 23 March 2015 and the last P-3C left on 29 August 2017, making the 3rd Squadron the first operational all-P-1 squadron.

The balance shifted again in 2017–18, when the fixed-wing squadrons of the US Navy’s Carrier Air Wing 5 moved to Iwakuni, leaving only helicopters on the American side. Since then the JMSDF’s P-1s have been the main fixed-wing aircraft at Atsugi.

Atsugi sits in a densely built area, and its neighbours have fought it in the courts for decades. Wikipedia lists a Yokohama District Court award of ¥2.75 billion in 2002, ¥4.04 billion from the Tokyo High Court in 2006 for 4,865 residents, ¥7 billion from the Yokohama court in 2014, and about ¥9.4 billion from the Tokyo High Court in 2015 for about 6,900 residents. In 2016 the Supreme Court upheld damages but overturned a lower-court ban on night flights by Self-Defense Force aircraft. A fifth suit, joined by more than 6,063 residents, was filed in 2017.

The protests are older than the lawsuits: in July 1988 about 20,000 people formed a human chain around the base against night carrier landing practice. Much of the noise came from American carrier jets, which is why their move to Iwakuni mattered to local residents as much as to the navy.