I am always surprised by how few people there appear to be in Narita airport.  I’m sitting at the gate waiting for my plane to board and there are hundreds of empty chairs.  I can never decide if the airport is actually empty or, unlike airports like Heathrow, they actually have lots of spare chairs.

Looking at the airline statistics for 2007 Narita is busy enough.  More than 35 million people use it in a year.  It’s not as busy as Haneda airport, the other airport in Tokyo, which had 66 million people in 2007.