Originally Posted by
AlwaysAisle
What I remember is that service of Northwest Orient was nothing to write home about...
That's why many Japanese had a nickname for it back in the day and called it "Northworst Airlines".
Originally Posted by
A Little Cow
It looks like the Niigata -> Khabarovsk connection goes back to the 1970s primarily for agricultural-related exports form Niigata: It looks like Khabarovsk is a major rail junction and has a water connection to the pacific along the Amur rivers via China, so perhaps some goods were coming in via boat?
I passed through Khabarovsk back in 1976, but not by plane, and it was not a very attractive city. Khabarovsk was, as you said, a major rail junction of the Trans-Siberian railway, so if goods came from there to Japan by boat, they would have had to have traveled to the railway's terminus in Vladivostok and/or Nakhodka, where there were regularly scheduled passenger/cargo ships sailing to Yokohama since 1961. But I heard that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the route was changed and the ships were diverted from Vladivostok to Niigata and Fushiki (Toyama Pref.).
Originally Posted by
5khours
Security going into Narita was very tight back then. If I remember correctly you could take the Keisei line to a station just outside the airport perimeter, and then from there you transferred to a bus which was carefully searched before going into the airport. Security guards boarded the buses and intently perused the passports of all the passengers. It kind of reminded me of a cold war epic when someone was trying to escape out of East Berlin.
I remember that there was a machine gun nest surrounded by sandbags at Narita Airport's entrance. At the airport entrance, passengers handed over their passports and got off the bus with their luggage, which was opened and inspected by police, and then they boarded the bus again to the airport. Cold war-like it may have been, but it was nothing like the security you would have experienced crossing the border from the Soviet Union to East Berlin.