We passed through Narita International Airport – one of the two serving Tokyo – twice, once on the way in to Japan and once on the way out. But it’s OK – lucky for you I’m only going to review it once.

By the time we were leaving, we were very accustomed to Japan liking things to be compact and efficient. 

Narita is both those things. It’s an enormous airport but, unlike others we passed through, feels smaller as you pass through it. The ceilings are lower, the halls are smaller, it just never quite gives you the sense that you’re in one of the world’s great transportation hubs. 

One manifestation of that is how crowded some of it is. Once we hit the departure lounge there were queues for everything – queues of 20 minutes to get in to anywhere that served food, queues to get in to convenience stores and chemists, queues to buy thing a from vending machines. This was a queue-heavy airport and it was more stressful than we expected a Japanese airport to be. 

The further we got through departures, and the closer to our extremely distant gate, the more things calmed down. At one stage we could even get into the duty free shops without queueing, where I inspected the tasty wares below a giant colourful fish. 

The tasty wares in question were crisps covered in white chocolate. I did not buy any. 

The giant colourful fish was just about the only colourful thing at Narita airport. Japan appears to have decided that the most efficient colour is grey, and that is presumably why they have decorated every aspect of the airport in grey. 

The walls and the ceilings and the floors are grey. 

The corridors, stretching away from you for miles into the distance, are grey. 

The chairs are grey as well. Narita’s chairs are plastic, with no padding, but shaped in such a way that they are surprisingly comfortable. You could spend longer than ought to be possible on a plastic chair before needing to shift your weight about a bit. Narita scores 6/10 for seating comfort. 

Overall Narita did everything we needed reasonably efficiently, but it needed far better facilities to deal with all the people passing through, and the grey colour scheme was very depressing, so there is room for improvement.

I award Narita International Airport an Air Transit Usability Index of 0.7, just three points short of the maximum.