Many travellers get upset if it takes even an hour from exiting their aircraft to get through passport control. Chinese rights activist Feng Zhenghu has been living in the grey zone between arrival gate and immigration for nearly two weeks.

In a case that has drawn comparisons to the 2004 Tom Hanks film The Terminal, Mr Feng has been haunting the halls of Japan's Narita airport since being turned away from his own country by Shanghai police on November 4.

But while the movie featured an eastern European stuck in a terminal because of paperwork problems, Mr Feng's presence in the airport no man's land stems from his outrage at his treatment by Chinese authorities and Japanese airline All Nippon Airways.

Mr Feng, a Chinese human rights activist, says Shanghai police, assisted by an ANA employee, physically forced him on to a flight back to Japan after he was barred from returning home for the eighth time.

“I refuse to enter Japan. For a Chinese to be kidnapped and taken to Japan like this is a humiliation for me and a humiliation for China,” he told the FT in an interview in a Narita corridor.

Mr Feng called on Barack Obama, who arrived in Beijing yesterday, to play “close attention” to human rights.

In the short term, however, the US president's visit has meant even tougher times for China's embattled rights campaigners, with police detaining dozens of dissidents, according to his family and activists.

Mr Feng was himself detained earlier this year after being seized by Shanghai police while helping a victim of forced eviction get legal representation.

He believes a speech criticising the bloody 1989 crackdown on protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square is also a factor in the authorities' refusal to let him return.

For days after his return to Narita, Mr Feng survived mainly on airport tap water. Unlike Mr Hanks' fictional character, the activist has no access to shops or restaurants, and has since subsisted on biscuits and cakes ferried in by sympathetic arriving passengers and supporters.

Mr Feng would not agree to enter Japan unless ANA promised to fly him back to China, a demand he said was prompted by its role in helping force him back to Japan.

Asked about the incident, ANA said its staff had needed to use “just a little bit” of force to ensure Mr Feng was on the flight, since it was an hour late and Shanghai authorities had made clear it could not depart until he was on board. Shanghai police declined to comment.

Earlier this month, Mr Feng says he was surprised to see an old acquaintance, Wang Jiarui, striding to the diplomatic channel. Mr Wang is now head of the Chinese Communist party's international department, and one of his entourage paused to accept a note from Mr Feng explaining his case.

So far, however, he has had no response.