Tachikawa Base Town History: Cola Bottles, Yuming, the Laundry Gate

For 32 years Tachikawa was a US base town. A walk through what that left behind: a cola-bottle notice, a wind-tunnel cinema, and a gate in a Yuming song.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Until the autumn of 1998, Tachikawa (立川) had a bus stop called “Laundry Gate.” A gate named after washing. As names for a stop on a Japanese public bus route go, it is by any reckoning an odd one.

The stop is now called “Fujimi-dori.” But the old name survives in a song. In 1978, Yumi Matsutoya, the singer-songwriter known to everyone in Japan as Yuming, put a track called “LAUNDRY-GATE no Omoide” (“Memories of the Laundry Gate”) on her album “Benisuzume.” The title, it is said, refers to one of the real gates of the US Tachikawa Air Base.

From 1945 to 1977, Tachikawa, a city in the west of Tokyo, was a US base town. The politics of those 32 years, the runway and the Sunagawa Struggle against the base’s expansion, have already been walked through in another article in this series. What I want to know about is smaller. In the base town, what did people eat, listen to, laugh at and fear? Now that the gates have been gone for nearly half a century, where does that culture survive? And why is it so hard to see?

Where does Tachikawa’s base-town culture survive?

Let me first lay out what I found. Probably half the people who live in Tachikawa do not know these things.

In 1945, the US military sent a notice through the Tachikawa police station to the surrounding villages: if you pick up an empty Coca-Cola bottle, return it. The notice came with a hand-drawn picture of the bottle, because nobody yet knew what Coke was. The cinema on the base was a converted “wind tunnel building,” where the Japanese army had studied airflow around aircraft. In the summer of 1952, “Operation Seashore” was carried out, with base buses taking Tachikawa’s children to the sea. The man who later led The Drifters, the comedy band that would later keep living rooms all over Japan laughing, played bass at US military camps including Tachikawa as a young man, and made American soldiers roar with his gags. And for a time, Tachikawa Air Base was also the military’s gateway in the sky between Japan and the world.

None of this catches your eye as you walk around the station. The culture of the base town lies scattered, not in signs or buildings, but in sheets of official notices, the titles of songs, a line in an entertainer’s biography. Perhaps that very scattering is the character of this town’s base era. I will pick the pieces up one by one.

Return the cola bottles: a 1945 notice, and ham fed to pigs

Issue 19 of “Tachikawa Monogatari” (Tachikawa Stories), the newsletter of Tachikawa City’s history-compilation office, is devoted to how official documents were produced. In it is a document that nearly made me laugh out loud.

Shortly after the war, the US military sent a notice through the Tachikawa police station to the surrounding municipalities: anyone who found an empty Coca-Cola bottle should return it to the US forces. There is a notice from the Sunagawa Village office and a notice from the Tachikawa police station, both from 1945. The newsletter’s commentary goes on: in an age when Coke was still unfamiliar, the notices included a hand-drawn bottle.

Words alone would not tell people what to return. So staff at the village office copied the shape of the bottle by hand. The office had no photocopier and no computer. According to the newsletter, in the mimeograph printing of the time, any picture or diagram had to be traced by hand to resemble the original. Someone at the office must have run a steel stylus round the outline of an unfamiliar bottle of an unfamiliar drink. At a desk in a village office in Tama, a Coke bottle was being drawn in deadly earnest. Picturing it cheers me up a little.

The base poured unfamiliar things into the town. Sometimes they took strange routes.

In October 2025, on a local-information TV programme, the mayor of Tachikawa and two members of the city-history compilation committee, both born in 1930, talked about a hundred years of Showa-era Tachikawa (Showa is the era name for 1926–1989). Issue 21 of the newsletter reprints the conversation. Asked about life after the war, one of them told this story.

A farm-products dealer rented space in his family’s garden and every day brought in, by truck, leftover food discarded by the US military, to sell as pig feed. Out of it, in great heaps, came sausages, ham, butter and cheese: food nobody had ever seen in those days.

In front of a boy who had never known ham or cheese, it was being piled up as food for pigs. I read the story twice. In post-war Tachikawa, the first to grow used to American food may not have been the people at all, but the pigs.

Something else came up on the same programme. After the war, crop theft was even worse than before, and the fields were badly hit. So members of the local young men’s association patrolled the night roads under the name “Night Watch.” The MPs, the US military police, did their own rounds; the young men did theirs, walking the roads to guard vegetables and fruit. The name for a village night patrol was in English. This is how the base’s language seeped into the town.

The base’s goods were not only food. Issue 20 of “Tachikawa Monogatari” says that supplies leaking out of the base filled the black markets around Tachikawa Station. The town’s first post-war years were built from things that spilled over from inside the fence.

So how big was the area inside that fence?

One sixth of the city: “America inside Japan”

Issue 21 of the newsletter features the results of a survey the city has been carrying out since fiscal 2023 in the US National Archives. Its cover headline is rather good: “Welcome to ‘America inside Japan.'”

According to the feature, after US forces arrived in 1945 there were, at most, four US military facilities adjoining the area of today’s Tachikawa City. Of these, Tachikawa Air Base took up the largest area, about one sixth of the city as it is today. Tens of thousands of military personnel and civilian employees worked there, Japanese included.

One sixth. Cut Tachikawa into six slices, and one whole slice was America.

According to issue 20, US forces entered Tachikawa on 3 September 1945 and set up Tachikawa Air Base on 5 September. The aircraft factories stopped, and workers who lost their jobs went back to their home towns in droves. But as Tachikawa Air Base became the leading transport base in the Far East, many jobs appeared inside and outside it: mechanics, cooks, housemaids, drivers. People flocked in. In the 1950 statistics, the population finally exceeded the 60,000 recorded in 1944, when Tachikawa had been called a “military city.”

American servicemen working at the base became valued customers of the shotengai, the local shopping streets, around the gates and in Akebonocho, Takamatsucho and Fujimicho. Issue 20 shows a photograph of the Akebonocho 2-chome crossroads around 1952: the crossroads faced by the main gate of US Tachikawa Air Base, lined with signs aimed at GIs. Issue 15 says souvenir shops for foreigners, with signs reading “Souvenir Store,” sprang up in the base town and spread beyond the station’s North Exit and across the tracks to the South Exit.

Goods and customers were not all that came from beyond the base. Holidays came too.

Issue 15 says that with US forces at Tachikawa, American military aircraft came and went constantly, and at the same time the surrounding area became a front line of American culture. Its example is a photograph of the Christmas decorations at Tachikawa Station in 1950. Santa Claus and a transport plane decorating the station symbolise it, the newsletter notes. Santa standing next to not reindeer but a transport plane. A very sky-town sort of Christmas.

Issue 8 of the newsletter discusses records from the city’s Second Primary School, which stood right in front of the base’s main gate. The documents left at the school include some about problems with American soldiers, but also records of exchange, such as pupils going to the US base to receive presents at a Christmas festival. The gate in front of the school was an entrance for trouble, and an entrance for presents.

And here is the record I love most. According to issue 21, in the summer of 1952, in a “joint operation” between the Tachikawa City Board of Education and the US military, Operation Seashore was carried out: Tachikawa Air Base buses took children from around Tachikawa to the sea. The photographs had been sleeping in the US National Archives.

An army gives everything an operation name. Even taking children to the beach. If children from Tama climbed aboard a base bus and saw the sea for the first time in their lives, that was, fair to say, a successful operation.

Base-town Tachikawa by the numbers

• 1/6: the share of today’s Tachikawa City taken up by Tachikawa Air Base. One whole slice of the cake was America.
• 5 September 1945: the day US forces set up Tachikawa Air Base. Just two days after they arrived.
• 60,000: the population recorded in wartime, in 1944. Five years into the base-town era, in 1950, the town passed it.
• About 2,300: the average monthly take-offs and landings at Tachikawa Airfield at its peak. Spread over day and night, roughly one every 19 minutes.
• 1952: the year base buses took children to the sea in “Operation Seashore.” For all the military name, the main equipment was presumably rubber rings.
• 1998: the year the bus-stop name “Laundry Gate” disappeared. Twenty-one years after the base was returned: the name outlived the gate.

Westerns in a wind tunnel: the base cinema

Japanese records say very little about daily life inside the base. Issue 21 explains why. Most photographs of the US base kept on the Japanese side were taken at goodwill events: friendship festivals when the base was opened to Japanese visitors, or courtesy calls by the mayor and assembly members. American records hold many more pictures of ordinary base life.

One of those “ordinary” photographs is of the base cinema.

According to the newsletter, the Tachikawa Base Theater stood west of the base runway, near the middle of what is now the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Tachikawa. It was originally a building called the “wind tunnel building,” used by the Japanese army’s Aviation Technical Research Institute for aerodynamic experiments on aircraft, and the US military converted it into a cinema. In a photograph from April 1954, the newsletter says, the western “Way of a Gaucho” appears to be showing. Not only entertainment: in an age with no computers, no television and no video, “film training,” screenings of work-related footage, was also held in this building.

A wind tunnel is a facility that blows artificial wind to see how a model aircraft meets it. In a building where Japanese engineers had blown wind to learn how an aeroplane’s wing takes the air, American soldiers after the war watched a film about horses galloping across South American grasslands. In the room where wind was once measured, it was now the dust on the screen that blew. The building, I suspect, no longer remembers what it was built for.

That the town of Tachikawa later had as many as ten cinemas and was called a “movie town” is covered in another article in this series. Inside the fence there was a cinema too. Whether the same western was showing in the same year at the town’s cinemas and at the base’s, I cannot say. But on both sides of the fence, people sat in the dark in the same way and looked up at the same glowing screen.

Wayfarer’s detour quiz

In 1945, the US military sent a notice through the Tachikawa police station telling surrounding villages to “return to the US forces if found,” and a village office even drew a picture to explain it. What was it?

1. Parachute cloth (B) Empty Coca-Cola bottles (C) Chewing-gum wrappers

The answer is on the last page.

So were films the only entertainment on the base? Hardly. The base had stages.

On the camp stage, the future leader of The Drifters made them laugh

It is well known that post-war Japanese popular music grew up at US military camps. Jazz, country, rockabilly. Japanese bandsmen stood in front of American soldiers in the base clubs, played English songs, and honed their craft.

Tachikawa was one of those stages. I was able to confirm it through the biography of an unexpected figure.

According to Chosuke Ikariya’s biography as compiled on Wikipedia, in 1959 he came to Tokyo hoping to be a musician, and after a rockabilly band joined “Jimmie Tokita and the Mountain Playboys,” a country-and-western band whose members included Jimmie Tokita and Takeshi Terauchi, as its bass player. And he played at US military camps in Tachikawa, Yokosuka and Yokota.

The same encyclopaedia’s entry on Jimmie Tokita says the band was formed in September 1957 and at first worked mainly at US camps around the country. Ikariya was a member from 1959 to 1962. In the column listing his part, next to “bass,” it says “comedy sketches.”

Here is where it gets interesting. According to Ikariya’s entry, when he tried doing gags inside the band for the American soldiers, they went down a storm. But his bandmates resented him for doing nothing but gags when they were not a comic band. The Jimmie Tokita entry puts it more gently: he and some bandmates pushed a comic direction, but Tokita, the leader, was reluctant. And in 1962 he left the band and joined “Teruo Sakurai and The Drifters.”

American soldiers who had come to hear country music laughed at the bass player’s gags. Earnest bandmates frowned. And the gags still worked. At least part of the comedy of a man who would later make living rooms all over Japan laugh was sharpened between Japanese bandsmen who did not understand English and American soldiers who did not understand Japanese. When you cannot share words, all you have to make people laugh is timing and movement. The camp stages of Tachikawa were one of his rehearsal rooms.

Of course, I cannot tell which night Ikariya stood on which club stage in Tachikawa. The records would not take me that far. What I do know is that the base town’s night stages were a workplace, in their unknown years, for later Japanese comedy and music.

Even in the 21st century, the sound of the base town lingered faintly. The biography of Munetaka Maki, a dancer and leader of the artist collective Tokyo Gegegay, contains a passage saying that because Tachikawa, where he grew up, once had the US Air Force’s Tachikawa base, there were also hip-hop shops run by Black owners. With the general feeling that dancing in such places was something delinquents did, he never went inside, but it was what first made him, as a junior-high-school student, aware of street dance.

A shop he never entered became the entrance to a life. Decades after the base disappeared, in the town where the fence had stood, a boy met dance. The culture of the base may have lasted longer in the town’s air than in any building.

But to the Tachikawa runway, the entertainers who played the camp stages were just a few more passing travellers. A much larger flow of people moved through this base.