Tachikawa Aviation Shrine History: The First ‘Tokyo Airfield’ Walk

A shrine that prayed for safe skies now sits in a corner of a car park in Tachikawa. Following it leads to the airfield that was called Tokyo before Haneda was.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

A shrine that prays for safety in the sky is sitting in the corner of a car park.

On map apps, Tachikawa (立川) shows a pin labelled Koku Jinja (航空神社), “Aviation Shrine.” A city that grew up around aeroplanes has a shrine to the sky. Nothing could be more natural, I thought at first.

But the more I looked into the place, the less natural it became. I could not find a photo of a torii gate. No shrine-office phone number, no date for an annual festival, no information about goshuin, the ink-and-stamp seals that visitors collect at shrines. What I found instead was talk of a car park in a residential street in Akebonocho 1-chome, south of Showa Kinen Park, with a small hokora, a miniature shrine, set in one corner. After the war, the same records said, it was renamed Taiyo Jinja (太陽神社), “Sun Shrine.”

Why is a sky shrine in a place like that? Why did “Aviation” become “Sun”? And where are the people who were supposed to be enshrined there now? Relying on the documents I had and the records left by a few people who went before me, I decided to trace the path to that little shrine. At the end of it was another Tachikawa, one that called itself “Tokyo Airfield” before Haneda did.

A word of background for readers new to Japan. A jinja is a Shinto shrine, a place where kami, gods or spirits, are worshipped. In Shinto the spirits of the dead can also be enshrined and honoured as kami. And Tachikawa, a city in the Tama area of western Tokyo, was from 1922 the home of a large army airfield, later a US air base, which shaped the whole town. Keep both in mind.

Where is Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine? A small mark on the map

First, the location. Several websites that introduce shrines and temples give the Aviation Shrine’s address as Akebonocho 1-chome, Tachikawa. That is the area you reach by walking west from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, past the Akebono Gate of Showa Kinen Park, and along the park’s southern edge. It is the southern fringe of the old Tachikawa airfield.

A personal website that records walks to shrines gives this history of the little shrine. It was originally a shrine to Tenjin, invited from Kitano Tenjin in Kyoto by the Itaya family, who owned the land, as a kimon-yoke, protection against the “demon gate,” the unlucky north-east direction. In the early Showa era (from the late 1920s), at the request of the army’s 5th Air Group and others based at the Tachikawa airfield, aviation personnel killed in the line of duty came to be enshrined there too, and it is said the shrine was renamed Aviation Shrine at that time. After the war it was renamed Sun Shrine, and for a while it seems to have been used as a wedding hall, the site says. And the whole area is now a car park, with a small shrine left in one corner.

The Japanese Wikipedia article “Aviation Shrine” carries almost the same line about the shrine in Akebonocho, Tachikawa: it was originally a shrine to Kitano Tenmangu of Kyoto, invited by a local man of standing as protection against the demon gate, and it is said to have begun enshrining aviation personnel killed on duty at the request of the army’s 5th Air Group.

What is interesting is the way these record-keepers write. The author of the personal site I mentioned notes that strictly speaking it should perhaps be called “Sun Shrine,” but that he followed the map apps and used “Aviation Shrine.” Another site, which records walks to war-related sites, says an Aviation Shrine was founded in April 1929 next to the Tachikawa army airfield, but adds honestly that it has not been able to confirm that today’s little shrine is what remains of it. Someone who left an account of a walk around the old airfield writes that at the back of a car park there is a small shrine said to be the Aviation Shrine, and that its position matches where the prewar shrine stood. And he ends by saying that since it is a private family’s car park, he wants to be careful not to cause any trouble.

All three records are cautious. Only the map apps declare, without hesitation, “Aviation Shrine.” The humans are modest, the machines are confident. You would hope it were the other way round.

What I can write here does not go beyond the caution of those who went before me. So let me say this first. This little shrine is not a historic site with an information board. It stands on someone’s private land. I do not intend to lead readers there. Instead, I will trace, through documents I can check, the stream it came from. That is quieter for the shrine, too.

The first clue is in the shrine’s earlier name. The Aviation Shrine, they say, was originally a Tenjin shrine. Why would the god of learning become a god of the sky?

How Tenjin became a god of the sky

In Japan, Tenjin is the god of exams. He is the god at whose shrines, every January, wooden ema prayer plaques asking for exam success hang so thickly that they clatter against each other. The official website of Kitano Tenmangu in Kyoto describes it as the head shrine of about 12,000 Tenmangu and Tenjin shrines across Japan, which enshrine Sugawara no Michizane, a ninth-century scholar and statesman. It was founded in 947. It began, the site says, when Michizane was enshrined at Kitano, in the direction called the “heaven gate,” north-west of the capital Heian-kyo.

But the same official site also describes Tenjin’s other face. Ancient people, it says, revered the thunder that brought rain as Tenjin. Tenjin, written with the characters for “heaven” and “god,” was originally the god of the heavens, the god of the sky. The Japanese Wikipedia article on Tenjin worship puts it more plainly still: Tenjin worship is the worship of the god of thunder. After lightning struck the Seiryoden hall of the imperial palace, Michizane’s vengeful spirit came to be linked with the fire-and-thunder god already worshipped at Kitano.

If that is so, the story connects. Before Tenjin was the god of learning, he was the god who hurled thunder from the sky. Praying to a sky god for the safety of those who fly. Whether the people of early Showa Tachikawa thought it through that far, I cannot know. But when I heard the story of airmen enshrined alongside a Tenjin brought in to guard against the demon gate, it did not strike me as odd at all. Those who lost their lives in the sky, seated next to the god of thunder. As seating plans go, you could not do better.

A little about the family that brought the god here. The record-keeping site says it was the Itaya family, and that they invited the god in the Edo period. An old Tachikawa family brought Tenjin from Kyoto to guard the kimon, the north-east corner, of its own house. When you remember that Kitano Tenmangu itself was a shrine guarding the north-west of the capital, a god of directional protection had, generations later, ended up guarding a different direction for a different household.

But that is a story about a house among fields. And one day, right next to that house, an airfield appeared. In 1922 the army’s 5th Air Regiment came to Tachikawa. Tachikawa City’s guide to one of its walking courses says that Tachikawa was called “Sora no Miyako Tachikawa,” the “Sky Capital,” because the 5th Air Regiment was stationed here. Before it knew it, the household Tenjin was living next door to the newest machine in Japan.

Here a question arises. If you wanted to enshrine those killed in aviation, surely the nation had a much bigger shrine for it. Why a small Tenjin shrine next to an airfield?

The ones Yasukuni did not take: why aviation shrines sprang up across Japan

A piece of the answer was in a short sentence in the Wikipedia article. After the aeroplane was invented, aviation accidents followed one after another, and many people, starting with the military, died on duty. But their spirits were not enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine, the Tokyo shrine that honours Japan’s war dead. So, to console their spirits and honour their achievements, units and schools in many places built aviation shrines.

These were people who fell not in battle but in training and test flights. Not killed in war, so not taken in by Yasukuni. Who, then, would enshrine them? Each place came up with its own answer to that question.

The biggest answer is in Shinbashi, in central Tokyo. According to the official website of the Japan Aeronautic Association, on 1 August 1931 the board of the Imperial Aviation Association decided to build an Aviation Shrine. Using timber left over from the building of Meiji Jingu, the great Tokyo shrine to the Meiji Emperor, it built the shrine on the roof of the association’s Aviation Hall. The enshrinement ceremony was held on 7 November that year, and 325 aviation personnel killed on duty were enshrined together. The shrine is still on the roof of the Aviation Building in Shinbashi. Including aviation pioneers who have since been added, the register of enshrined spirits now numbers 6,367.

The official site has a line I read twice. People hoping to work in aviation, it says, and others too, come to pray for exam success, borrowing the luck of air safety, in other words of “not falling.” In Japanese, ochiru, “to fall,” is also the word for failing an exam, so safety in the air and safety in exams can be prayed for with the very same word. Here again, the god of the sky and the god of exams join hands. Having just read about Tenjin’s past, I could not believe it was a coincidence. The shrine’s main annual festival is held every year on 20 September, Japan’s Sky Day.

The shrine’s short history has one more record that should not be missed. On 20 September 1974, the spirits of the Aviation Shrine were temporarily moved to the Chinreisha, a small shrine in the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine, and for eight years afterwards the annual festival was held in front of it. The aviation dead whom Yasukuni had not enshrined took shelter, for a while, in a small shrine within Yasukuni’s grounds. In August 1983 a new shrine building went up on the roof of the Aviation Building, and the spirits returned to the roof.

Another answer lies next door, in Saitama Prefecture. According to the official website of Kitano Tenjinja in Tokorozawa, the Tokorozawa Aviation Shrine was built in 1937 at the Tokorozawa Army Flying School, fulfilling the long-held wish of Tokugawa Yoshitoshi, who made Japan’s first official flight. It honours 4,956 army aviators killed on duty or in war. The shrine buildings were made from sacred timber of the Ise Grand Shrine and of Hikawa Shrine, the leading shrine of old Musashi Province.

Tokugawa Yoshitoshi’s name appears on the first page of Japan’s aviation history. According to Wikipedia, on 19 December 1910, at an official flight trial at the Yoyogi parade ground, he flew successfully along with Hino Kumazo, and this was recognised as Japan’s first powered flight. The man whose name is on Japan’s first official flight later wished for a shrine for those who lost their lives in the sky. The first to go up could perhaps see the faces of those who followed and fell.

The wanderings of this shrine are, in themselves, the postwar history of Japan’s sky. On 3 September 1945, the Aviation Shrine at the Army Air Academy in Iruma was moved into the grounds of Kitano Tenjinja in Tokorozawa to avoid seizure by the occupation forces. Its prayers show, the shrine says, that the chief priest of Kitano Tenjinja was already presiding over memorial rites for aviation dead at Tokorozawa airfield in 1917. On 3 November 1965 the military memorial tablets and registers were moved to the Air Self-Defense Force Officer Candidate School in Nara, and in 1988 to the Shubudai Memorial Hall at Iruma Air Base. Then, in 2024, the spirits returned to the Aviation Shrine at Kitano Tenjinja, and the annual festival is held there again.

In Tokorozawa, too, it was a Tenjin shrine that cared for the sky shrine. In Tokorozawa, Kitano Tenjinja; in Tachikawa, a Tenjin said to have been invited from Kitano Tenmangu. The dead of two airfields both found shelter in shrines to Sugawara no Michizane. One would be coincidence. With two side by side, the word coincidence starts to look the shakier explanation.

An older answer still is in Yawata, Kyoto. According to a multilingual explanation compiled by the Japan Tourism Agency, Hiko Jinja (飛行神社, the “Flight Shrine”) was founded by Japan’s aviation pioneer Ninomiya Chuhachi (1866–1936). In 1891 Chuhachi flew a rubber-powered model aeroplane called the “Crow type,” and in 1893 he built the “Jewel Beetle type.” He was working on a full-size machine when, in 1903, news came of the Wright brothers’ success.

The Japanese Wikipedia article on Ninomiya Chuhachi tells a more human story. During a field exercise in his military service, at lunchtime, he watched crows gliding without flapping their wings and wondered whether a wing that caught the wind could fly. For the rubber band that drove his model’s propeller, Chuhachi, who worked at an army hospital, used the rubber tube from a stethoscope. Japan’s first step into the sky began with a stethoscope. Chuhachi petitioned the army to research aeroplanes, but was turned down. The army recognised his research and honoured him only in 1922, the very year the airfield came to Tachikawa. As the age of flight arrived and more and more people died in accidents, Chuhachi’s heart ached. In 1915, he built this shrine.

According to the explanation, Hiko Jinja enshrines the victims of air accidents worldwide, regardless of nationality. The main hall has three seats: in the centre, Nigihayahi no Mikoto, the god of the sky; on the right, those who died in the sky and the pioneers of aviation; and on the left, people who served Japan’s pharmaceutical industry. As a young man Chuhachi worked in his uncle’s medicine shop, and later took up work in pharmaceuticals to save money. So the gods of medicine share a shrine with the god of the sky. He invited everyone who had helped him in life. You could hardly be more loyal.

Kyoto in 1915, Shinbashi in 1931, Tokorozawa in 1937. Within about twenty years, shrines to those who died in the sky had appeared in place after place. The early Showa years, when Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine is said to have been born, sit right in the middle. So what was Tachikawa’s sky like at that time? Hidden there was a name that almost nobody in the city today knows.