Tachikawa Fireworks Festival Guide: History, Tips and Things to Do

Tachikawa’s fireworks began on a riverbank in 1954 and now draw 745,000 in a night. Why is the launch site secret? A walk through the town’s festival year.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

“Launch site not disclosed.”

That is what it says in the venue line of the press kit issued by the committee that runs the fireworks festival in Tachikawa (立川), a city in western Tokyo. Main viewing area: Minna no Harappa, the great lawn of Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park). And then, tucked into brackets right behind it, the one thing the press kit will not tell you: where the fireworks actually go up from. A fireworks press kit normally names the riverbank or the stretch of bay. Without that, spectators cannot choose where to stand.

Here is a festival that fires 5,000 shells in one night, that drew 745,000 people the year before, and it will not say where those 5,000 shells come from. A secret launch pad. It has a faintly sinister ring to it. I could not stop thinking about that bracket.

Where do the fireworks over Tachikawa’s summer sky really come from? I set out to trace the history of the town’s festivals to find out. Turning the pages of the records, I found that behind the fireworks lies some seventy years of this town’s life. The answer, in the end, was hiding inside a notice of cancellation from one particular year.

Tachikawa fireworks: it all began beside Hino Bridge

The festival’s official website describes its origins like this. In 1954 (Showa 29 in the Japanese calendar), the “1st Tachikawa Evening-Cool Fireworks” — Tachikawa Noryo Hanabi Taikai — was held on the riverbank of the Tama River beside Hino Bridge. For more than sixty years since, the site says, it has been a symbol of summer in Tachikawa, loved not only by the people of the city but by the many who live across the Tama area — the broad belt of suburbs and hills that makes up Tokyo west of the 23 central wards.

Hino Bridge (日野橋, Hino-bashi) carries the old Koshu Kaido highway across the Tama River. It was built in 1926. The riverbank at its foot was the first venue. Seen from the present venue, Showa Kinen Park, that is a long way south, down by the water.

What sort of town was Tachikawa that year? I checked the city’s statistical yearbook. In 1954 the population was 59,548. Today, as of 1 January 2026, Tachikawa has 187,440 residents — the town of 1954 was less than a third of that. The city’s chronology for the same year also records that Sunagawa, the village just to the north, became a town. Sunagawa would not merge with Tachikawa for another nine years. The figure is for Tachikawa before the merger, but even so: it all started with an evening-cool fireworks show on the riverbank of a small city.

In those years Tachikawa was a base town. After the Second World War the US military took over the old Japanese army airfield here, and for decades the town lived beside it. Leaf through Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the city’s history-compilation office, and you learn that in April 1954 the Hollywood film Way of a Gaucho was playing at a cinema on the west side of the base runway. The cinema building had once been a wind-tunnel laboratory where the Imperial Army’s aviation research institute tested the aerodynamics of aircraft; the US forces converted it into a movie theatre. So inside a box built to blow wind at airplanes, gauchos galloped across the Argentine pampas. Two summers earlier, in a “joint operation” between the city’s board of education and the US military, base buses carried local children to the sea. The operation’s name: Operation Seashore. In a town with no coast, the children’s summer holiday came with a military code name. And at Christmas, Tachikawa Station was decorated with Santa Claus and a transport plane. A photograph from 1950 survives in the city’s collection.

The evening-cool fireworks began in a town like that, in summers like those. As the name suggests, you went down to the river on a hot night to catch the breeze, and watched some fireworks while you were at it. The coolness was the star; the fireworks were the side dish. I doubt anyone who comes to the Tachikawa fireworks today goes home saying, “Well, that was refreshing.”

How did the fireworks move from the riverside to the park? And why won’t anyone say where they go up from? Before we get there, there is a number that does not add up.

Sixty-five times — and the subtraction doesn’t work

In a corner of the official 2026 flyer there is a short sentence: Since the 1st Tachikawa Evening-Cool Fireworks in 1954, this year’s display is the 65th.

At this point I started counting on my fingers. If the festival had been held every year from 1954 to 2026, this would be the 73rd. Sixty-five is eight short. At least eight Tachikawa summers went by without fireworks.

The official website wraps up the reasons in a single phrase: over its long history, there were times when the festival could not be held, because of the weather and various other reasons.

One of those “various reasons” is clearly on record. On 7 April 2011, the organizing committee put out a one-page notice headed “Regarding the Cancellation.” In the sender’s block, the member organizations of the time are listed one after another with their representatives’ titles: the City of Tachikawa, the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Tachikawa Tourism Association, the federation of the city’s shotengai (shopping-street) cooperatives, the Tachikawa Junior Chamber, and the Showa management center of the park-management foundation. It is almost the same line-up as today. Fifteen years on, the town’s main organizations are still sitting around the same table. The content of the notice was this. On 11 March, the Great East Japan Earthquake had struck a wide area of the Tohoku and Kanto regions, and the electricity supply was still not sufficient. So that the Self-Defense Forces, the police and the fire services could put everything into recovery work, and with the hope that sponsoring companies would turn their sponsorship money into donations for the disaster areas, the committee had decided to cancel that year’s display. Calling off the fireworks was, itself, a form of support.

At the start of the Reiwa era, too, there was a run of summers without fireworks: the years when the novel coronavirus was spreading. The city’s chronology has a single line for 2023: “Tachikawa Festival Showa Kinen Park Fireworks held for the first time in four years.” 2020, 2021, 2022. Three blank summers are folded into that phrase, “the first time in four years.”

That makes four. Still not eight. The rest lie buried in older gaps. According to an encyclopedia entry summarizing the festival’s history, as traffic grew the venue moved from the banks by Hino Bridge to land borrowed inside the US Air Force’s Tachikawa base; and there were years when the display could not be held, such as 1972, when under a progressive (left-leaning) city administration a row broke out over co-hosting with the US forces and the Self-Defense Forces. Then in 1982, the account goes, it was revived as the “Tachikawa Festival Fireworks,” and in the late Showa years, when the venue moved to Showa Kinen Park, it took its present name. From public records, I could not count those blank years one by one.

The gaps cannot be counted, yet the number of displays has been counted carefully. The people of Tachikawa did not keep a tally of the summers they lost; they simply stacked up, one by one, the summers they had. So what was happening in this town in the year the fireworks came back after their long absence?

1982: a new runway and a new station

Open the city chronology at 1982, the year the fireworks are said to have been “revived,” and you find Tachikawa at a small turning point.

The year before, 1981, a temporary station building had come into use at Tachikawa Station, and construction of the station building had begun. The trunk roads to be laid across the former base land and the boundaries of Showa Kinen Park were also fixed in the city plan in 1981. The city’s first agricultural festival was held that year too.

Then 1982. The chronology’s first entry reads: “New runway enters service (New Tachikawa Airfield).” Next, the Tachikawa Station building, the station shopping complex and the north–south free passage through the station were completed. Toward the end of the same year there is another line: “C-1 transport aircraft makes first visit.” In the city’s chronology, the first arrival of an airplane sits at the same weight as the completion of the station. The things that happen in the sky get written down, almost by reflex, as things that happened in town. Tachikawa’s chronology has that habit.

In 1983, Showa Kinen Park partly opened, and Musashi-Sunagawa Station opened on the Seibu Haijima Line. A new runway, a new station building, a new park. The fireworks started going up again, then, at exactly the moment the town was building the face it would wear after the base era.

The way the park was run has changed, little by little, too. Park documents issued by the Kanto Regional Development Bureau (the national ministry’s regional office that manages the park) in 2012 and 2013 say that on fireworks day, “admission is free only for visitors entering after 18:00.” The current committee’s documents say admission to the park is free all day on the day of the festival. The six o’clock line has, at some point, slid all the way back to the morning.

Inside the 5,000 shells: geikyo-dama and the 1.5-shaku shell

So what went up on the night of the 65th display? According to the committee’s documents, a planned total of 5,000 shells. Shells from size 3-sun up to 1.5-shaku (the old Japanese units in which shells are measured), wide star mines, geikyo-dama and more. Launch time: 7:15 to 8:15 p.m., sixty minutes.

The documents describe the highlights this way: big, powerful fireworks such as 1-shaku and 1.5-shaku shells, which you rarely get to see within Tokyo. In the middle of the capital it is hard to find room to fire large shells. Tachikawa has that room — flat, wide, former airfield land with few tall buildings around it.

The official flyer also adds a note on that word geikyo-dama. It means outstanding works by the Japan Fireworks Art Association (日本煙火芸術協会, Nihon Enka Geijutsu Kyokai — geikyo for short). According to the flyer, the association is a group of about 30 fireworks makers formed around Gisaku Aoki of Nagano, whose members are makers who have won competitions around the country and who have new creations or distinctive techniques. They have shown works abroad, starting with the yaeshin — a peony-type shell with multiple concentric cores, a uniquely Japanese form. The association’s own website tells the story in a little more detail. In the autumn of 1959, Gisaku Aoki, who had completed the creation of the multi-core yaeshin shell, became the first person in the fireworks trade to receive the Medal with Yellow Ribbon, a national honour. That became the occasion to found the association as a body to nurture the traditional culture of fireworks, and it was formed in 1960. The flyer gives the founding as 1961 (Showa 36), so the two disagree by a year. Here I would rather follow the association’s own account. Prize-winning works from craftsmen’s competitions go straight up into the Tachikawa night sky.

The back of the flyer is even more fun. The sponsors’ names are packed in tiny type, and here and there come notes like “☆ No. 7, 2 shells,” “☆ No. 6, 1 shell,” “☆ No. 3, 6 shells.” Companies, shopping-street associations and schools are sponsoring in units of shells — so many of such-and-such a size. Some of those 5,000 shells really do carry the name of someone in this town. Tachikawa’s summer sky is a giant group card that the whole town signs.

Run your eye down the list and, under the heading “Tachikawa Pro Sports Liaison Group,” you find a cluster of team names. In basketball, Alvark Tokyo and Tachikawa Dice; in football, Tokyo Verdy; in futsal, Tachikawa Athletic FC; in handball, Zeekstar Tokyo; and the riders’ association of Tachikawa Keirin, the city’s track-cycling stadium. Professional teams with ties to Tachikawa all line up together behind the fireworks. That a single city’s fireworks festival can list this many sports among its sponsors looks to me like quiet proof that Tachikawa is a town where people gather to watch things.

The list also includes a portable-shrine (mikoshi) fan club, shopping-street cooperatives, a neighbourhood nursery school. The cost of the fireworks is shared out from the town’s big companies down to its small shops, each according to its means. People who raise and lower the same shutters on the same street all year round get to put their names in the sky for one summer night. The size of the shell is, I suspect, the size of the gesture.

Tachikawa fireworks by the numbers

• 1954 — Year of the first display. Tachikawa’s population then: 59,548.
• 65 — The 2026 display’s running number. Counting from 1954, it is eight short. What went uncounted were the summers that couldn’t happen.
• 5,000 — Total shells (planned). Divided by sixty minutes, roughly 83 a minute. Anyone who tries to count them gives up after about three.
• 745,000 — Total attendance in 2025: 345,000 inside the park, 400,000 around it. For one night, about four times the city’s population is in Tachikawa.
• 60 — Tonnes of rubbish left in the park after the festival.
• 6 — Member organizations of the committee: the city, the chamber of commerce, the tourism and convention association, the shotengai federation, the junior chamber, and the park’s management center.

The traveller’s detour quiz

The official flyer for the Tachikawa fireworks offers visitors a list of “one-point advice.” After the item saying it is hard to use your phone before and after the launch, so decide on a meeting place in advance, a short remark is added in brackets. Which one?

• A. (Keep your eyes on the kids)
• B. (Adults get lost too)
• C. (The fireworks aren’t going anywhere)

The answer comes near the end of this article.

745,000 people in one night — and 60 tonnes

According to a notice on the official website, attendance at the 2025 display was 345,000 inside Showa Kinen Park and 400,000 around it: 745,000 in all. Tachikawa’s population is about 187,000. In one night, the city takes in four times its own number.

Then: the riverbank under Hino Bridge. An evening-cool fireworks show in a city of 59,548, at the mercy of the river breeze. Now: a lawn on a former airfield. More than twelve times that city’s population, looking up at the sky in a single night.

Why do so many people come? The committee’s press materials explain it in a sentence: as a transport hub, Tachikawa draws visitors from the entire Tama area and from neighbouring prefectures. The JR Chuo, Ome and Nambu lines, and the Tama Monorail running north–south. Because you can reach it from all over the Tama area without changing trains, this many people can gather in one night. The same document also worries that visitor numbers may rise further, beyond what the viewing areas can hold, making it hard to ensure safety and keep people moving. Too popular for its own good. Tachikawa’s fireworks have the luxurious kind of problem.

Where people gather, things are left behind. The committee’s documents say more than 60 tonnes of rubbish is produced in a single night on festival day. The official flyer also asks visitors to separate their rubbish and to give to a fund that pays for its collection and disposal: if the cost of disposal can be reduced, it says, everyone can enjoy more beautiful fireworks. Next year’s shell count is decided by how much rubbish we carry home this year.

The flyer’s “one-point advice” conveys the reality of the event well. You can get heatstroke even at night. Be ready for sudden cloudbursts. The toilet queues are huge. If you drop your wallet, transit IC card, keys or phone, there’s a good chance you won’t find them. Stations may restrict entry to prevent accidents. And your phone will struggle to connect before and after the show.

The way the festival is run has changed with the years. For 2026, to deal with rising costs — fireworks first among them — and excessive crowding, Minna no Harappa and the area around it were designated a paid zone, and entry required a ticket bought in advance. In exchange, the Tachikawa Gate and Sunagawa Gate car parks, normally used for parking, were newly opened as free viewing areas. The official notice warns that the asphalt there gets far hotter than you’d imagine during the day and there is no shade, so take measures to protect yourself. That year the park’s Sunagawa, Tamagawa-Josui and Akishima gates became entrances for ticket holders only. At the paid-zone entrances you trade your paper ticket for a paper wristband and keep it on until the end. The notice stresses that showing your phone screen won’t get you in: be sure to bring the paper ticket. On a night when the mobile network gives up, paper is the most reliable thing you can carry. It makes perfect sense.

The show itself gains a new twist every year. In 2025, before the fireworks, a light show by about 500 drones ran for about fifteen minutes from 7:15 p.m. It carried the name of Schau Essen, a sausage brand made by Nippon Ham. Before the fireworks, then, the name of a sausage went up into the night sky first. The official notice kindly pointed out that the drones would fly above the park’s sports field — that is, to the west as seen from the lawn — the opposite direction to the fireworks, which go up in the east. Fifteen minutes facing west, then sixty minutes facing east. A fireworks night here begins with neck exercises.

In the same year, 2025, the staff T-shirts featured Pochita from Chainsaw Man, to mark the film’s release. On the morning of the festival, the official website announced: “With our resolve as of 7 a.m. today, we have decided to hold the festival.” Not “decision” — resolve. People who looked at the sky, glared at the weather charts and agreed to take responsibility for a night with hundreds of thousands of guests: their seven-o’clock-in-the-morning determination shows in that one word.

In 2026 there was a collaboration with the anime Digimon. Limited-edition hand fans (uchiwa) were handed out at the venue. Distribution from 1:30 p.m., one per person, not for sale, resale strictly forbidden, and please do not throw the fan away — be sure to take it home, the official notice specifies in detail. It is, perhaps, also a heartfelt plea from people wrestling with 60 tonnes of rubbish. Agumon and friends were printed on the staff T-shirts, and announcements in the venue were to be made by Agumon. On the chests of people calmly steering a crowd of hundreds of thousands, a little dinosaur grins without a care. Somehow that combination is very Tachikawa.

Now, then, we are getting close to the answer to that bracket.