Tachikawa Old Villages Walk: History Guide, Shibasaki to Nishisuna

Why do Tachikawa’s old villages leave only a stone marker or a well? A history walk through villages that kept moving: Jomon homes, a tiny Buddha, canals, gods.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Go looking for old villages in Tachikawa (立川) and, more often than not, you arrive at a spot where a single stone marker stands.

Read the city’s list of designated cultural properties from the top, and you begin to see why. Hachiman Jinja Honden Ato. Manganji Ato. Kokage Jinja Ato. Tachikawa-shi Yakata Ato. Even the city’s walking courses include “Tonogaya Bunsui Ato.” The word that keeps repeating is ato (跡): “site,” “trace,” the place where something used to be. It is a marker that says, something was here once.

Where a shrine building should stand, a single stone. Where a temple should be, a single well. Where there should be a canal, a footpath. Where did the old villages go?

Few people come to Tachikawa expecting old villages. Department stores and office blocks surround the station, and this is a city in the Tama area of western Tokyo better known for its big park, its monorail and its history as an airfield town. To be honest, I did not expect much either. But as I read the city’s notes on its cultural properties and the newsletter put out by the people compiling the new city history, I changed my mind. Tachikawa’s old villages did not vanish. They moved, again and again; they changed their names, they merged, and every time they left an ato behind. Perhaps that habit of moving house is the very character of this town. I decided to follow the old villages from ato to ato.

Walking Tachikawa’s old villages: in the Middle Ages there was only Shibasaki

First, a map to keep in your head.

Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the team compiling the new city history, explains early-modern Tachikawa in one issue like this. Until the Middle Ages, villages in the Tama area were scattered at the foot of the escarpments of the Musashino Plateau and in small valleys, wherever water could be had, while the heart of the plateau was open wild land. In the Tachikawa area, there was only Shibasaki Village, near the Tama River.

Across the whole of today’s Tachikawa City, the Middle Ages had one village: Shibasaki. Most of the north of today’s city, Tachihi, Showa Kinen Park, Sunagawa, Nishisuna, was simply wild land. The boundaries between villages were not clear-cut, and neighbouring villages met loosely across the open ground in between.

Where was Shibasaki Village? On the edge of the river terrace that drops toward the Tama River. Go south from the South Exit of today’s JR Tachikawa Station and into Shibasaki-cho. Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine, which I walked in another episode of this series, sit right in the middle of that old village. Tachikawa City’s walking course “Walking the Old Village” describes this area as the heart of the former Shibasaki Village (later Tachikawa Village) and gives a route starting from the station’s South Exit. The old village is within walking distance of the station.

The same newsletter describes another side of Edo-period Shibasaki. Most villages in the Tachikawa area were directly ruled by the shogunate, but Shibasaki included some land belonging to Fusai-ji Temple and to a hatamoto, a direct retainer of the shogun, of the Nakagawa family. One village, several lords. A village like this is called an aikyu village. Which lord you paid your rice tax to depended on which household you were. “And whose tax are we, again?” If the village officials had to check that at every meeting, I feel for them.

Shibasaki also joined with other villages to maintain the Tama River levees and to present ayu, sweetfish, to the shogun. Levee upkeep and ayu presentation sit side by side as the work of one association. One was muddy, back-breaking labour to protect the village; the other, silver fish for the shogun’s table. Living with a river meant taking on both.

So were there no people here before Shibasaki Village? Of course there were. Before the age when we would write “village,” people lived on the same edge of the terrace, in settlements for which “village” is almost too modern a word.

A 30,000-year-old kitchen, and post holes that may be an ancient government office

In Shibasaki-cho 4-chome, on the Aoyagi terrace, lies the Owada site. According to Tachikawa City, it is a multi-period site spanning the Jomon period through the Nara and Heian periods, and it has been excavated several times since 1954. Remains of pit dwellings from the Initial Jomon period, about 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, have been found.

One step up, on the Tachikawa terrace, is the Shimo-Owada site. Here, clusters of stones about 30,000 years old were found. The city describes these stone clusters as “the remains of cooking places that used heated stones.” Thirty thousand years ago, someone in Tachikawa was heating stones and cooking something. Today countless restaurants and bars line the streets around Tachikawa Station, but the history of this land’s kitchen is roughly 30,000 years older. If the city ever wants to call itself a food town, that is a number it could put on the sign.

At Shimo-Owada, along with pit dwellings from the late 8th to late 9th centuries, nine buildings with posts sunk directly into the ground were found. Post-built buildings are thought to have had a higher status than pit dwellings. So, the city writes, some believe this was not an ordinary Nara-Heian settlement but the site of an ancient government office. And about 500 metres north-west of the site is Suwa Shrine, said to have been founded in 811. The city’s note ends: “The relationship is attracting attention.” Did the office come first, or the shrine? Or were both together a small centre on the edge of the terrace? The answer is still in the ground.

Follow the terrace edge east and you come to another ancient settlement: the Mukaigo site, on the edge of the escarpment overlooking Yagawa Green Space. The city calls it the best-known archaeological site in Tachikawa. It was first excavated in 1945 and has been investigated more than 100 times since.

In the first half of the Middle Jomon period, about 5,400 to 5,000 years ago, there was a settlement a little away from the escarpment, around what is now the Hagoromo-cho 3-chome crossing. Then in the second half of the Middle Jomon, about 5,000 to 4,500 years ago, the settlement moved to the edge of the escarpment. Excavation at the site of the city-run Nishiki-cho housing found a plaza at the centre of the settlement, ringed in concentric circles by a burial area, groups of pits and pit dwellings. This is the form called a ring settlement.

In the burial area there were more than 290 graves. From some of them, Jomon pots were found upside down. These were burials in which a pot was placed over the head of the dead, known as kamekaburi-so, “pot-covered burial.” Pendants of amber and soapstone were also found in the graves. The city’s note says these were ornaments, but probably had a magical meaning too.

What caught my attention was that 5,000 years ago, the settlement moved house to the edge of the escarpment. Just a little closer to the water. The people of this land were already shifting where they lived, in small moves, back in the Jomon period. Tachikawa’s love of moving house, it seems, runs deep.

Let us move on from the age of stone tools and pottery. This time, there are written words. Including a woman’s name.

The Hachiman Shrine site and Onene’s Amida

In a residential street a little away from the south torii gate of Suwa Shrine stands a single stone marker. This is the Hachiman Jinja Honden Ato, the site of the main hall of Hachiman Shrine. It is a city-designated historic site, in Shibasaki-cho 1-chome. Only the stone recalling the old days remains.

According to the city, Hachiman Shrine was built in 1252 as the clan shrine of the Tachikawa family, the local warrior clan of the Middle Ages. That is the middle of the Kamakura period. It burned in wildfires in 1586 and 1824, was rebuilt in 1841, and in 1907 was moved into Suwa Shrine. Then in 1994 it burned again, together with Suwa Shrine.

Burned, rebuilt, burned again, moved, and burned again at its new home. As shrine histories go, that is quite a saga. But one thing of this Hachiman Shrine survived the fires. Suwa Shrine owns a seated Amida Buddha in gilt bronze, about 16 centimetres high. It is a city-designated cultural property, the “Hachiman Shrine honji Buddha.” (In pre-modern Japan, Shinto gods were widely understood as local manifestations of Buddhas; the honji is the Buddha a god was thought to “really” be. Hachiman’s was Amida.)

On its back is an inscription. The city’s note gives it in full:

武州多東郡立河郷芝崎村八幡本地再興願主立河照重内女お祢々。本願大夫式部。于時天正拾四丙戌年三月十五日。大工椎名土佐守。

Roughly: “Musashi Province, Tato District, Tachikawa estate, Shibasaki Village. For the restoration of the honji of Hachiman. Petitioner: Onene, a woman of the household of Tachikawa Terushige. Principal sponsor: Tayu Shikibu. Tensho 14, year of the fire-dog, third month, fifteenth day. Craftsman: Shiina Tosa-no-kami.”

In the city’s own words, Onene, of the household of Tachikawa Terushige, dedicated this seated Amida in 1586 to restore Hachiman Shrine, which had been burned in a wildfire.

I read the inscription over and over. For two reasons.

The first is the name. Onene. Not a warrior’s name, not a monk’s. The name of one woman who wished to rebuild a burned shrine is clearly preserved on the back of a gilt-bronze Buddha 440 years ago. Sixteen centimetres high, small enough to sit in your palm. Its very smallness makes the urgency of the prayer show through.

The second is the place name: “Tachikawa estate, Shibasaki Village.” The Edo-period Shibasaki Village changed its name to Tachikawa Village in 1881. As another episode of this series explained, that was because there was another Shibasaki Village in the same district, and the two were easily confused. But reading this inscription, you realise it was not a new name at all. Nearly 300 years before Meiji, this village was already “Shibasaki Village” inside “Tachikawa estate.” The people of Meiji simply swapped the village’s name for the older name one ring further out. The name Tachikawa was already engraved on the back of a Buddha in the age of the warring states.

About 30 metres south of where Hachiman Shrine once stood is the Great Zelkova of Hachiman Shrine. It was designated a city natural monument in 1955. To this day it is the one and only natural monument Tachikawa City has designated. It was damaged in the 1824 wildfire, and scorch marks are said to have remained high on its trunk until recently. I leave this tree, and the “Tansu Yokocho” lane beyond it, to the Fusai-ji and Suwa Shrine episode. I want to note only one thing here. Hachiman Shrine burned in the same wildfire of 1824. The shrine burned, was rebuilt, and eventually moved away. The tree stayed in its place, carrying its scars. Only the things that cannot move remember where things used to be.

Right next to this Hachiman site there is one more thing that “came from elsewhere”: a gate, said to have been carried here from the residence of a shogunate intendant.

The Nakajima family gate, and water that took fifty years

On the city’s “Walking the Old Village” route, the Nakajima family gate comes right after Hachiman Shrine. According to the walking-course guide, this is where the residence of the Nakajima family stood; in the Edo period they served as nanushi, village headman, of Shibasaki, alternating each year with the Suzuki family. The yearly rotation of the headmen, and the visit the writer Ota Nanpo paid to this house, are covered in the Fusai-ji and Suwa Shrine episode. What I want to pick up here is the story of the gate itself.

The city’s guide says the gate is said to have been handed down, at the end of the Edo period, from the intendant Egawa Tarozaemon.

Egawa Tarozaemon was the name taken generation after generation by the heads of a family of shogunate intendants (daikan, local administrators of the shogun’s lands) based at Nirayama on the Izu Peninsula. The intendant’s gate came to the house of Shibasaki’s village headman. Reading that line, I remembered another cultural property: the Shibasaki Aqueduct petition.

According to the city, the Shibasaki Aqueduct petition is a letter sent from Shibasaki Village to the intendant’s office in Nirayama, Izu, in 1688, asking permission to dig a branch canal. The village wanted to draw water from the Tamagawa Aqueduct, the great canal that carried water to Edo, and develop new fields. Permission for the Shibasaki branch came in 1737, about 50 years after the petition was sent, the city writes.

About 50 years. The people who sent the request probably never heard that it had been granted. The water came only in the time of the headman’s children or grandchildren. Slow replies from officialdom are nothing new. Even so, that is half a century of “under consideration.” And at the end of the Edo period, from the family of the master of that same Nirayama office, a gate was handed to the headman’s house. The side that kept them waiting half a century finally presented them with a gate. Am I taking a traveller’s liberties to read it that way? The gate is still a private family’s gate. Please admire it quietly from the outside.

A little more about the water. The Shibasaki branch canal was used for drinking water in Shibasaki Village on the plateau, and for paddy irrigation below it, and it turned water wheels, eleven in all over the years. West of Showa Kinen Park, using a technique called fusekoshi, an inverted siphon, it ducks under the Zanbori River from west to east. Then at the Fujimi-cho 2-chome crossing it divides into a main stream and a branch in a ratio of seven to three.

The interesting thing in the city’s note is how the branch flows. To deliver water to houses that were already there, it used the slightest differences in the lie of the land, flowing from north to south, and in places from south to north. Water flows from high to low. Knowing that through and through, people read the faintest slopes and sent the water back and forth from house to house. A village that had been kept waiting 50 years worked out a way to waste not a drop of the water it finally got. The main stream was abolished with road widening and sewer construction, but the branch still flows in an open channel today. A stretch where the banks of stacked river cobbles survive is a city-designated historic site.

Tachikawa’s old villages in numbers

• 30,000 — Years. The age of the stone clusters at Shimo-Owada. Tachikawa’s first kitchen opened just slightly before the station building.
• 290 — Graves found in the burial area at Mukaigo. The settlement of 5,000 years ago was already a big household.
• 16 — Centimetres. The height of the Amida that Onene dedicated. 440 years of prayer, carried in something that fits in your palm.
• 50 — Years from the Shibasaki branch-canal petition to permission. While they waited, a generation passed.
• 7:3 — The ratio in which the Shibasaki branch divides. The stream that went round the houses was the smaller one.
• 11 — The total number of water wheels the Shibasaki branch turned over the years.

While Shibasaki waited for water, other villages were about to be born in the wild land to the north. But first, Shibasaki has one more temple that vanished, leaving only a well.

The well of Manganji, and the first new school building in Kitatama

In Shibasaki-cho 1-chome is the Manganji Ato, the site of Mangan-ji Temple. It is a city-designated historic site, but there is no temple. Only a well remains.

According to the city, before the Genroku era (1688–1704) there was a temple called Toko-in here, and it flourished. By the Genroku era it had fallen into ruin, but Beppo, a disciple of the renowned monk Tetsugyu of the Obaku school of Zen, revived it as Ioyama Mangan-ji. Mangan-ji drew many believers, but by the end of the Edo period it had no resident priest, and in 1875 it was abolished under haibutsu kishaku, the anti-Buddhist movement that followed the Meiji government’s separation of Shinto and Buddhism. Almost all its ritual objects were lost.

The temple disappeared; the well remained. Only the hole for drawing water knows where the temple stood. It is the same as the Great Zelkova of Hachiman Shrine. Only the things that cannot be moved stay in place.

But some things that could be moved survived too. Two ren that hung at the gate of the abolished Mangan-ji. A ren is a long, narrow board of calligraphy or carving hung in a facing pair on either side of a temple gate; these are said to be the work of Kosen, an Obaku monk of the Genroku era. The two boards are kept as city-designated cultural properties. The temple was lost, but the words on either side of its gate remain. In Tachikawa’s old villages, words and water outlive buildings.

Shibasaki’s other ato is a school. According to the city’s walking-course guide, in the Edo period the children of Shibasaki studied at Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine. In 1870, a village school that was the forerunner of today’s Tachikawa City No. 1 Elementary School opened at Shingen-an, a sub-temple of Fusai-ji. Forty children of the village learned reading, writing and the abacus from four teachers. One teacher to ten children. Today’s schoolteachers would be envious.

Under the national school system of 1872 the school was renamed Guei Gakusha, and in 1875 Shibasaki School. As the number of pupils grew, it was decided to build a separate school building. In 1878, thanks to the enthusiasm of the villagers, a two-storey school building was completed on the site of today’s Shibasaki Yon-nishi Park. It had about 120 pupils. At the time, a purpose-built school building was very rare.

The city’s guide quotes a line from the History of Shibasaki Elementary School: “Probably the first newly built elementary school in Kitatama District.” The guide adds that this was written “proudly.” Meiji people recorded their local pride in a classical Chinese style; the Reiwa-era city office annotates it with “proudly.” The pride has been passed down faithfully from Meiji to Reiwa.

Tachikawa Village’s school stayed here until 1914, then moved to today’s No. 1 Elementary School in Shibasaki-cho 2-chome. In a corner of the park stands a stone inscribed “Birthplace of the School,” set up in 1950 to mark the school’s 80th anniversary. The school, too, moved and left a stone behind.

That is the ato of Shibasaki, the village that has lasted since the Middle Ages. But how were villages born on the northern plateau, which in the Middle Ages was nothing but wild land? That is a story of moving house on a far grander scale.