Tachikawa Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum: Free Guide and History

Touch Antarctic ice for free in Tachikawa: a guide to the polar science museum and Midori-cho, where an old airfield became a district of national institutes.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In Tachikawa, you can touch Antarctic ice. Admission is free.

Nobody who hears this believes it at once. I didn’t. Ask what there is in Tachikawa (立川) and hardly anyone will answer “Antarctica.”

We think of Antarctica, vaguely, as somewhere very far away. A land of ice and wind and penguins. And here it is, in a corner of a town on the west side of Tokyo, where a monorail runs overhead. Not photographs in an exhibition: you put your hand on real ice, look up at a snow vehicle that travelled to the South Pole and back, and watch live footage of Syowa Station, Japan’s Antarctic base, as it is today. All for nothing. There can be no cheaper Antarctica anywhere on Earth.

Still, why Tachikawa? Tokyo has other districts where museums gather. This walk is a journey after that one mystery. The clue lies in the strangely flat land on the north side of town. And while chasing the answer, I would stumble on another unexpected face of Tachikawa.

Why You Can Meet Antarctica in Tachikawa: The Flat Land to the North

According to the official directions, the museum is about 25 minutes on foot from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station. By the Tama Monorail, you get off at Takamatsu, one stop from Tachikawa-Kita, and walk about ten minutes.

If you walk, you first pass through the redeveloped district by the station. According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, “Faret Tachikawa,” built on former Tachikawa base land, has 109 artworks from around the world placed as part of the streetscape. At the feet of buildings, works shaped like sculptures, benches and bollards appear without warning. People in a hurry don’t notice them. At first, I didn’t either.

The north side of Tachikawa was once an airfield. The city’s guide to its walking courses gives three reasons Tachikawa was chosen as the site: it was close to the capital, it had wide, flat land, and it had a railway. And in 1922 (Taisho 11), the finished airfield welcomed the Army’s 5th Air Regiment from Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture.

That is where the nickname “Tachikawa, capital of the sky” came from. “Tachikawa Monogatari,” the newsletter of the city’s history compilation office, writes that as the airfield developed, Tachikawa grew rapidly as “the capital of the sky.” In 1930 (Showa 5) the “Tachikawa Kouta,” a popular ditty, was written. Packed with scenes of Tachikawa at the time, it was sung with dancing at geisha parties in tatami banquet rooms and widely loved at drinking parties.

Dancing to the capital of the sky in a tatami banquet room. They were celebrating the most up-to-date airfield in the most old-fashioned way possible. A monument recording the song stands in front of what was the airfield’s main gate, beside today’s head office of the Tama Shinkin Bank.

Leaf through the city’s chronology and you can see how giddy the airfield town was. In 1923 (Taisho 12), Tachikawa Village became a town. The following year, the event held to celebrate becoming a town was a car race at the airfield. Using a runway for a civic celebration: this town’s way of throwing a party was a little out of the ordinary from the start.

In 1927 (Showa 2), a Soviet goodwill aircraft flew into Tachikawa Airfield. It was the first foreign aircraft, more followed, and Tachikawa Airfield became an international airport, the chronology says. In 1937 (Showa 12), the Asahi Shimbun newspaper’s aircraft “Kamikaze-go” took off from Tachikawa and flew to London, setting a world record for flying time. There was a time when Tachikawa’s airfield was called an international airport. That line alone gives Tachikawa people the right to puff out their chests a little.

According to the Cabinet Office, in September 1945 (Showa 20) the Allied forces (the US military) took over the airfield and used it as an air force base. The full return came in November 1977 (Showa 52). The state land handed back came to 453 hectares.

The road to the return was not straight. According to the city’s chronology, in 1972 (Showa 47) the Self-Defense Forces moved into the US Tachikawa base: 127 personnel and five helicopters. After the return, in 1982 (Showa 57), a new runway went into service, which the chronology calls “New Tachikawa Airfield.” The memory of the airfield town did not vanish along with the runway. The official guide to Showa Kinen Park describes it as a national government park of 180 hectares in total, built on the site of the US Tachikawa Airfield. Wide land has a reason for being wide. Runways were needed. Hangars were needed. Once returned, that width waited for other uses. Part became a park, part became a disaster-response base.

And part was where the research institutes came.

Midori-cho, the Corner Where the Research Institutes Moved In

According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, by cabinet decision five research and training institutions of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications moved to the former Tachikawa base district: the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, the National Institute of Japanese Literature, the Local Autonomy College, the National Institute of Polar Research, and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics. Later, a joint government building including the Tokyo District Court moved into the same corner, and Tachikawa City Hall moved in next door. The same document counted 345 staff across the five institutions as of 2011.

Line up the institutions’ official histories and you can see that this corner was assembled within a few years. The National Institute of Japanese Literature moved to its present site in Midori-cho in March 2008. The National Institute of Polar Research came in May 2009. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics moved from Minami-Azabu in Minato Ward in October 2009.

The first to come was the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. According to its history, it moved in February 2005. The institute’s story is a story of house moves. When it was born in 1948, its offices borrowed part of the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery. In 1954 it moved into a Hitotsubashi University building in Kanda-Hitotsubashi, in 1962 to Nishigaoka in Kita Ward, and then it came to Tachikawa. The national body for researching the Japanese language began life as a lodger in an art gallery. The study of words does not choose its venue.

The city’s chronology also records how the corner changed afterwards. In 2003, the Tachikawa campus of the Local Autonomy College opened. In 2009, the Hachioji branches of the Tokyo District Court and the Family Court and other offices moved to Midori-cho, and in 2010 Tachikawa’s new city hall began work. In less than ten years, the site of an airfield became a district of national and city institutions.

Comparing the addresses, I laughed quietly. The National Institute of Polar Research, the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and the National Institute of Japanese Literature all share the address “10-3 Midori-cho, Tachikawa.” Next door, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics is “10-2 Midori-cho.” People who study Antarctic ice. People who think about the mathematics of probability. People who read classical books of the Edo period. People who study the Japanese language. All working at almost the same street number. As an outsider, I am a little curious how well the lunchtime small talk meshes.

Reading layers of ice. Reading the fluctuations of numbers. Reading brushstrokes on washi paper. Aren’t these all jobs of reading an unseen past out of the object in front of you? On flat land that was once an airfield, the buildings of people who read now stand in a row.

A Name the World’s Statisticians Know

On the grounds of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics is a guest house called the “Akaike Guest House.” According to the institute’s commemorative website, it came into use in June 2010. Its namesake is the statistician Hirotugu Akaike.

Akaike joined the Institute of Statistical Mathematics in 1952 and became its director in 1986. The information criterion he presented in a 1974 paper is known as AIC. In 2006 he received the Kyoto Prize for “the proposal of the information criterion AIC.” On 5 November 2017, his 90th birthday, Google’s home-page logo became a doodle in his honour.

The guest-house description contains one honest sentence. The move to Tachikawa changed the institute from a conveniently accessible city-centre location to a suburban one, and the house was built to solve that problem. It is so far out that researchers need somewhere to stay. Put like that, Tachikawa residents may have mixed feelings. But the fact that a lodge bearing a name known to statisticians worldwide stands in Tachikawa’s research district is much the bigger thing.

The same ministry document describes the National Institute of Polar Research as the core implementing body of Japan’s Antarctic research programme. In other words, the centre that runs Japan’s Antarctic research is in Tachikawa. The work of the expeditions heading for Syowa Station is connected to this corner of Midori-cho. It is probably the number-one fact Tachikawa residents are entitled to tell other people.

The Nation’s “Other Command Centre”

Midori-cho has one more little-known face: the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base, which spreads out next to the research district. According to the Cabinet Office, it is at 3567 Midori-cho, Tachikawa, and covers about 118 hectares. Facilities of the Tokyo Fire Department, the Metropolitan Police Department, the Disaster Medical Center, the Japan Coast Guard and the Ground Self-Defense Force are gathered here.

Among them is the Cabinet Office’s reserve facility for a disaster headquarters. When a major disaster strikes, the national emergency disaster headquarters is set up, in order, at the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defense — a cabinet agreement of 2003 (Heisei 15). And if all three are unusable? The document’s answer is short. It moves to the reserve facility in Tachikawa.

The government’s own White Paper on Disaster Management states this base plainly. The 2001 edition, in its section on developing wide-area disaster prevention bases, names the Tachikawa base first, saying it has, besides the reserve disaster headquarters facility, disaster facilities for the police, the coast guard, fire services, Self-Defense Force aviation and medical care. In a national white paper, the name Tachikawa appears as a base for emergencies.

I lingered for a while over the “advantages of location” column in the documents. About 30 kilometres from central Tokyo. A plateau with relatively good ground. Ample space. They sounded like reasons I had read somewhere before. I will reveal where that sense of déjà vu came from at the end.

So, what face does the hall of one of these institutes, the people who read Antarctica, show to travellers?

At the Door of the Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum

The museum’s access guide explains the route from Takamatsu Station in eight steps. Leave the ticket gate, go right, and go down to street level. Walk about 50 metres toward the Tamagawa Aqueduct to the “Takamatsu-eki Kita” traffic signal. Don’t cross; turn left. The monorail track up on your right is not the main line but a spur to the depot. Follow it for about 100 metres, cross at the “Saibansho-mae” (In Front of the Court) signal and turn left. Just past the court’s car park is the footpath to the museum. Look for a small signpost.

So much care, presumably, because so many people get lost. Having no confidence in my sense of direction, I felt I was halfway there just from reading the steps. I only felt it.

At the entrance is a big rock: the “Honeycomb Rock,” brought back from Syowa Station in Antarctica. Its surface is riddled with holes. The museum’s commentary says it is biotite gneiss, widely found around Syowa Station, and that the holes were formed by weathering and by salts dissolving and crystallising. There is also a researcher’s explanation on record that strong winds hollowed out the weakened rock surface and wind-blown sand carved it further.

Beside a pavement in Tachikawa sits a rock sculpted by the Antarctic wind. That alone, I felt, made the 25-minute walk worthwhile.

Outside the building there are other members of the cast. The monument “Kyokko” (Aurora) marks the hundredth anniversary of 1912, when the expedition led by Shirase Nobu became the first Japanese to land on the Antarctic continent. It has the double-helix shape of DNA. There is also a screw blade from the first icebreaker named “Shirase.”

A bronze statue of the Sakhalin husky sled dogs that worked hard in the early Antarctic expeditions stands here too. It used to stand at the entrance to Tokyo Tower; if you have been to Tokyo Tower, you may have seen it. In 2013, it was donated to the National Institute of Polar Research by the Japan Animal Welfare Society. From the foot of Tokyo Tower to the garden of a research institute in Tachikawa. Whether this was a promotion for the dogs I cannot judge. But here there are far more colleagues who understand Antarctic talk.

Open the door, and the first thing waiting for you is an Antarctica you are allowed to touch.

Antarctic Ice, and a Cylinder 3,035 Metres Long

The introductory display uses maps and models to show the differences between the Antarctic and the Arctic. And there is Antarctic ice. You can touch it with your bare hand.

The Antarctic ice sheet is made of snow that fell and never melted, piling up over a very long time. The museum calls it a “time capsule” that tells the story of the Earth’s past. A writer who introduced the museum on a travel-feature site also put first the chance to touch Antarctic ice directly and to see the snow vehicle up close. Whoever comes, it seems, reaches for the ice first. The cold that reaches your palm is not just any cold. It is snow that fell long, long ago, pressed hard into ice.

In the next corner is a real ice-core drill. According to the museum’s 2013 commentary, the Antarctic continent is covered by an ice sheet more than 3,000 metres thick. Substances carrying information about the Earth’s environment have built up in it over hundreds of thousands of years, and ancient air is trapped inside. Japan’s expeditions built Dome Fuji Station in the interior, drilled through the ice sheet from surface to bedrock, and brought up a cylindrical ice core 94 millimetres across and 3,035 metres long. The drill on display is the one used.

Each run drilled about four metres. The drill was raised and lowered on a cable, again and again. To stop the borehole closing up, drilling was done in antifreeze, so the drill had to withstand pressures like those of the deep sea at 3,000 metres.

3,035 metres, four metres at a time. Simple division gives roughly 760 trips up and down. I would have stopped counting somewhere around the tenth. The tool of that mind-numbing labour lies quietly in front of you. Beside it are a real automatic weather station and a mooring system that is sunk in the sea to make observations.

How cold, by the way, is Dome Fuji Station? The answer is in the numbers box a little further on. First, we must pass the largest exhibit in the museum.