Tachikawa History Museum Guide: Local History and Folklore, Free

The museum’s National Treasure is a replica. So what draws 330,000 visitors? A black ship in a village diary, daytime cormorant fishing, and 55 silkworm eggs.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tell people in Tachikawa (立川) that you want to learn about the city’s history, and the usual reply is: “Well, there’s the museum.”

Ask where it is, and they say Fujimicho. On foot, it is 20 minutes from Nishi-Tachikawa Station: an unassuming building up on a river terrace lined with houses. And when you open the city’s list of the museum’s main exhibits, the very first line reads: “[National Treasure] Six-sided stone pillar (*replica).”

The real National Treasure is not here. The bronze gong designated a cultural property by Tokyo also carries the note “*replica.” And yet, according to the museum’s own newsletter, some 330,000 people have visited in the 40 years since it opened in 1985. What do people come to see at a museum without its real National Treasure? And for that matter, what does a small town museum actually do all day?

Carrying that question, I opened the museum’s published papers one by one. From the very first page, the story started rolling somewhere I had not expected.

To learn Tachikawa’s history, go to the museum in Fujimicho

The Tachikawa City History and Folklore Museum (立川市歴史民俗資料館, Tachikawa-shi Rekishi Minzoku Shiryokan) opened on 1 December 1985 — Showa 60 in the Japanese calendar. The city states its purpose as deepening residents’ knowledge and understanding of the city’s history, culture and natural environment, and contributing to the improvement of civic culture. According to the city’s timeline, it was extended in 1991. Admission is free.

Inside are two rooms: a permanent exhibition room displaying materials on Tachikawa’s history from prehistoric times to the present, its folklore and its nature, and a special exhibition room for themed temporary shows. There are ten visitor guides explaining the exhibits, and anyone can read them on the city’s website. The museum also uses an exhibition-guide app called “Pocket Curator” (ポケット学芸員), which, according to the city, works outside the museum as well. You can read the curator’s commentary from your own sofa. Convenient times we live in.

In December 2025, the museum turned 40. Reading the list of events for that year, one line caught my eye: the Kiyose City Local Museum and the Tachikawa City History and Folklore Museum are “classmates.” Both were celebrating their 40th anniversaries, so they marked it by swapping materials and exhibiting each other’s collections. A town museum calling the museum in the next town its classmate — there was something in that easy familiarity that told me a little about this place.

That 40th-anniversary winter had another, slightly ticklish exhibition: “Tools in Everyday Life — 40th Anniversary Limited.” Alongside nostalgic household tools of the past, it also introduced folk objects from around 1985, when the museum opened. 1985 was about three years after a station building called “WILL” went up at Tachikawa Station, and before construction of the monorail had even begun. The tools people used in their kitchens and living rooms in those days are now behind museum glass, labelled mingu — “folk implements.” For older visitors, things that were in their own homes not so long ago have crossed over to the side of history. For younger ones, it is a first close look at how their parents or grandparents lived when they were young.

So what is this Tachikawa museum proud enough of to show its classmate? The first thing to face is that replica at the top of the list.

The National Treasure is a replica; the real one has been repaired at a temple in Shibasaki

The six-sided stone pillar (六面石幢, rokumen sekito) standing in the permanent exhibition room is a replica. The real one is at Fusai-ji Temple (普済寺) in Shibasakicho. It is a stone monument erected in 1361 (Enbun 6), with Nio guardian kings and the Four Heavenly Kings carved on six slabs of green schist. Its origins and its imagery are covered in detail in this series’ story on Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine. What I want to follow here is what happened afterwards.

The latest issue of the museum newsletter carries a piece by a researcher involved in the repair. According to it, the pillar fell over in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when parts of its cap stone and slabs broke. It was later rebuilt, and a report on that repair was published in 1927. Then, in January 2018, the area where the pillar stood was designated a landslide hazard zone. It was decided to move the pillar somewhere safe, and the survey for that move found damage to the pillar itself and deterioration of the materials used in the Taisho-era repair.

So the pillar was taken apart and repaired for the first time since the Taisho era. According to the city, the restoration was carried out from 2020 to 2024. The work was done by the craftsmen of the Bijutsuin National Treasure Repair Studio (美術院国宝修理所), the researcher writes — a workshop that traces its origins to the Japan Art Institute founded by Okakura Tenshin in 1898, and that has also repaired the seated Amida Buddha in the Phoenix Hall of Byodo-in and the Nio guardian statues at the Great South Gate of Todai-ji. Tachikawa’s stone pillar was put back together by the same hands that have cared for the Buddha of the Phoenix Hall.

The piece contains numbers the people of Tachikawa would do well to remember. Japan has 1,149 National Treasures, but only 51 of them are archaeological materials. Tokyo holds more National Treasures than any other prefecture, but most of them are portable — paintings, sculptures and the like — and only three are immovable “real property”: the Jizo Hall of Shofuku-ji in Higashimurayama, the former Crown Prince’s Palace, the Akasaka Palace, in Minato Ward, and Tachikawa’s stone pillar. Tokyo has three National Treasures fixed to the ground. One of them stands in Shibasakicho, Tachikawa.

The piece ends with this: to hand down cultural properties to future generations, it matters that many people see them, feel them and love them — cultural properties, too, need oshi-katsu. (Oshi-katsu is a slang word for the devoted support fans give to their favourite pop idol.) In a report on the repair of a National Treasure, the word for idol fandom appears. In an otherwise serious text, that one spot is brightly, slightly bashfully cheerful.

To mark the completion of the repairs, the museum held the exhibition “The Six-Sided Stone Pillar Revived: The Front Line of Cultural Property Repair” in the autumn of 2025. The replica, then, had been standing in the exhibition room all the while the original was away for repair and relocation. A stand-in that quietly kept the front desk open while the original was in surgery. A replica has a replica’s job.

The same is true of other exhibits. The bronze gong designated by Tokyo is, according to the city, privately owned, and the one in the exhibition room is a replica. The honjibutsu Buddhist statues of Hachiman Shrine are at Suwa Shrine, and what is displayed here are replicas. Their histories are told in this series’ stories on the Tachikawa clan and on the old villages. The museum’s exhibition room may be a kind of map pointing to where the real things are.

That stone pillar also appears in film from the Showa era. And from there, another side of this museum comes into view.

Film that smells of vinegar, and Tachikawa in 1951

Issue 28 of the museum newsletter carries a modest but thrilling report. Over three years starting in fiscal 2021, the museum digitised items in its collection. In the first year it tackled about 150 old reels of film.

The film was in poor shape. Some had lost their form through oxidation and other causes, and the image layer was peeling away. The caption to one photo in the report says that film far gone in deterioration and starting to melt is sticky and gives off a strong smell of acetic acid. Showa-era Tachikawa was fading away, smelling of vinegar. Rather than a cheap machine, the museum used a proper scanner to read the film frame by frame, and corrected footage that had faded to red back to natural colours. Precious footage of city scenes and historic moments that can no longer be seen has been brought back to life, the report says. But some reels were too badly deteriorated to digitise. From the pen writing on the can, it is known that one of them was a film of a lion dance from the city.

One of the films brought back was The Growing City (The New Tachikawa), made in 1951. A frame from it, printed in the newsletter, shows the National Treasure stone pillar at Fusai-ji, and above it a plane from the US Air Force’s Tachikawa base flying away.

In those days, the base’s planes crossed directly above a stone monument from the Northern and Southern Courts period. Today, the lawns of Showa Kinen Park spread over the returned base, and the stone pillar has been repaired and moved somewhere safe. You can compare the same stone across more than seventy years. That is possible only because someone did not throw the film away but kept it in its can.

In the second year, about 16,800 mounted photographs were digitised. They are the museum’s most heavily used materials, with many enquiries coming not only from within City Hall but from the media and companies. The museum has used these photographs to show the Showa-era city again and again. A 2023 photo exhibition was titled “The Changing Face of Tachikawa Station: From the Late 1950s to the Early 2000s.” In fiscal 2009 it held an “Old Tools Exhibition” of everyday implements from the 1940s to the 1960s. In 2000 there was a small exhibition called “Tachikawa, City of Cinema.” Some will remember that Tachikawa was once a city of many movie theatres; others will never have known. The same photograph reaches people in two ways: for the young, as a picture of a city they never knew; for the old, as a street corner they recognise.

As of the end of February 2024, the newsletter says, the materials donated by residents were approaching 41,000 items. Forty-one thousand. Each one carries the smell of somebody’s closet.

So, of the things that really are here in the original, which surprised me most? It was a page in one old diary.

A black ship, drawn in a village headman’s diary

The Koshi Nikki (公私日記, “Diary of Public and Private Affairs”) is a diary kept at the end of the Edo period by Suzuki Heikuro, the nanushi — the village headman — of Shibasaki Village. According to the museum’s visitor guide, over twenty years from 1837 (Tenpo 8) to 1858 (Ansei 5), it records in fine detail the daily weather, his official records as headman, the annual festivals, farm work, prices, village incidents and what was happening in the wider world. It is a city-designated tangible cultural property, kept at the museum. Its value as a record of festivals has already been introduced in this series’ story on Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine.

What I want to look at is the entry for the 10th day of the 6th month of 1846 (Koka 3). According to the visitor guide, a black ship is drawn on that page. It was, the guide says, an American warship armed with cannon that appeared off Uraga on the 27th day of the 5th month of Koka 3.

Not Perry. Commodore Perry’s “black ships” — the ones every Japanese textbook remembers for forcing Japan to open up — came to Uraga in 1853 (Kaei 6). Seven years earlier, American warships had already come to Uraga once. According to an encyclopedia entry, the American naval officer James Biddle entered Uraga in July 1846 with two ships, the ship of the line Columbus and the sloop Vincennes, and requested trade. He was not allowed to land; the shogunate told him to go round to Nagasaki, and Biddle left after about ten days. Textbooks usually dispose of it in a single line.

That single-line event was sketched into his diary, within the same summer, by the headman of a village beside the Tama River. How did news of the black ship reach Shibasaki Village in Tama, far from Edo? Did someone show him a picture, or did he draw it from what he heard? The guide does not go that far, and I will not fill the gap with imagination. But seven years before Perry, a black ship was floating on the desk of a Tachikawa village headman. That alone shifts how Tachikawa’s Edo period looks.

The diary has been published as books, too. The museum’s list of publications for sale includes a revised edition of the Koshi Nikki in five volumes, published from 2011 to 2015. What is fun is that the list has a column for “weight” next to the price — presumably for people buying by post. Volume one has 309 pages and weighs 680 grams. The heaviest item on the same list is an excavation report, Mukogo Site (向郷遺跡), at 9,000 yen and 2,180 grams. I know of no other museum that measures the weight of history in grams.

Just scanning the titles on that list shows you what “folklore” means here: The Tachikawa Dialect, More Old Tales of Tachikawa, Tachikawa as Seen by the Women of Shibasaki, Born on a Farm in Sunagawa, The Doctors of Tachikawa, The Household Shrines of Tachikawa. These are not books about lords and battles. They gather the language, the old tales, the eyes of village women, the memories of local doctors. If history is the record of events, folklore is the record of daily life. The reason the word “folklore” is in this museum’s name probably shows best on this shelf. In January 2026, the Tama Local History Book Fair was held at the Shibasaki Learning Centre, gathering and selling books on local history, culture and nature published by 21 cities and towns in the Tama area. It was the 38th.

The diary’s village sat just north of the Tama River. Under the sky whose weather the headman wrote down, how did the villagers live with the river? The museum keeps the answer in the shape of tools.