Tama Monorail from Tachikawa: A Guide to Views, Mt. Fuji and History

Riding the Tama Monorail from Tachikawa: which side to sit for Mt. Fuji, when to catch “Diamond Fuji,” the river crossing, and why the line runs above roads.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Three minutes by monorail from Tachikawa-Kita Station, on the platform of the station next to Tachikawa-Minami, on a winter evening, the sun is swallowed by the summit of Mt. Fuji.

Not many people in Tachikawa (立川) know this. Locals sometimes call their town “a place with nothing in it”: a town you pass through, with nothing but big shops around the station. But step out of the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, look up from the pedestrian walkway, and a thick grey beam crosses the sky overhead. Astride that beam, four cars go gliding by.

A railway is supposed to be an extension of the ground. There are sleepers, there is ballast, there are level crossings. The Tama Monorail has nothing to do with any of these; it slides along at a height well clear of the ground. And if you follow the beam with your eyes for a while, you notice something odd. The pillars almost always stand in the middle of a road, or right beside one. A vehicle that ought to be free to go anywhere in the sky somehow, dutifully, chooses to run only above the roads on the ground.

Why does the road in the sky run directly above the roads on the ground? I jotted this small mystery in my notebook and went through the ticket gate. The answer was in the scenery outside the window. Mt. Fuji included.

The Tama Monorail’s Views Begin at Tachikawa-Kita Station

The Tama Monorail does not have just one station in Tachikawa. On either side of JR Tachikawa Station there is Tachikawa-Kita (“Tachikawa North”) and Tachikawa-Minami (“Tachikawa South”). The company’s station guide calls Tachikawa-Kita “the connecting station on the north side of JR Tachikawa Station” and Tachikawa-Minami “the connecting station on the south side.” The two are 0.4 kilometres apart, one minute’s ride: the shortest hop among the line’s 19 stations. You feel you have just boarded and already you are getting off.

An encyclopedia entry on the line says that after leaving Tachikawa-Kita the monorail draws a great S-curve, and JR Tachikawa Station can be seen directly below. The first sight on this road in the sky, just after departure, is the Chuo Line tracks and the station roof flowing past under your feet. JR running east–west, the monorail running north–south: Tachikawa Station is where the two lines cross. The corporate profile of the Tama Toshi Monorail company says the line was conceived to make Tokyo a city with a better balance between work and home, and to further improve public transport in the Tama area, the broad western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards. Picture Tokyo’s rail map: most lines radiate outward from the centre, and surprisingly few link the suburbs to each other sideways. The Tama Monorail took on the job of a thread that crosses many of those radial lines and stitches Tama together from north to south.

The threading began in the Showa era. The Tachikawa base was fully returned in 1977, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government studied a basic plan in 1979, and the company was founded in April 1986 (Showa 61). The sky that a Tachikawa child of the Showa era looked up at from the station’s north side had no beams and no track yet. Look up from the same place today and four cars are crossing on a grey beam. It first carried passengers in the autumn of 1998 (Heisei 10).

The first stitch of that thread was made in Tachikawa. According to the company, the line opened in two stages: from Tachikawa-Kita to Kamikitadai on 27 November 1998, and from Tama Center to Tachikawa-Kita on 10 January 2000. The first passengers rode the section heading north from Tachikawa-Kita. The company’s head office is also in Izumi-cho, Tachikawa. The sky road linking Tama from north to south started moving with Tachikawa as its starting point.

The list of shareholders tells you a lot about its character. The largest is Tokyo Metropolis with 78.84 percent; also listed are the Seibu, Keio and Odakyu railways, banks, and the cities and towns along the line. Tachikawa City’s share is 0.65 percent. For a city whose name appears in two station names, that is a rather modest stake. A big name, a small share.

The ground under the starting stations has two faces too. According to the company’s station guide, around Tachikawa-Kita stand department stores and other commercial buildings forming a major shopping zone. Tachikawa-Minami is linked to Tachikawa Station by a pedestrian deck and has many restaurants, and compared with the north side it keeps places with a sense of history, such as Suwa Shrine. The north is new, the south is old. In the north and the south of the same town, the entrances to the sky road look completely different.

So what kind of land is this thread stretched over? Read the station names and you can mostly tell.

16.0 km and 19 Stations: Tama’s CV, Read in Station Names

According to Tokyo Metropolitan audit documents, there are 19 stations over 16.0 kilometres from Tama Center to Kamikitadai: phase one, Tachikawa-Kita to Kamikitadai, 8 stations and 5.4 kilometres; phase two, Tama Center to Tachikawa-Kita, 11 stations and 10.6 kilometres. The company’s fare table gives 13 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita to Kamikitadai and 23 minutes to Tama Center. Even riding from end to end, you won’t reach 40 minutes.

Here are the station names in order from the north: Kamikitadai, Sakura-Kaido, Tamagawa-Josui, Sunagawa-Nanaban, Izumi-Taiikukan, Tachihi, Takamatsu, Tachikawa-Kita, Tachikawa-Minami, Shibasaki-Taiikukan, Koshu-Kaido, Manganji, Takahata-Fudo, Hodokubo, Tama-Dobutsukoen, Chuo-Daigaku/Meisei-Daigaku, Otsuka/Teikyo-Daigaku, Matsugaya, Tama Center.

Two of them are named after a gymnasium (“taiikukan”). Having no confidence in my sense of direction, I could clearly see my future self mixing up Izumi and Shibasaki and standing at a loss in front of the wrong gym. So I opened the company’s station guide, and the answer was right there. Izumi-Taiikukan Station is named after the city’s public Izumi Citizens’ Gymnasium, and Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station after the Shibasaki Gymnasium about three minutes’ walk away. Extremely practical naming, using buildings everyone knows as landmarks.

There are older names too. On Sunagawa-Nanaban (“Sunagawa Number Seven”), the company’s guide explains that in the Edo period the Sunagawa area was divided into sections numbered one to ten for collecting the rice tax. An Edo-era tax district survives as the name of a station in the air. As for Tachihi, the guide says the station took its name because it borders the site of Tachikawa Airfield. Tax villages, an airfield, gymnasiums, universities: the list of station names is the CV of the land called Tama.

The line was built in an unusual way, too. According to the company, Tokyo Metropolis was responsible for the infrastructure — the piers and the track girders — while the company handled everything related to operation, such as the depot, substations and rolling stock. The grey beam I looked up at in front of the station was built by the metropolis; the cars running on top of it belong to the company. A Tokyo Metropolitan pamphlet calls this a straddle-type monorail. The whole line is a double-tracked, elevated, dedicated guideway, with not a single level crossing.

No level crossings also means nothing on the ground blocks the view. But before I get to the scenery, I want to tell you how this road in the sky once nearly fell. What nearly fell was not the girders, but the books.

Eight Years to Build, Eight Years to Trouble: The Sky Road Nearly Fell

The timeline in the business reform plan the company drew up in 2019 is matter-of-fact. November 1990: work starts on phase one, Tachikawa-Kita to Kamikitadai. November 1991: work starts on phase two, Tama Center to Tachikawa-Kita. Phase one opened in November 1998, phase two in January 2000. So it took eight years from driving the first pile to carrying the first passenger. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, citing railway magazines, says a groundbreaking ceremony was held on 26 November 1990 at the planned site of Kamikitadai Station, and that test runs on the main line began between Tachikawa-Kita and Sunagawa-Nanaban on 19 December 1997. The metropolitan government’s study of a basic plan, it says, was in 1979. From concept to opening: nearly twenty years.

Things were not easy after opening either. Tokyo Metropolitan audit documents put it frankly: because much of the initial capital investment was financed with long-term borrowing, by the end of fiscal 2007 the company’s liabilities exceeded its assets. A road in the sky whose piers, girders and stations were built on borrowed money had, about eight years after opening, sunk below ground level — on paper.

Rescue came in fiscal 2008. According to the audit documents, Tokyo Metropolis invested 21 billion yen and converted 8.9 billion yen of its own loans into shares. The cities along the line extended the period of reduced fixed-asset tax, and the metropolis, the cities and the financial institutions restructured the repayments. As a result, from fiscal 2008 the equity ratio turned positive, and the documents record that by eliminating its excess of liabilities, the company had escaped its crisis. That is why Tokyo Metropolis sits at the top of the shareholder list with the large figure of 78.84 percent.

After the recovery, the numbers climb. The same encyclopedia, citing newspaper reports, says cumulative ridership passed 100 million in November 2002 and 500 million in June 2012, the fastest any monorail in Japan had reached 500 million. Tokyo Metropolitan audit documents of 2010 record an average of a little over 122,000 passengers a day in fiscal 2009. According to the business reform plan, average daily boardings rose from 129,820 in fiscal 2014 to 144,139 in fiscal 2018. On the growth in operating revenue, the plan names one event: a large shopping complex directly linked to a station opened in December 2015, and that year’s operating revenue rose 6.8 percent over the previous year. That is LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi, which opened next to Tachihi Station. A shopping mall built on the land of an aircraft company lifted the sky road’s books. In one corner of northern Tachikawa, two stories cross.

The plan tells one more story, of answering passengers’ voices. In response to requests to change the times of the first and last trains, it says, the company carried out the first full-scale timetable revision since opening. According to the encyclopedia, that was on 23 March 2019. The sky road has gradually changed its shape to fit the hours of the people who ride it.

So what can you see from the windows of that sky road now?

Window Guide: Which Side of the Tama Monorail to Sit for Mt. Fuji

What people riding the Tama Monorail most want to know is probably “which side should I sit on?”

The clue is direction. The Kanto Regional Development Bureau of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, in its “100 Views of Mt. Fuji in the Kanto Region,” describes Fuji as seen from Tachikawa’s Tama River green space as lying to the south-west, behind the point where the Tanzawa and Chichibu ranges meet. On the route map, the Tama Monorail runs roughly north–south. So Fuji will float in the west-side windows. Heading south from Tachikawa toward Tama Center, that is the right side in the direction of travel; heading north toward Kamikitadai, the left. That is the theory. The description in the 100 Views also says Fuji is “seen especially well in winter, when the weather is good.” Clear winter mornings and evenings, when the air is crisp, are your best chance.

The company itself sells this view. A 2018 press release says that the Tama Monorail, running mainly on a high guideway above roads, passes through many sections with open views, and is known for having many spots from which Mt. Fuji can be seen.

On the southbound section, the river is the highlight. After leaving Tachikawa-Minami and passing Shibasaki-Taiikukan, the view opens wide and you cross the Tama River. Under the guideway runs the Tachihi Bridge. According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Construction, it is one of the representative bridges over the Tama River, opened in 1989, with the Tama Toshi Monorail running above the bridge. Its name is read “Tappi-bashi.” It is a two-storey bridge: a road, with a sky road stacked on top of it. Ground floor, cars; upper floor, trains. The upper floor has the better view, and I began to wonder which floor pays the rent, then stopped. According to the same bureau, the Hino Bridge over the same river was completed in August 1926 and is being rebuilt.

The bridge seems to stick in the minds of people walking the river, too. One hiker’s log, from a walk that started around 40 kilometres up the right bank from the river mouth, has a photo captioned “the bridge you can see in the distance is an unusual bridge where the monorail and cars share the same structure.” The bridge isn’t named, but it is probably the Tachihi Bridge. On a travel review site there are posts saying that at the bridge’s end is an information board showing there was once a ferry crossing here: the Hino ferry on the Koshu Dochu, the old highway west from Edo. In those days travellers crossed the river by waiting for a temporary bridge in winter, or a boat in summer. Now you pass over their heads without leaving your seat. Beneath the sky road runs the car road, and beneath that lies the memory of a time when people crossed by boat.

In spring, the window view turns to cherry blossom. According to the company’s station guide, the area around Izumi-Taiikukan Station is a cherry-blossom spot famous along the line, and every year crowds come to see the tunnel of cherries around the gymnasium. Near Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station is the Negawa Greenway, also known for its cherries. Looking down on rows of cherry trees from a high guideway is a completely different experience from cherry-viewing on foot.

Let me pick out the seasonal views from south to north, following the company’s station guide. Ten minutes’ walk from Otsuka/Teikyo-Daigaku Station, near the Tama Center end, Otsuka Shinmei Shrine has a great ginkgo estimated to be 500 years old, designated a cultural property of Hachioji City. Chuo-Daigaku/Meisei-Daigaku Station has Chuo University’s Tama Campus to the west and Meisei University’s campus to the east, each linked to the station by a pedestrian deck. Tama-Dobutsukoen Station is a one-minute walk from Tama Zoological Park, about 60 hectares. Near Hodokubo Station there is a row of cherry trees along the road, and the station guide states plainly that in spring you can enjoy cherries in full bloom from the monorail. Takahata-Fudo Station is the nearest station to Takahata Fudo-son, one of the three great Fudo temples of the Kanto region, where festivals follow the seasons: a hydrangea festival, a chrysanthemum festival, an autumn-leaves festival. The station guide itself is a calendar of the seasons seen from the sky.

Further south there are historic sites too. According to the company’s guide, Manganji Station is the nearest station to Sekiden-ji Temple, where the family home and the grave of Hijikata Toshizo, vice-commander of the Shinsengumi (the famous swordsman police of the last days of the shogunate), are located, and the next station, Koshu-Kaido, is nearest to Hino-juku, which flourished as a post town on the old highway. The sky road passes over land walked by the men of the final years of the shogunate. Koshu-Kaido Station also connects with the Hino bus stop on the Chuo Expressway, about seven minutes’ walk away, and from there, the station guide says, you can catch buses toward Mt. Fuji, a World Heritage Site. Change buses and you can actually go to the Fuji you saw from the window. It is not just a mountain for looking at.

Heading north, the scenery turns into a modern town. According to the company, around Takamatsu Station the new Tachikawa City Hall and a district court opened in 2009, and since then commercial buildings and a joint government office building have gone up one after another south of the station, changing the scenery greatly.

The northern section has unexpected window views too. South of Tamagawa-Josui Station, the Tamagawa Aqueduct, built in the Edo period as a waterway, flows east–west, and its banks are a greenway. Sakura-Kaido Station is named after the Sakura-Kaido road that runs east–west just south of it, and the station guide says the vast grounds of a dairy company’s factory spread east of the station. From the sky road you look down on a milk factory. There cannot be many lines where you can see Mt. Fuji and a milk factory from the same window.

There is scenery at the northern end too. Kamikitadai Station is near the Sayama Hills, and the company’s guide lists among its sights Lake Tama, chosen as one of the “100 New Views of Tokyo.” On days when there is a professional baseball game, direct buses run from Kamikitadai to Belluna Dome, taking as little as 12 minutes. The end of the sky road is also the gateway to a ballpark. At Takamatsu Station is the junction toward the monorail’s depot; the Takamatsu Junction Bridge, where an anemometer is installed, is the bridge at that fork.

The Tama Monorail by the Numbers

• 16.0 — total length in kilometres. Ride it end to end and you still won’t reach 40 minutes.
• 0.4 — kilometres between Tachikawa-Kita and Tachikawa-Minami. One minute: the shortest stretch, with no time to look out of the window.
• 0.65 — Tachikawa City’s shareholding, in percent. A modest share for a town that put “Tachikawa” into two station names.
• 20 and 25 — the wind speeds, in metres per second, at which operations are suspended and stopped. Even the sky road has two levels of patience.
• 25 and 22 — the thermostat settings, in degrees Celsius, for cooling and heating. A question that would cause an all-night argument at home is settled here by rule.
• 144,139 — average daily boardings in fiscal 2018. That is how many were riding eleven years after the year of excess liabilities.
• Two and a half months — the period around the winter solstice when you can try for Diamond Fuji from the window. For the other nine and a half months, it is merely a beautiful Fuji.

The last number comes with a detailed sequel, like a timetable. It was drawn up by a railway company that even schedules the sun.