Tachikawa Tama River History Walk: Floods, Ferries and Bridges

In Tachikawa, the train crossed the Tama River 37 years before people could walk across. A history walk through ferries, floods, sweetfish, gravel and bridges.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

I was reading a timeline of the Tama River (多摩川, Tamagawa) compiled by the Keihin River Office of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, working forward from the Meiji era. Under 1889 there is nothing about the Tachikawa area. Only under 1926 does a single line appear: “25 August. Hino Bridge built across the Tama River. Hino ferry and Manganji ferry abolished.”

In other words, until the mid-1920s there was no road bridge you could walk across from Tachikawa (立川) to Hino on the far bank. People crossed the river by boat.

Yet a Tachikawa City handout says this: in August 1889, the Kobu Railway opened between Tachikawa and Hachioji. Hachioji is on the other side of the river. The train was already crossing the Tama River in 1889.

The train crossed the river 37 years before people could walk over it. Why did things happen in that order? To find out, I followed the records of water and bridges along the Tama River, which runs along Tachikawa’s southern edge.

For readers new to the area: Tachikawa is a city of western Tokyo, in what is called the Tama area, the long, broad half of Tokyo Metropolis that lies west of the 23 central wards. The Tama River gives the area its name. It rises in the mountains, flows east past Tachikawa, and enters Tokyo Bay between Tokyo and Kawasaki, forming the border between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture for much of its lower course.

Tachikawa’s Tama River bridge history begins with no bridge

The Tama River runs east to west along the southern end of Tachikawa City. A handout from the city’s Museum of History and Folklore says that people drew drinking water and irrigation water from the river, along with fish and gravel from the riverbed, and that at the same time they were struck by floods and other disasters, so the river has been bound up with their lives since long ago. The same river brought both blessings and calamity.

The Keihin River Office describes the Tama as an abare-gawa, a “rampaging river,” with a steep gradient. Its rampages are written straight into the history of its bridges.

According to the office, in the Edo period ferries, not bridges, were the main way to cross the Tama, for military and technical reasons. There were 39 ferry crossings between Ogochi in the mountains and the river mouth. Even on the Tokaido, the great highway between Edo and Kyoto, at the very bottom of the river, the Rokugo Bridge, 120 ken (about 218 metres) long, was built in 1600, only to be washed away by floods again and again. In the end, Rokugo remained a bridgeless ferry crossing until 1874.

If not even the nation’s main highway could keep a bridge over the river, nobody could complain that there was none on the Koshu Kaido near Tachikawa. On the Edo-period Tama, having no bridge was normal.

A ferry that lost its job when the shogunate fell

So what crossings were there on the Tachikawa bank?

In the Keihin River Office’s list of ferry crossings, one carries a Tachikawa name: the Shibasaki ferry. Shibasaki is the name of an old village in southern Tachikawa. According to the list, the Shibasaki ferry served the old Kamakura road, and it closed before the Edo period. In the column for the reason for closure, it says: “Fall of the Kamakura shogunate.”

The reason a ferry closed was the fall of a government. Not falling passenger numbers, not a new bridge. The very reason to travel the road to Kamakura, seat of Japan’s first warrior government, vanished along with the regime. The employer went bankrupt, and even the ferryboat lost its job. It happened nearly 700 years ago, but it is a restructuring on an impressive scale.

Right next to it in the list are three ferries on the Koshu Kaido, the highway west from Edo. The Ishida ferry served the old Koshu Kaido and closed in the Keian era (1648–1652) when the highway moved. The Manganji ferry also served the old Koshu Kaido and closed in 1926 when the Hino Bridge was built. And the Hino ferry was the Edo-period crossing of the Koshu Kaido.

Why did the Koshu Kaido change its crossing point? Japanese Wikipedia, in its article on the Hino Bridge, explains that the highway originally ran from Bubaigawara in Fuchu across the Tama lowlands and crossed the river at Manganji, but because floods kept cutting the road, it was moved up onto the river terrace, to the line of today’s Koshu Kaido. Every time the river overflowed, it was the highway that ran away. From the start, in the relationship between people and the river, the river was the stronger.

I wrote about the history of the Hino ferry, and the monument that stands on the Tachikawa side in Nishiki-cho, in this series’ episode on the Nekawa stream and the Tama River. It was a crossing that used a temporary bridge in the dry winter and boats in the high-water summer. Here I will add only a little about ferry life, as summarised in the Wikipedia article on the Hino Bridge.

According to that article, the Hino ferry was made the official crossing of the Koshu Kaido in 1684. Before that, it had been used by people going across to farm their fields in Shibasaki Village, in other words today’s Tachikawa. The ferry charged a fare, with separate rates for people and horses, but monks, samurai and people of the post town rode free. The post town of Hino ran and managed it, and the fares were a source of income for the town. In the Meiji era the operation passed from the post town to the town government, and each year a contractor chosen by tender ran the boats and paid the town a fixed sum.

For the villages on both banks, the ferry was both a road and a wallet. The samurai rode free, and the farmers paid. Even on a ferryboat, the accounting of social rank was exact.

And one more thing. In the Taisho era, when cars began to use the road, the lack of a bridge became a problem. It is said that two horse ferries were placed side by side, long planks were laid across them, and cars were loaded on top and carried to the other bank.

A car on a raft of ferryboats crossing a river. Did the driver keep his hands on the wheel the whole way? Or did he get out and watch his car sway? Either way, it cannot have been a restful few minutes.

1889: the train crossed the river before the people did

Upstream from that ferry, in the middle of the Meiji era, something crossed the river by a completely different method: the train.

According to Tachikawa City, the Kobu Railway, today’s JR Chuo Line, opened between Shinjuku and Tachikawa on 11 April 1889, and between Tachikawa and Hachioji in August of the same year. To get from Tachikawa to Hachioji, you have to cross the Tama River.

According to the Japanese Wikipedia article on the Chuo Main Line’s Tama River bridge, this iron bridge was completed in 1889 as part of the extension from Tachikawa to Hachioji and came into use on 11 August. It was single-track at first, 418.7 metres long. When the line between Tachikawa and Toyoda was double-tracked in 1937, the original bridge was kept for up trains (towards Tokyo), and a new bridge for down trains was built on the downstream side. The piers of the up-line bridge, though some have been replaced with concrete, are known for their oval brick construction.

Brick piers from 1889 still stand in the Tama River, holding up the Chuo Line’s Tokyo-bound trains.

Water was involved in this railway’s birth, too. According to the Wikipedia article on the Kobu Railway, the company began as a plan for a horse-drawn tramway to replace water transport. Boat traffic on the Tamagawa Aqueduct, the canal that supplied Edo with drinking water, started in 1870 and was banned two years later, and as a substitute someone planned a horse tramway along the aqueduct’s embankment from Shinjuku to Hamura. A railway along the embankment was not approved, so the route was changed and a licence obtained for Shinjuku to Hachioji, still with horses in mind. But around the same time another company applied to build a steam railway, so Kobu hurriedly switched from horse to steam and saw off its rival.

Had horses pulled the trains as planned, the bridge over the Tama might have looked very different. Making a horse walk a 418-metre iron bridge would have been hard on the horse and on the passengers. If someone asked me to name a Meiji-era structure still on active duty in Tachikawa, this is the one I would put forward first.

Here, half of the opening mystery comes into view. The Keihin River Office’s notes on bridges say that the first permanent bridge built over the Tama River below Ome since the middle of the Edo period was the railway bridge over the Rokugo, built for the government railway between Shinbashi and Yokohama, which opened in 1872. The road bridge at Rokugo, meanwhile, was built in 1873, but it was damaged or washed away by flood after flood and abolished in 1903. On the Tama, the railway was always first across the river, and road bridges came chasing after.

A railway was a project for the state or a large company, which could spend heavily and drive solid piers into the river. A highway bridge could not. This is only my guess, but Tachikawa’s 37-year gap probably has the same cause. The railway passed overhead, a step ahead of the age of ferryboats.

A line drawn down the middle of the river

In the early Meiji years, one more invisible line was drawn on the Tama. According to the Keihin River Office’s timeline, in September 1868 the centre of the Tama River became the boundary between Tokyo Prefecture and Kanagawa Prefecture. In 1912, too, it was decided that the boundary between Tokyo and Kanagawa would be the middle of the river.

Yet according to Tachikawa City, Shibasaki Village and Sunagawa Village were transferred to Kanagawa Prefecture in 1871, and the three Tama districts were not moved to Tokyo until 1893. In between, Tachikawa was part of Kanagawa, though it lies north of the river. I will leave the details to another episode of this series, but it is worth remembering that even with the prefectural border drawn down the middle of the river, there was a time when villages north of the river belonged to Kanagawa. Borders are far more fickle than rivers.

The great flood of 1910: the summer the railway bridge broke

A little over twenty years after the trains began to cross, one summer the Tama River rampaged in earnest.

The Keihin River Office’s timeline calmly records a run of levee breaches in the late Meiji era. September 1884: a typhoon breaks levees at many points on the Tama. August 1890: the same. August 1907: breaches at many points again. And on 10–11 August 1910, a typhoon broke the levees along almost the entire length of the river.

The flood reached Tachikawa. Issue 15 of Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the city’s newsletter about its new official history, carries a report from the team working on the modern period. Searching old newspapers at the National Diet Library, they found articles about Tachikawa even in newspapers from Nagano and Yamanashi prefectures. The reason was that the 1910 flood also damaged the Chuo Line, which links Nagano and Yamanashi with Tokyo. In this flood, the Tama River railway bridge between Tachikawa and Hino stations was put out of action, and a temporary bridge was set up so that passengers could cross on foot. The damage to the bridge, the report says, can also be confirmed in the official records of Tachikawa town.

The passengers whose train had crossed the river 37 years ahead of the people now crossed on foot, over a temporary bridge, in the summer of 1910. Off the train, bags in hand, looking down at the water as they walked. The river had come to collect 37 years of debt in one go.

Why did the Meiji-era Tama break its levees so often? The Japanese Wikipedia article on the Tama River explains it like this. Most of the river’s levees were the traditional kasumi-tei, open-ended “mist levees,” which failed in big floods and left the land as waste ground. By custom dating from the Edo period such land was not taxed, but after the land-tax reform of 1873 it was, which made it hard for villages to recover from floods on their own. On top of that, with flood-control budgets squeezed, the building of bridge piers, the digging of gravel, fruit growing on the riverbanks and factories moving onto the river’s edge all came together to make the damage worse.

Building piers, digging gravel: the very work of running trains had changed the way the river rampaged. The summer the railway bridge broke holds that irony too.

The Tama River at Tachikawa in numbers

• 39 — The number of ferry crossings on the Edo-period Tama. Much quicker than counting the bridges.
• 418.7 — Metres. The length of the first Chuo Line railway bridge of 1889. Its brick piers are still there.
• 37 — Years between the train crossing the river in 1889 and the opening of the walkable Hino Bridge in 1926.
• 3,400 — Households flooded above floor level along the Tama when Typhoon No. 4 struck in June 1966.
• 4 — Kilometres. The length of the drainage channel dug to carry water from around Tachikawa Station to the Tama River. It is now underground.
• 45 — Years. When the Tama basin flooded in the 2019 typhoon, it was the largest such flooding since the Komae flood of 1974.

So did the rampaging river bring Tachikawa nothing but trouble? It did not. The river also brought Tachikawa fish and stones.

Sweetfish, cormorants and gravel: what the Tama River gave Tachikawa

The Tachikawa Museum of History and Folklore’s handout “Fishing Methods and Gear of the Tama River” includes a photo from the Meiji 30s (roughly 1897–1906): a yakatabune, a roofed pleasure boat belonging to a ryotei, a traditional restaurant. According to the caption, in the Meiji era there were three ayu restaurants in the Tachikawa area. Ayu, the sweetfish, is a small river fish much loved in Japan. Guests feasted on it in huts on the riverbank or aboard the pleasure boats.

Pleasure boats in Tachikawa. Hard to picture in today’s city, but Tama River ayu had long been famous. According to Wikipedia’s Tama River article, ayu from the river were presented to the shogunate, and in 1843 the river was designated an otome-gawa, a “reserved river,” with its ayu reserved for the shogun’s household. The farmers along the banks bore the burden of supplying the fish. Issue 16 of the city-history newsletter also notes that in the Edo period, Shibasaki Village had to deal with tasks such as maintaining the Tama River levees and presenting ayu to the shogun, and that villages formed joint associations to handle them.

Tachikawa’s villages were on the side that caught the ayu and handed them over to the shogun. The ayu in the river in front of their own village were not for them to eat. Picture the people of Shibasaki repairing the levee while watching the fish swim past, and you feel a little sympathy.

The museum’s handout has another unexpected photo: cormorant fishing on the Tama in the early Showa era (around the late 1920s and 1930s). In cormorant fishing, trained birds catch fish for the fisherman. On the Tama it was already practised in the Edo period, but unlike the Nagara River and other places where it is done at night by the light of fires, it used a method called kachi-u, “walking cormorant fishing,” done in daylight by walking in the river. In the Meiji era it was also staged as a kind of show in front of the restaurants’ pleasure boats.

Tachikawa’s cormorant fishing was a daytime, on-foot, show. It lacked the mystery of firelight, but from a pleasure boat you could surely see more by day. The handout adds that Tama River fishing methods, including rod and line, nets, basket traps called do, and cormorants, are said to number more than 100.

The railway that carried the riverbed

Alongside the ayu, the Tama brought one more gift: gravel.

According to the Keihin River Office’s timeline, in 1871 gravel from the Tama River was used as ballast for the track of the railway between Shinbashi and Yokohama, Japan’s first railway. Stones from the Tama lay under the rails of the country’s very first line. In 1910 the Tokyo Gravel Railway opened and began carrying Tama River gravel.

A gravel railway came to Tachikawa too: today’s JR Nambu Line. According to Wikipedia, the Nambu Line began in 1919 as an application for the “Tama River Gravel Railway,” with Akimoto Kishiro, born into the family of hereditary village headmen in Kamihirama, Kawasaki, as the leading promoter. Its purpose was to carry gravel dug from the Tama riverbed. According to Tachikawa City, the Nambu Railway opened along its full length between Tachikawa and Kawasaki in December 1929.

This Akimoto Kishiro had another face. The Keihin River Office’s timeline records the “Amigasa Incident” of 16 September 1914, when more than 500 residents of Miyuki Village (now part of Kawasaki) and nearby villages, wearing amigasa woven straw hats, marched on the Kanagawa Prefectural Office to demand levees on the Tama. According to Wikipedia, at the head of the march was Akimoto Kishiro.

A man who stormed the prefectural office to demand levees went on to found a railway to carry the river’s gravel, and that railway’s terminus became Tachikawa. Flood control and gravel lived together in one person.

Gravel digging also left the river deeply scarred. According to Wikipedia, excessive extraction lowered the riverbed, and damage followed, such as farmers being unable to draw irrigation water. After the war, gravel digging continued on the Tama for construction including the US base at Tachikawa. According to the national river timeline, extraction was banned entirely below Futako Bridge in 1936, and on 30 April 1965 gravel extraction was finally banned throughout the Tama River system.

The Tachikawa museum has published a book called Tamagawa no Jari Saishu to Hitobito (“Gravel Extraction on the Tama River and Its People”). It is a record of Tachikawa life, tracing the lives of two people whose family business was gravel digging. Tachikawa had people who made their living by digging stones from the river.

By the end of the Taisho era, people could at last cross the river on their own feet rather than by boat. But that bridge had another role waiting for it, in the history of flood control.