Tachikawa Bridges Walk: ‘Nameless Bridge’ to a Double-Deck Crossing

Tachikawa’s 51 city bridges and what their names remember: “Nameless Bridges”, the numbered bridges of an Edo village, and a double-deck river crossing.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

The City of Tachikawa manages 51 bridges. Three of them have the name “Nameless Bridge”. Having no name is their name.

I began looking into bridges on a whim. Everyone knows the Hino Bridge and the Tappi Bridge over the Tama River. But Tachikawa (立川) is crossed by several small waterways — the Tamagawa Aqueduct, the Zanbori River, the Nekawa stream — and each time, there is a bridge. Far more of them are bridges people cross every day without ever wondering what they are called.

Turning the pages of the city’s documents, strange names appeared one after another. The Master’s Bridge. Ochirashi. “Below-the-Slope Bridge”. And a row of bridges known only by numbers, from Bridge No. 1 to Bridge No. 10.

What, I wondered, do the names of bridges remember? With that question in hand, I decided to cross Tachikawa’s bridges one at a time. (Tachikawa is a city in the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards.)

How many bridges does Tachikawa have? 51 bridges, and the 1934 Senju Bridge and Bridge No. 6

My guide was the “Bridge Life-Extension and Repair Plan” the City of Tachikawa drew up in March 2022 — a plan for making bridges last longer, which lists the bridges the city manages.

The plan covers 43 road bridges at least 2 metres long and 8 pedestrian overpasses: 51 in all. Almost all of them, the plan says, are small single-span bridges less than 35 metres long. There is only one long bridge: the Fujimi Viaduct, 180 metres long, joining six spans, built in 1969.

Which is the oldest? Follow the construction years in the list and there are two from 1934: the Senju Bridge over the Tamagawa Aqueduct, and Bridge No. 6. The Senju Bridge was renovated in 2013, but it was born at the start of the Showa era. Even the elder of the city’s bridges is only about ninety. For a town on a highway that dates back to Edo times, that is younger than you might expect.

There is a reason. Many of Tachikawa’s bridges were built in the 1960s and 70s, when Tama’s population shot up and roads were built in a rush. Counting the list, 18 bridges were built in the ten years from 1960 and 13 in the ten years from 1970. The plan says that at the time of inspection, 24 bridges — 47 per cent of the total — were more than 50 years old, and forecasts that this will jump to 67 per cent in ten years and 86 per cent in twenty. Bridges, too, grow old along with the town.

The list also contains a row of bridges called by numbers: Bridge No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, all the way to No. 10. Most of those whose locations are given are in Fujimi-cho — small reinforced-concrete bridges built around 1964. And mixed in among them are “Nameless Bridge 1”, “Nameless Bridge 2” and “Nameless Bridge 3”, each 3 to 5 metres long. Perhaps they were thought not worth naming, or perhaps the paperwork moved on before anyone named them. Either way, this is how the bridges with no name acquired one. Their situation is a little like that of the box labelled “Miscellaneous” in my desk drawer.

While some bridges made do with numbers or with no name at all, Tachikawa has a group of bridges whose names tell the story of a village: the bridges over the Tamagawa Aqueduct in the north.

The bridges of the Tamagawa Aqueduct: counting from “the First Bridge” of Sunagawa village

How many bridges did Edo’s Tamagawa Aqueduct — the 17th-century water channel to Edo, old Tokyo — originally have? The history archive of neighbouring Akishima City says Josuiki (“Records of the Aqueduct”), compiled in 1791, records 82 bridges along the whole aqueduct, including bridges with no name. Eighty-two over 43 kilometres: about one every 500 metres.

Today, within Tachikawa, the aqueduct is crossed, from upstream, by Matsunaka Bridge, Ichiban Bridge, Tenno Bridge, Inari Bridge, Kamijuku Bridge, Shinya Bridge, Mikage Bridge, Konpira Bridge, Miya-no-hashi, Senju Kobashi, Senju Bridge and Seiganin Bridge (according to the encyclopedia’s list). Trace the origins of their names one by one and a map of the days when this was Sunagawa village begins to appear.

First, Tenno Bridge, where the Itsukaichi Kaido road crosses the aqueduct. Issue 4 of Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the city’s history-compilation team, says the name is thought to come from the Tenno shrine that stood to the south, and that it was once also called “Itsukaichi Bridge”, after the highway crossing the aqueduct. At the foot of the bridge stands a stone memorial tower for the bridge, raised to mark its building and to pray for the safety of those who cross.

Here things get a little complicated. Today’s Itsukaichi Kaido does not cross on Tenno Bridge but on its next-door neighbour, Shin-Tenno (“New Tenno”) Bridge. According to an article in a community paper, Tenno Bridge was built around 1931 and Shin-Tenno Bridge around 1970. The bridge with the old name stayed on the side road, and the bridge with the new name took on the main road. The junior who never got the senior’s title has taken over all the senior’s work. You see the same arrangement in many a company.

For the people of Sunagawa village, Tenno Bridge was “the First Bridge”. According to a community-paper article that copied out the information board at Shinya Bridge, Shinya Bridge was called “Shinya-bashi” because it was built behind a farmhouse whose household name was Shinya, and it was also called “the Third Bridge” because it was the third bridge counting from Tenno Bridge upstream, which was known in Sunagawa village as “the First Bridge”. In the 1791 Josuiki, it is recorded as a sakuba-bashi, a bridge for going to the fields.

So the villagers called the aqueduct’s bridges by number, from upstream: the First Bridge, the Second, the Third. If the people of Edo-era Sunagawa saw the row of Bridges No. 1 to No. 10 in Fujimi-cho, they might laugh that nothing had changed.

The next, the fourth, is Mikage Bridge. According to the local information board, quoted by a website that serves as an encyclopedia of the aqueduct, Mikage Bridge is an old bridge that has stood since the Edo period; being the fourth bridge from upstream on the aqueduct through Sunagawa village, it was called “Shi-no-hashi”, the Fourth Bridge. And because it was close to the house of the Sunagawa family, the village headmen, it was also called Danna-bashi — the Master’s Bridge. When the bridge was rebuilt at the end of the Taisho era (the mid-1920s) it was renamed 御影橋 (Mikage Bridge), and later its characters were changed again to 見影橋, read the same way. Fourth Bridge, Master’s Bridge, Mikage, Mikage again. Japanese has a word, shusse-uo, for fish such as yellowtail that change their names as they grow up; this one bridge has changed its name rather like one of those.

The Sunagawa family, the “masters” of the Master’s Bridge, left another legacy. In the Meiji era a branch channel for the Sunagawa family’s own use was dug from beside the bridge, called the “Gengoemon Branch” after the head of the family. It fed the stream in their garden and also watered rice paddies, rare in this area. The aqueduct encyclopedia says Mikage Bridge Park, south of the bridge, is the site of those paddies. According to the city chronology, there was even a year when a swimming pool opened in Mikage Bridge Park. The headman’s rice paddy became a place where children played in the water. Over time, the uses of water have become rather more fun.

The fifth bridge is Konpira Bridge. According to issue 4 of Tachikawa Monogatari, it was called “Murayama Bridge” because it stood where the Murayama Kaido — the road to Murayama and Tokorozawa — met the aqueduct, and its present name comes from Konpira-yama, the small hill with a shrine on top beside the bridge. The city’s cultural-heritage guide describes this Konpira-yama as an artificial mound about 10 metres high. On the flat land of Sunagawa, 10 metres is a fine mountain.

The miya (shrine) of Miya-no-hashi is Azusami Tenjin-sha, according to a community paper. Go south from the bridge and you reach Sunagawa’s guardian shrine.

Between the aqueduct’s bridges, traces remain of something that was not a bridge. The city’s guide to the aqueduct lists, below Mikage Bridge, “the site of the Tomoe landing of the boat service”. At the beginning of the Meiji era, boats were run on the aqueduct to carry goods, and according to the chronology in Tachikawa Monogatari, Sunagawa village joined the boat service in 1870. But at the request of Tokyo Prefecture, worried that the aqueduct’s water would be polluted, the service was stopped in 1872. The age of boats lasted barely two years. Boats passing under the bridges was the briefest of moments in the long history of the aqueduct in Tachikawa.

At the south end of Matsunaka Bridge, furthest upstream, two water intakes sit side by side. According to a community-paper article, the right one is the intake for the Shibasaki branch channel and the left one for the Sunagawa branch. The water of Tachikawa’s two villages — Shibasaki to the south and Sunagawa to the north — parted at the foot of the same bridge. Further downstream, around Seiganin Bridge, part of the aqueduct bank is filled with rocks, and it is said to be where a bomb fell in an air raid during the war, the same paper writes. The feet of bridges were where a village’s water divided, and also where the scars of war were left.

The names of the bridges live on in local life. Turn the pages of the city chronology and you find the years in which community halls named “Tenno Bridge Hall” and “Konpira Bridge Hall” opened. Bridges have even given their names to neighbourhood meeting halls. In the north of Tachikawa, a bridge was not just a way across; it was the name of your own place. (More on this area in our Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa article.)

Tachikawa’s bridges by the numbers

• 51 — bridges managed by the City of Tachikawa (43 road bridges and 8 pedestrian overpasses). People cross them every day, but probably can’t name even a tenth.
• 3 — bridges called “Nameless Bridge”. Having no name became a name.
• 1934 — the year the city’s oldest bridges, Senju Bridge and Bridge No. 6, were built. Even the elders are only about ninety.
• 82 — bridges along the whole Tamagawa Aqueduct recorded in the 1791 Josuiki, nameless ones included. Namelessness has a long history.
• 180 — metres: the length of the Fujimi Viaduct, the city’s longest. Almost all the rest are under 35 metres.
• 417 — metres: the length of the Tappi Bridge over the Tama River. That one belongs to Tokyo, and it has two storeys.

The wanderer’s quiz

What was Mikage Bridge over the Tamagawa Aqueduct once called, because it stood near the village headman’s house?

1. the Master’s Bridge; (B) the Lord’s Bridge; (C) the Headman’s Bridge

The answer comes near the end of this article.

If the aqueduct’s bridges carry the names of village life, the bridges of the Zanbori River to the west carve into their names the shape of the land and the violence of water.

The bridges of the Zanbori River: “Below-the-Slope Bridges” and the memory of ochirashi

The Zanbori River flows out of Sayama Pond in the town of Mizuho, runs north to south down the western edge of Tachikawa, and joins the Tama River at Shibasaki-cho. On that short stream there are a surprising number of bridges. According to the encyclopedia’s list, within Tachikawa alone there are road bridges named Shin-Zanbori, Shimosuna, Shin-Ochirashi, Josui, Kamijuku, Zanbori, Tabori, Matsunoki, Taka-no-michi, Oyama, Namiki, Matsukaze, Shoei, Fujimi, Takiguchi and Tachikawa.

Among them, one name stands out as especially odd: Shin-Ochirashi Bridge — “New Ochirashi Bridge”. The city’s plan gives its construction year as 1982 and notes that there was once also an “Ochirashi Bridge”, since removed.

What is ochirashi? Issue 6 of Tachikawa Monogatari offered a clue. In an article deciphering a map of Sunagawa village from the Edo period, it says that in those days the Zanbori River was merged into the Tamagawa Aqueduct, and the area to the north was called ochirashi (押散し), because water sometimes overflowed there. A place where water pushes in and scatters. I read the bridge’s name, ochirashi, as carrying on the memory of that place. Taken by itself, the name has a gentle sound. But beneath it lies buried the memory of a village troubled by overflowing water.

How the Zanbori River and the aqueduct meet today I described in the feature’s article on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa. At the crossing, the Suzukake Bridge for people and the Josui Bridge for cars stand side by side, and the aqueduct passes underneath the Zanbori River.

Further south, the bridges’ names start talking about terrain. Around Fujimi-cho, the Zanbori River flows close to the cliff of a river terrace. The city’s plan lists Sanchuzaka-shita Bridge (1969), Babazaka-shita Bridge (1970), Takishita Bridge (1970) and Takiue Bridge (1969). Below the slope, so “Below-the-Slope Bridge”; below the falls, so “Below-the-Falls Bridge”. A blogger who walked the Nekawa Green Path writes that the bridges are named “So-and-so Slope Below Bridge” because the river’s left bank is a terrace cliff, with slopes down to the bank. The slope names I walked in the feature’s article on Tachikawa’s terrain and slopes have flowed straight into the names of bridges.

Near the confluence with the Tama River is the Zanbori Promenade Bridge. According to a column written by a Tachikawa newspaper delivery agency walking its own neighbourhood, the zelkova, the city’s tree, and the kobushi magnolia, the city’s flower, are painted at either end, and a small viewing platform sits in the middle. From bridges below slopes to a bridge of the city’s tree and flower: from upstream to downstream, the Zanbori’s bridges change the tone of their names from village memory to the face of the city.

And just beside that confluence, Tachikawa’s most conspicuous bridge crosses the Tama River in two storeys.