Tachikawa and San Bernardino: The History of Tokyo’s First Sister City

In 1959 Tachikawa became Tokyo’s first sister city, with San Bernardino, California. Why two base towns paired up, and the Tachi Kids and San Kids since 1962.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

San Bernardino. Say it slowly, the way a Japanese tongue meets it for the first time: San-bā-na-di-no. It sits about 100 kilometres east of Los Angeles, inland, a long way from the beaches people picture when they hear “Southern California”. And it is Tachikawa’s sister city. I wonder how many people in Tachikawa (立川), a city of about 190,000 in western Tokyo, know that.

For a while I assumed Tachikawa had little to do with the wider world. The US air base here was handed back long ago, the airports are at Haneda and Narita, and the crowds outside the station are Tama shoppers and office workers. (The Tama area is the western half of Tokyo Metropolis, the part beyond the 23 central wards.) Then I opened the city’s records. At the end of 1959, Tachikawa formally joined hands with an American city. It was the first sister-city tie anywhere in Tokyo, and the 27th in Japan, just four years after Japan’s first one.

So why did Tachikawa end up paired with San Bernardino? Not New York, not San Francisco, but an inland city whose name almost nobody in Japan has heard. I took that question to the old timelines in Tachikawa and to the records of a city hall on the other side of the Pacific.

Tachikawa’s sister cities: Tokyo’s first, in December 1959

Tachikawa City’s “City Exchange” page lists exactly two names: San Bernardino in the United States, and Omachi in Nagano Prefecture. Tachikawa has one sister across the ocean and one across the mountains.

Tachikawa dates the tie with San Bernardino to 23 December 1959. The city’s own timeline uses an older word, shimai-shi, “sister city”, where most Japanese towns today say shimai-toshi. One character shorter, and somehow a little more old-fashioned.

San Bernardino’s records give a slightly different date. The sister-cities page on the city’s former official website lists 14 December 1959, noting that its dates reflect when the Mayor and Council took action to affiliate. Neither is wrong: one is the day the council voted, the other the day the tie took effect. Nine days, the width of the Pacific.

That page holds another line that makes a Tachikawa reader sit up a little straighter: “Our sister affiliation with Tachikawa, Japan is the oldest of our relationships.” San Bernardino went on to make ties with Mexicali and Villahermosa in Mexico, Tauranga in New Zealand, Ile-Ife in Nigeria, Herzliya in Israel, Roxas in the Philippines, Zavolzhye in Russia, Yushu in China, Kigali in Rwanda and Goyang in South Korea. At the top of that long family tree is Tachikawa. The eldest sister, you might say.

By Japanese standards, 1959 was early. According to the city of Nagasaki, the first Japan–US sister-city tie was signed in December 1955, between Nagasaki and St. Paul, Minnesota. The next year, 1956, President Eisenhower founded what is now Sister Cities International. The idea was citizen diplomacy: ordinary people bridging the gaps that governments had opened. Within four years of that movement starting, Tachikawa was the first in Tokyo to join it.

Why San Bernardino? A supply-base town meets a supply-base town

Tachikawa City is quite frank about the reasons. San Bernardino had Norton Air Force Base, which, like the US base at Tachikawa, was a supply base. The two cities had much in common in population and industry, and both were transport hubs. And many Japanese Americans lived in and around San Bernardino. All this, the city says, made the tie meaningful for Japan–US friendship.

In short, it was a match between two cities that looked alike.

From the California side, the likeness is even clearer. According to the Norton Air Force Base Museum, the base began as San Bernardino’s municipal airport, became a pilot-training base in the summer of 1941, and grew into a major centre for maintenance, storage and logistics. From 1966 it was home to the 63rd Military Airlift Wing, flying airlift support to units around the world.

Tachikawa Air Base was an air-freight town too. Tachikawa Monogatari, the newsletter of the city’s history-compilation office, says that from 1956, military air transport that had been handled at Haneda was also received at the Tachikawa base terminal. A good share of the Far East’s military air cargo moved through here. Supply base meets supply base: one in a dry valley near the desert, one on the Musashino plateau. Apart from the weather, they really were alike.

Even the populations still match. The 2020 US census, as cited by the English-language encyclopedia, put San Bernardino at 222,101. Tachikawa had 187,440 residents on 1 January 2026. “Similar in population and industry”, a reason given more than 60 years ago, still holds up on paper.

The base’s name has its own small story. According to the history pages of San Bernardino’s former official website, the base was renamed in 1950 for Leland F. Norton, a local young man born in San Bernardino in 1921. He went to San Bernardino High School and Valley College, and on 27 May 1944 he was killed in action over Amiens, France. The hometown airfield took the name of a hometown son.

On the third reason, the Japanese American community, Tachikawa’s page says no more. The English-language encyclopedia notes that there was once a Japanese American neighbourhood around Seccombe Park, on the east side of downtown San Bernardino. Across the ocean was a city where people with Japanese family names made their lives. That gave a pairing of two base towns a second meaning.

But who actually made the match? Tachikawa’s records do not say. The answer was on the other side of the Pacific. A report from a 2014 meeting of the Southern California chapter of Sister Cities International, held in San Bernardino, credits the formation of the Tachikawa tie in 1959 to Louis and Thelma Press.

That name will come up again, sixty years later.

Winter 1959 in Tachikawa

Look at 1959 again, this time from Tachikawa’s side. It was not a quiet year here.

Tachikawa’s base had been at the centre of the Sunagawa struggle, a long campaign by farmers and their supporters against a planned expansion of the runway. In 1959 it reached the courts twice. On 30 March, the Tokyo District Court acquitted protesters charged with entering the base, in what became known as the Date ruling. On 16 December, the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court overturned it.

San Bernardino’s council voted for the sister-city tie two days before that, on 14 December. Tachikawa dates the tie a week after, on 23 December.

In the same month that Japan’s highest court ruled on the base, the two base towns became sisters. Conflict and friendship sit side by side on the same month’s calendar. Life, I think, is usually made of two layers like that.

That December, another visitor came from across the ocean. Issue 21 of Tachikawa Monogatari says that Daniel K. Inouye, the first Japanese American to serve in the US House of Representatives, appears to have landed at Tachikawa Air Base in December 1959. A city tie with a place full of Japanese Americans, and a visit from a Japanese American congressman: coincidence or not, I can’t say. But in the winter of 1959, Tachikawa’s sky was closer to America than you might think.

In the base years, the lives of Japanese and Americans ran on both sides of the fence. The same newsletter says the base covered about one-sixth of today’s city, and that tens of thousands of service members and civilian employees, Japanese among them, worked there. One article puts the number of Japanese working at the Tachikawa base alone at about 12,000. There were friendship festivals when the base opened its gates to Japanese visitors. At the elementary school opposite the main gate, records show children going onto the base at Christmas to receive presents. The same school’s papers also record trouble with US servicemen. Tachikawa lived next to America with both the light and the shadow.

And outside the fence, the citizens made a promise of their own. Not to swap soldiers, but to swap high-school students.

Tachikawa’s sister cities by the numbers

• 1959: the year of the tie. First in Tokyo, 27th in Japan. Tachikawa is the eldest daughter of Tokyo’s sister-city family.
• 1962: the year the high-school exchange began. Two years before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Tachikawa teenagers were already crossing the Pacific.
• About 100 km: the distance from Los Angeles to San Bernardino, as the Tachikawa committee puts it. If you pictured surfboards, sorry: it is inland.
• 195 and 204: the total number of Tachikawa students sent to San Bernardino up to fiscal 2018. Two pages on the city’s site give two different figures. You want to recount, but either way, around 200 young people made the crossing.
• 23: how many times larger Omachi, the other sister, is than Tachikawa in area. The younger sister is quite the big girl.
• 6,591: foreign residents living in Tachikawa on 1 January 2026. Beyond the sister cities, the world has already moved in.

Tachi Kids and San Kids: a student exchange running since 1962

The year after the tie, on 20 January 1960, the Tachikawa Sister City Committee was formed. In 1995 it was renamed the Tachikawa San Bernardino Sister City Committee, and it carries on today. Its aims: friendship and understanding between the citizens of both cities through cultural and economic exchange, and a contribution to world peace. Postwar sister cities rarely thought small.

At first, the city says, the exchange was children’s paintings and essays, swapped by schools and individuals. In 1962, paper turned into people. The committee began sending Tachikawa high-school students to San Bernardino.

In today’s terms, it is a two-way homestay. According to the city, students from San Bernardino usually stay with host families in Tachikawa for about a month, from late June to late July, joining committee events and visiting local schools and public facilities. Then, from late July to late August, Tachikawa students live with families in San Bernardino. Applicants must have lived in Tachikawa for at least a year and be in high school. Only a few are chosen, and the committee pays the whole air fare.

On the San Bernardino side, the students have nicknames. A 2019 article from San Bernardino Valley College explains that the San Bernardino teens selected to go to Tachikawa are called “Tachi” kids, and that when they come home in July they bring a “San” kid, “their sister or brother from Japan”. The Tachikawa child is a “San”, the San Bernardino child a “Tachi”. Each wears the first syllables of the other’s city like a name tag. I love that.

The same article says that over 60 years, “hundreds of high school seniors have traveled both ways across the Pacific Ocean”, and that during the month together “most of them fall in love with their host families and remain lifelong friends”. One board member who helps select the students recalled that she had watched Japanese and San Bernardino students exchange ideas every summer since her own daughter went to Japan in 1992.

Tachikawa has a way of catching the students when they come back. According to Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, returning students join a youth club of former participants and help the next year’s students prepare. Those who were sent, send the next. A friendship that lasts 60 years usually runs on quiet loops like this.

The tie has also meant help in hard times. The same ministry document records that when a major wildfire struck San Bernardino County in 2003, the Tachikawa committee raised donations, and that after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, the San Bernardino committee led a donation drive in return. In 2019 the Tachikawa committee was among the winners of the ministry’s 13th awards for international exchange by local communities.

The San Bernardino committee has always raised its own money. The 2014 meeting report lists an annual golf tournament, a rummage sale, car washes and firework sales. An American teenager washes a car, and a Japanese teenager eats breakfast in an American kitchen. International exchange, up close, is made of things like that.

So what became of those 200 or so San Kids? One of them ended up somewhere quite surprising.

A quiz for the curious traveller

One Tachikawa student sent to San Bernardino in 1971 was later elected head of an international institution. Which one?

1. NASA
2. The International Court of Justice
3. The International Olympic Committee