Tachikawa Air Raids: WWII History and a Memorial Walk Guide

Building clearance, and a move with one handcart

The air raids changed people’s lives even before they came.

According to the ministry’s record, the Air Defence Act came into force in April 1937, and air-defence drills and blackouts changed everyday life. In the official gazette of 22 July 1944, districts in Tachikawa were designated for tatemono sokai — building clearance. According to the Mainichi Shimbun of 29 July, more than 400 houses were affected; according to the Asahi Shimbun of 18 August, there were three areas in total: two (21,100 tsubo — about 7 hectares) connected with the defence of military facilities, and one (6,100 tsubo — about 2 hectares) for widening the road at Tachikawa Station to ease traffic. The demolition, aided by mobilized students and an evacuation labour corps, was finished by 9 September.

Building clearance meant tearing down the houses in designated areas in advance to stop fire from spreading in an air raid. The ministry’s record explains that evacuation (sokai) meant not only moving people, as with the evacuation of schoolchildren, but also moving things and facilities. What was done in Tachikawa was an evacuation that cut away the town itself.

The lives on the side of those whose houses were torn down remain in the city’s War Experiences. Someone who lived in Akebono-cho writes that forced evacuation changed their life greatly. They were separated from close friends, and their parents were consumed with house-hunting and moving. With a single borrowed handcart, they moved from Akebono-cho to Takamatsu-cho. What they cannot forget, they write, is that they were caught in an air raid there. The flares made it as bright as day outside, and the sound of the bombs sank into the pit of the stomach. The family huddled under futons in the shelter, bracing their legs.

Tear down houses to stop fire. The families who had lived in them pulled handcarts to another district, and were bombed again there. Evacuation did not always carry people to a safe place.

Volume 6 of Tachikawa Monogatari introduces two maps from the last days of the war: an “Evacuation Plan Map” and a “General Map of Tachikawa City” with public refuges marked on it. The first records Tachikawa Aircraft’s dispersal plan; the second, the public refuges the city prepared for air raids. The factory drew its escape routes on paper, and so did the town.

That the North Exit station plaza and North Exit Avenue were built on the land of this clearance, I wrote at the beginning. The place where we wait for the bus was once someone’s home.

Burned records, and the records residents wrote

Here I want to return to the second question from the beginning. Who has passed on the memory of that night?

Volume 2 of Tachikawa Monogatari carries a piece by a resident involved in compiling the city’s history. Before the war, army aviation institutions and factories gathered around Tachikawa Airfield, and Tachikawa was called a “military capital.” But right after the defeat, the military ordered its documents burned, and almost no military records survive, the writer says.

In a town where the official records were burned, it was residents who left a record.

The Tachikawa City Library’s research guide, “Researching the Tachikawa Air Raids,” begins with one series. Tachikawa Kushu no Kiroku (Record of the Tachikawa Air Raids), volumes 1–4 (1972–1986), compiled by the Tachikawa literary circle, and a revised new edition rewritten with new manuscripts added, Kono Kanashimi o Kurikaesanai: Tachikawa Kushu no Kiroku (We Will Not Repeat This Sorrow: Record of the Tachikawa Air Raids), volumes 1–3 (Keyaki Shuppan, 1982). It gathers the accounts of residents who lived through the raids, district by district: volume 1, the Yamanakazaka shelter and Fujimi-cho and Shibasaki-cho; volume 2, Sunagawa village; volume 3, Takamatsu-cho, Akebono-cho, Hagoromo-cho, Nishiki-cho and the raids on Tachikawa Airfield. The library guide calls the three volumes substantial and valuable sources. A literary circle edited the record of the air raids district by district. This town’s memory was protected first by the hands of people who write.

The same guide lists other leads. Tachikawa no Tatemono Sokai no Kiroku (Record of Building Clearance in Tachikawa, 1996), compiled by the city board of education, examines building clearance through newspaper articles and interviews with residents, and includes a layout of buildings around Tachikawa Station in the early Showa period. The fifty-year history of Tachikawa Hospital describes the damage the hospital suffered; the centennial book of No. 9 Elementary School describes the raids on the Nishisuna area. There is also an oral-history collection, “Tachikawa Airfield and the Women,” gathered from women who knew those times.

The listening went on. According to the same resident’s piece in Volume 2 of Tachikawa Monogatari, from 1995 the writer joined a “study group on Tachikawa Airfield” at the Central Community Center, listened to many people involved, and compiled volumes 1 and 2 of Showa Kinen Koen wa Hikojo Datta (Showa Kinen Park Was an Airfield). They filmed the accounts of air-raid survivors on video and screened them as part of the City of Tachikawa’s peace programme for the 70th year after the war, so that many residents could see them. They write that they learned that listening is as important as documents as a way of knowing history.

Shibasaki no Kosho Bungei (Oral Literature of Shibasaki), a research report of the city’s history-compilation project, collects about 120 stories heard from people in Fujimi-cho, Shibasaki-cho, Nishiki-cho and Takamatsu-cho, in the local way of speaking. Alongside stories of will-o’-the-wisps and of being tricked by foxes, it is said to include accounts of fleeing through the raids as small children. Folk tales and memories of the air raids, side by side in one book. That, I think, is the ordinary shape of memory in this town.

And as the 25th anniversary of its 1992 Declaration as a City of Peace approached, the City of Tachikawa gathered the war experiences of more than fifty people into War Experiences. Many of the passages quoted in this article come from it. It can be read in the city libraries and is also published on the city’s website.

Memorials and remembrance: a Jizo, a Kannon, and the statue of a woman

At Yamanakazaka there is now a small shrine. According to the ministry’s record, at the site of the disaster the bereaved families built a Sensai Kuyo Jizo-son — a statue of Jizo, the bodhisattva who watches over children and travellers, to console the spirits of the war dead. On 2 April 1995, a monument was also erected bearing “Yamanakazaka Hika” (Elegy of Yamanakazaka), a song that lyrically tells the tragedy of Yamanakazaka. The city’s walking-route guide writes that flowers, fruit and incense are still offered there, and the prayer that such a terrible war must never be repeated continues. The monument beside the little shrine, it is said, sings “we will not repeat that sorrow.” The same words as the title of the record the residents compiled.

At Fusai-ji Temple (普済寺) in Shibasaki-cho there are two more monuments listed in the ministry’s record. One is a Peace Kannon (a statue of the bodhisattva of compassion), erected in 1964 by the then head priest to console the souls of the war dead and air-raid victims across Japan and of his comrades killed in Okinawa. The other is a memorial to the victims of war damage, erected in the spring of 1975 at the place where victims of the 4 April raid whom no one came to claim are said to have been buried. There were people whom no one came to claim. I cannot find the right words for the weight of that one line.

Memorial as a city has slowly taken shape too. According to the city chronology, the first memorial ceremony for the war dead and air-raid victims was held in 1983. The Declaration as a City of Peace came in 1992. On 15 August 1995, to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, the peace memorial statue Ohanashi (“Talking”), a work by Hiroyuki Mogi, was placed in the fountain in front of the entrance to the then city hall. When the city offices moved in 2010, the statue was moved to the west side of the new city hall. Behind it stand a monument with the Declaration as a City of Peace and one with the Tachikawa Citizens’ Charter of 1982. The city describes the statue of a woman standing quietly in a corner of the government building as a symbol of residents’ prayers for lasting world peace.

On 18 December 2025, eighty years after the war, Tachikawa declared itself a “City of Peace for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons.” The declaration begins by saying that Tachikawa, which once held an airfield and many other military facilities and has a history of war damage and requisition, has now, eighty years after the war, developed into a town of peace and culture where diverse people come together. A programme sending student representatives from the city’s junior high schools to Hiroshima, the city struck by the atomic bomb, continues too; in fiscal 2025, nine students visited Hiroshima for three days and two nights, and after returning presented what they learned at the Tachikawa Education Forum.

Those who pass the memory on change a little every year. The five-year-old who remembered the night at Yamanakazaka was 76 when the account was written. On the receiving side of that memory, there are now junior-high students.

In a town that began from the ashes, answering the Yamanakazaka question

On 15 August, the war ended. According to the ministry’s record, the US military arrived in September, Tachikawa Airfield was requisitioned and became a US base, and Tachikawa took its first steps after the war as a “base town.” Street stalls and black markets in tents lined the North Exit.

The city’s War Experiences also holds a memory, from someone who entered a new junior high school after the war, that allows a small smile. That person, from Akebono-cho, was in the first class of Tachikawa No. 2 Junior High School. The school was a converted stable from an old army barracks, and until it was ready, the pupils were “lodgers” at No. 2 Elementary School. Their teacher used to say, “Walk quietly. You mustn’t cause trouble for the elementary-school teachers. We’re lodgers here, you know.” Classrooms in a stable, corridors as lodgers. That is how the children of a burned-out town began to walk into the next era.

Traces of the war lingered long in the places people lived. According to Volume 3 of Tachikawa Monogatari, the “Takamatsu Housing,” built in 1943 as dormitories for Tachikawa Aircraft workers, was an estate of 480 single-storey two-family houses. Although it stood in Sunagawa village, it was called “Takamatsu,” a Tachikawa City place name, which gave the false impression that it belonged to Tachikawa; it was later renamed “Nanbu Housing,” meaning the southern part of Sunagawa village. Rows of houses built for a factory became, after the war, places where the town lived.

Photos of the North Exit in the base era also survive in the city-history newsletter. In one introduced in Volume 15, looking northwest from around today’s Akebono-cho 2-chome intersection, a row of trees forms the boundary between the base and the town, and around it are signs ranging from advertisements for the popular products of the day to English-language signs apparently aimed at US servicemen. A souvenir shop for foreigners, with the words “Souvenir Store,” can also be seen. The cover of the first issue shows the North Exit around 1965. People and cars pass along North Exit Avenue, there are amusement rides on the roof of the Chubu department store, and across the street, at the time, was Isetan.

Then: the North Exit station front, built on the land of the building clearance, overflowed with people and cars, and English signs lined up beside the trees on the edge of the base. Now: a deck spans the station front, and queues of people wait for buses beneath it.

From burned ground, to rides on a department-store roof, to the deck. The width of the North Exit has been built from three eras laid one on top of another.

Now, the question from the beginning. Why Yamanakazaka?

What the US military was aiming for was No. 792, Tachikawa Aircraft. Yamanakazaka was a shelter dug for city-hall documents, two kilometres from that target. The light of the flares, the Chuo Line bridge, a stray bomb. Several reasons are put forward, but all remain theories. The only certainty is that a night-time “precision bombing” aimed at a factory took 42 lives on a slope two kilometres away. In the words of Tachikawa Monogatari, it was in effect indiscriminate bombing.

The town called a military capital was targeted for its military facilities. But most of the people who died were outside the factories, people who had fled into shelters with their families. And after the military’s records were burned, those who wrote these people down were a literary circle, a community-center study group, and the accounts of more than fifty residents.

The memory of the Tachikawa air raids has been kept not by the state but by the people of the town. That, I believe, is something this town can be proud of.

At the beginning of April, along the Nekawa below the terrace, the cherry trees will bloom again this year.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B). According to the ministry’s record and the City of Tachikawa’s walking-route guide, the Yamanakazaka shelter was originally dug to evacuate important city-hall documents (official records). After it fell out of use, local people came to use it as an air-raid shelter every time the sirens sounded.

Before you go

• Yamanakazaka Jizo Hall (山中坂地蔵堂; the war-victims’ memorial Jizo and the “Yamanakazaka Hika” monument): Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa. The ministry’s record gives its location as Fujimi-cho 5-chome and says the slope is in Fujimi-cho 4-chome. The City of Tachikawa’s walking route “Walking the Old Villages” starts from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station and takes in Suwa Shrine, Fusai-ji Temple, Yamanakazaka Jizo Hall and the Museum of History and Folklore: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004848/1004889.html The Jizo hall is still a place where people pray, so please visit quietly and respectfully.
• Fusai-ji Temple (the Peace Kannon and the memorial to war-damage victims): Shibasaki-cho 4-chome, Tachikawa. About 700 m west of Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail (according to Tachikawa Monogatari). Please check with the temple about visiting its grounds; it is an active place of worship.
• Tachikawa Museum of History and Folklore (立川市歴史民俗資料館): 3-12-34 Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa. Open 9:00 to 16:30; closed Mondays (the following day if Monday is a national holiday or substitute holiday) and over the New Year period (according to the city). Check the latest on the official page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisetsu/1008065/1008098.html
• Peace memorial statue Ohanashi: On the west side of Tachikawa City Hall (1156-9 Izumi-cho, Tachikawa). Behind the statue are the monuments of the Declaration as a City of Peace and the Citizens’ Charter. The city’s introduction: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/heiwa/1007076/1020469.html
• To read the records (all in Japanese): The city’s War Experiences can be read on the city website and in the city libraries: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/heiwa/1007076/1007092.html The ministry’s “State of War Damage in Tachikawa City”: https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/daijinkanbou/sensai/situation/state/kanto_21.html The Tachikawa City Library’s research guide “Researching the Tachikawa Air Raids”: https://www.library.tachikawa.tokyo.jp/images/upload/tachishira02_202007.pdf
• From central Tokyo and Kanagawa: Tachikawa Station is a single ride from Shinjuku on the JR Chuo Line. From Kanagawa, the JR Nambu Line links Kawasaki and Tachikawa stations with no change of trains.
• Time needed: I could not find an officially stated walking time. Yamanakazaka, Fusai-ji and the museum all lie south of Tachikawa Station, on and below the terrace that drops toward the Tama River, and can be visited on the one “Walking the Old Villages” route.
• Combine with: The same walking route includes Suwa Shrine, the guardian shrine of old Shibasaki village (the route walked in this series’ piece on Fusai-ji and Suwa Shrine). The green path along the Nekawa below the terrace becomes an avenue of cherry blossoms in spring (the route walked in the series’ piece on the Nekawa and the Tama River).
• General tips: Carry an IC transit card such as Suica or PASMO for trains, the monorail and buses. Check opening days on the official sites before you go; a browser’s translate function helps with Japanese pages.

Up the slope, to the North Exit

The way back from Yamanakazaka to Tachikawa Station is also a climb up the terrace. Pass through the South Exit and out of the North Exit, and you are in the plaza I wrote of at the beginning, built on the land of the building clearance.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the 3rd floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, Tokyo, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a hot yoga studio laid with lava-stone plates. It also offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lessons.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30.

A trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 (tax included), with two bath towels, one face towel and a mat to rent included. Pregnant guests cannot join the lava-stone hot yoga, but room-temperature maternity yoga is available. Many of our yoga instructors speak English, and the studio’s owner, Naomi Fujita, who holds Japan’s top English qualification (Eiken Grade 1) and a perfect TOEIC score and once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and who lived in Alaska for three years, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself (visitors from abroad have even left Google reviews about the care they received in English); if you would like an English-friendly lesson, just say so when you book.

• On the Shore: https://ontheshore.jp/
• Book a trial lesson: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

On the evening of a day spent walking the slope, the sky over the North Exit simply, quietly, grows dark.

Cover photo: The former Hitachi Aircraft Tachikawa plant substation, scarred by air-raid bullet holes, in Higashiyamato-Minami Park, Higashiyamato (not in Tachikawa) (Photo: Suikotei / CC BY 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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