Tachikawa Base Town History: Cola Bottles, Yuming, the Laundry Gate

Tachikawa Air Base, the great crossroads of the Far East

When thinking about base-town culture, one thing must not be forgotten. Tachikawa Air Base was not just a garrison. It was a place where people and goods gathered from all over the world and scattered all over the world.

Issue 21’s feature says that throughout its existence Tachikawa Air Base hosted units whose main mission was transport and supply, and that it was a hub for the US Military Air Transport Service, MATS. From 1956 in particular, military transport previously handled at Haneda Airport was also received at the terminal at Tachikawa Air Base, and a great many people and goods passed through. According to the encyclopaedia’s entry on Tachikawa Airfield, at its peak there were on average about 2,300 take-offs and landings a month, and about 20,000 people flown each month.

Two photographs in the feature are hard to stop looking at. One shows Daniel K. Inouye, the first Japanese American elected to the US Congress, apparently arriving at Tachikawa Air Base in December 1959. The other, from November of the same year, is titled “SAYONARA”: a boarding stair used by MATS, decorated with a torii, the gate that marks the entrance to a Shinto shrine. The letters MATS are visible on the side of the aircraft and of the stairs.

Pass through a torii, board a plane, and say goodbye to Japan. I do not know who came up with it, but it was bold staging. Tachikawa’s front door to the sky came fitted with the entrance to a shrine.

A few sports stories passed in and out through this front door too.

According to the encyclopaedia, Leo Kiely, the first active major-leaguer to play professional baseball in Japan, pitched for the Mainichi Orions in 1953 while in Japan on military service, and won his first six starts. But when the Korean War armistice brought discharge orders, he was sent home by air from Tachikawa Air Base on 3 September, leaving without time to say goodbye to his teammates. A short legend of Japanese professional baseball ended on the Tachikawa runway.

Going the other way, someone climbed from the Tachikawa base to the top in Japan. George Carter was an American serviceman assigned to Tachikawa Air Base. He made his professional boxing debut in 1961 and, boxing with the advantage of his height, was affectionately known as “Daddy-Long-Legs.” On 5 February 1970 he took the Japanese junior middleweight title from Koichi Wajima on a decision, and the next year took the middleweight title too, becoming a two-weight Japanese champion. A soldier from the base left his name in the history of Japanese boxing. There cannot be many champions known by the nickname “Daddy-Long-Legs.”

In 1968, the encyclopaedia says, Dick DeSa, a former pitcher for the Kintetsu Buffaloes among other teams, came back to Japan, joined the staff of the Tachikawa Air Base recreation centre and managed the base’s baseball team, “Tachikawa AIO.” The base had its own league, and its own managers.

One more name is on record. The actress Cathy Horan came to Japan in 1964 when her father, a US Air Force flight engineer, was transferred to Tachikawa Air Base. She worked in Japan as a model and began acting. From 1967 to 1969 she wrote a column for “The Airlifter,” the monthly magazine of the 315th Air Division, and received piles of fan letters from soldiers serving in the Vietnam War.

The base was a rear area of war: of the Korean War, and then of the Vietnam War. In the town behind those lines there was a baseball manager, a boxer, a young woman writing a column. Lives that never appear in the chronologies of history were certainly being lived inside the fence too.

The gate Yuming sang, and the rain at Nishi-Tachikawa

Back to the bus stop at the start.

According to the encyclopaedia’s entry on “Benisuzume,” “LAUNDRY-GATE no Omoide” is a song recalling memories of a former friend. Its title is one of the real gates of US Tachikawa Air Base, and the name “Laundry Gate” survived as the name of a Tachikawa Bus stop until the autumn of 1998. The stop’s current name is “Fujimi-dori.”

Why laundry? In the encyclopaedia’s entry on Tachikawa Airfield, under 1971, as the base was being scaled down, the closure of the “laundry,” a laundry plant, is mentioned. Inside the base there was a large laundry plant that washed soldiers’ clothes. The gate’s name probably came from it. But that is my guess; I could not find a record linking the gate to the plant.

Either way, the name of a laundry plant’s gate stayed on a Japanese bus stop for twenty-one years after the base was returned, and became the title of a Japanese pop song that is still sung. The laundry gate turned out to be unexpectedly durable. Perhaps well-washed cloth just lasts.

The same songwriter has another song about a Tachikawa station. “Ame no Station” (“Rainy Station”) is on her 1975 album “COBALT HOUR.” According to the encyclopaedia, the “station” is Nishi-Tachikawa Station on the JR Ome Line, and she revealed in her book “Rouge no Dengon” that she pictured a soft, steady rain. A monument to the song was later put up, and from 2006 until 19 January 2026 the song was used as the station’s departure melody, the short tune Japanese stations play before a train leaves.

Leave Nishi-Tachikawa Station by the Park Exit and Showa Kinen Park (the national Showa Memorial Park) is right in front of you. That land was once part of Tachikawa Air Base. There was a time when, beyond the rainy station, the base spread out. The departure melody retired this January, but stand at the station on a rainy day and the scene of that song is, I think, still there.

Light and shadow: how the town tried to protect its children

The culture of the base town cannot be closed with happy stories alone.

When compilation of the new city history began, issue 2 of the newsletter carried this sentence, in substance: after the war a US base was placed in Tachikawa, and many women lived here who, as depicted in Seicho Matsumoto’s novel “Zero Focus,” had to take work with American soldiers in order to survive; records should be kept without turning away from this dark side of Tachikawa.

The encyclopaedia’s entry on “Zero Focus” says the idea for the novel grew when Seicho Matsumoto, then living in Kami-Shakujii, met at a nearby diner a woman who seemed to have lived by dealing with American soldiers in the Tachikawa base town, and found himself wondering what became of such women. One of the defining works of post-war Japanese crime fiction was born from imagining the nameless people of Tachikawa’s base town.

The local history compiled by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty says that in the Korean War years, as Tachikawa Air Base became the US military’s largest transport base in the Far East, business with American soldiers brought a boom, while violence by soldiers against residents and aircraft noise became problems. Prosperity and fear came out of the same gate.

There is a record of what the townspeople did amid all this. When the folklore and local-geography section of the city history project collected oral accounts in the neighbourhood association of Fujimicho 1-chome, it emerged that Fujizuka Park is where, after the Second World War, the neighbourhood association took the lead in building a children’s hall to protect young people from the decline in public morals that came with the US military presence. The adults built a place for the base town’s children with their own hands. Issue 8 of the newsletter says the park is still the base for the association’s activities.

The base moved the gods’ homes too. According to the city’s walking-course guide, Kumano Shrine in Takamatsucho originally stood where Tachihi Kigyo’s south gate is now, but was burned in an air raid in 1945 and moved to its present site. The encyclopaedia says the shrine’s grounds were requisitioned by the occupying forces in 1946. The Suitengu shrine within the grounds of Azusami Tenjinja in Sunagawa originally stood in Sunagawa Goban, but in 1961, the encyclopaedia reports, it was merged into Azusami Tenjinja because of the expansion of US Tachikawa Air Base. Even the gods were forced to move house for the base’s convenience.

Coke bottles and Christmas presents, a children’s hall built to protect the young, and gods made to move. The culture of the base town is made of all of it. Pick out just one piece to be nostalgic about, and it will probably turn into a lie.

Where did the base town’s culture go?

Back to the first question. Why is the culture of the base town so hard to see?

Half the answer is that the base itself vanished so cleanly. According to issue 15 of the newsletter, apart from part of the land returned to private owners, almost all of Tachikawa Air Base’s facilities were demolished as the former base land was developed. The wind-tunnel cinema and the laundry plant are gone. On the block where the main gate stood, a square called “Ikoi no Ba” was built for the city’s 50th anniversary, and it now serves as a kind of front entrance to Faret Tachikawa, the public-art district. The land inside the fence became a park, a disaster-prevention base, a city hall.

Let me set then and now side by side. Then: the Akebonocho 2-chome crossroads was lined with English signs for American soldiers; beyond the crossroads was the gate, and in the sky behind it transport planes came and went. In the 1960s, the Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty local history says, ten cinemas lined the streets, among them “Cinema Tachikawa,” “Tachikawa Central,” “Tachikawa Shochiku” and “Tachikawa Chuo” by the North Exit, and “Tachikawa Meigaza,” “Tachikawa Nikkatsu,” “Tachikawa Daiei,” “Toei Tachikawa Minamiza” and “Tachikawa Toho” by the South Exit, and the town was called “the movie town.” Reading those names, some will think: yes, I remember. Now: beside the same crossroads there is a square, and the Tama Monorail runs above Sun Sun Road, a broad pedestrian avenue built on the former base land. Issue 21 captions a 2025 photograph of Sun Sun Road as built by developing the former base land. The English on the signs is gone, but stand at the crossroads and look north, and the size of the sky, at least, is probably no different from back then.

The other half, I think, is that the culture had dissolved into the town from the beginning. Ham out of the pig feed. An English-named night patrol. Santa and a transport plane at the station. Gags learned on a camp stage. None of it stayed locked inside the base. It came out through the gates into the town and worked its way into people’s lives, their performances and their memories. Once it has worked its way in, it is no longer called base culture. It is simply Tachikawa culture.

And now the records are coming home from across the ocean. Since fiscal 2023, Tachikawa City has been gathering records held in the US National Archives. Issue 21 says that besides events inside the US base, the search sometimes turns up accounts of Japanese events not recorded in Japan’s own official documents. The photographs of Operation Seashore and of the torii boarding stair came back to Tachikawa this way. Part of the base town’s culture, more than half a century on, is finally returning home.

People in Tachikawa often say their town has no culture worth talking about. But here was a village office that drew a Coke bottle nobody had seen, by hand, to inform its villagers; a wind tunnel that showed westerns; nights when comedy that would later belong to the whole nation was sharpened in front of an audience that did not understand the language. If that is not culture, I do not know what to call culture.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), empty Coca-Cola bottles. According to issue 19 of “Tachikawa Monogatari,” the city’s history newsletter, in 1945 the US military sent a notice through the Tachikawa police station to surrounding municipalities telling anyone who found an empty Coke bottle to return it to the US forces. In an age when Coke was still unfamiliar, notices such as the Sunagawa Village office’s included a hand-drawn bottle.

Before you go

• Getting to Tachikawa: from Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line to Tachikawa Station with no change. Check timetables and journey times on the JR East website. An IC card such as Suica or PASMO covers JR, the Ome Line and the Tama Monorail.
• Ikoi no Ba (site of the former main gate of Tachikawa Air Base): head north from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station; it is beside the Akebonocho 2-chome crossroads. This block was once the main gate of the army’s 5th Air Regiment and later the main gate of US Tachikawa Air Base; the square was created in 1990 for the city’s 50th anniversary. Combine it with a walk around the Faret Tachikawa artworks (see this series’ article on Faret Tachikawa).
• Sakae Ryokuchi (the route of the base’s railway spur): a footpath on the route of the freight spur that linked Tachikawa Station with the east side of the airfield. It is included, with Kumano Shrine and the site of the 5th Air Regiment’s main gate, in the city’s walking course “Walking the Modern Era.” Course map: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004848/1004891.html
• Nishi-Tachikawa Station (the station of “Ame no Station”): one stop from Tachikawa on the JR Ome Line. Leave by the Park Exit and an entrance to Showa Kinen Park is right there. Combined with this series’ article on Showa Kinen Park, it makes a half-day outing.
• Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore: 3-12-34 Fujimicho, Tachikawa. Besides the permanent exhibition, it hands out the guide “The History of Tachikawa Airfield.” Admission is free. Check opening hours and closing days on the city’s facility page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004849/1004905.html
• Back issues of “Tachikawa Monogatari”: issues 19 (the Coke bottles), 20 (from base town to commercial city) and 21 (the US National Archives survey), quoted in this article, can be read on the city website (in Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1003076/1003087.html
• The history of the base and the Sunagawa Struggle themselves is covered in more detail in this series’ “Tachikawa Air Base History Walk,” and the changing face of the town at night in the article on Tachikawa’s night streets.

In Akebonocho 2-chome, where the base gate stood

The main gate of US Tachikawa Air Base faced the Akebonocho 2-chome crossroads. On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店) is in that same Akebonocho 2-chome, on the 3rd floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, Tokyo, a one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station: on the station side of a neighbourhood once lined with signs for American soldiers.

It is a lava-stone hot yoga studio. There are also room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lessons alone. Working up a sweat at boxercise in the town where a soldier from the base won Japanese boxing titles is not a bad connection.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30, so there is time to drop in after walking from Ikoi no Ba to Sakae Ryokuchi, or after a trip out to Nishi-Tachikawa.

The trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and mat rental included, so you can come with nothing but yourself. Pregnant guests cannot join 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

From the crossroads where the gate stood, walk a little way back towards the station. Thinking about where everything that flowed into the town from beyond the fence half a century ago ended up, climb to the third floor.

Cover photo: Tachikawa Airfield from the northern sky in 2023; the land around the runway was once the US base. (Photo: ブルーノ・プラス / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

More Tachikawa Walks

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• Tachikawa Autumn Leaves Guide: Ginkgo, Zelkova and Where to Walk
• Tachikawa Air Base History Walk: The Sunagawa Struggle and After
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All Tachikawa Walks (English)