Tachikawa Air Base History Walk: The Sunagawa Struggle and After

The story of the US Tachikawa Air Base and the Sunagawa Struggle, from the 1955 expansion notice to the 1977 return, and what the town did with the land.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Fifty years ago, the ground under the feet of shoppers carrying department-store bags out of the North Exit of Tachikawa Station was on the inside of a wire fence.

That fence never moved north. A plan arose to extend the runway northward; the town split in two; the courts took the case all the way to the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court. And still the base never grew, and in the end it vanished altogether.

Tachikawa (立川), a city in the west of Tokyo, is sometimes called a plain sort of place. Handy station, people say, but no history worth telling. Yet buried in this town’s ground is one of the questions post-war Japan argued over most loudly. Why did lengthening a runway turn into a question about the constitution? Why did a base that never expanded disappear? And what did the town do with the land when it came back? With those three questions, I open Tachikawa’s old chronologies.

A note for visitors: after the Second World War, US forces occupied Japan and kept bases here under the security treaty between the two countries. Tachikawa held one of the most important of them, and its story runs through the whole city.

The history of Tachikawa Air Base begins with flat mulberry fields

“The History of Tachikawa Airfield,” an explanatory text from the Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore, gives four reasons why an airfield was built here. It was close to the capital, Tokyo. There was wide, flat land without houses. There was a railway. And the weather was favourable.

Put the second reason another way and it means: there was nothing here. Tachikawa’s rise in the world began when someone spotted that it had nothing. That is plainness of the most dependable kind.

Construction was decided in the autumn of 1921, and in November 1922 the army’s 5th Air Battalion arrived. In July 1929, Japan’s first scheduled civilian passenger service began between Tachikawa and Osaka. The city’s chronology records that in 1937 the Asahi Shimbun’s Kamikaze-go left Tachikawa Airfield and flew to London, setting a world record for flying time. It was the era when Tachikawa was called the “capital of the sky.” The airfield’s own story I leave to other articles in this series. What I want to follow here is what came after.

For 1945, the city’s chronology is brief. Tachikawa City suffered 13 air raids and heavy damage. The Pacific War ends. The US military arrives. In September, US forces entered Tachikawa Airfield. For the 32 years from then until 1977, Tachikawa was a US base town.

How did the townspeople live through those 32 years?

English signboards, and a school 200 metres from the runway

“The History of Tachikawa Airfield” gives just one line to the town after the war: shops catering to American soldiers, with English signboards, became a common sight all over town. The photograph beside it is captioned “Shops with English signs (along the Midorikawa).” The Midorikawa was a drainage channel dug to carry away rainwater north of the station; according to the city chronology, it first carried water in 1947 and was named Midorikawa in 1949. Today it runs underground, and survives in the name of a street.

The city’s history newsletter “Tachikawa Monogatari” (Tachikawa Stories) prints photographs with a little more texture. The crossroads at Akebonocho 2-chome, around 1952: the crossroads faced by the main gate of US Tachikawa Air Base, lined with signs aimed at GIs. Souvenir shops for foreigners, with signs reading “Souvenir Store,” spread beyond the North Exit and across the tracks to the South Exit. Shortly after the war ended, the US military even sent a notice through the police to the surrounding villages, asking that any empty Coca-Cola bottles people found be returned. In an age when nobody yet knew what Coke was, the notice came with a hand-drawn picture of the bottle. Whoever at the village office copied the bottle’s shape onto the mimeograph stencil probably had no idea what drink it held either.

Back then, beyond the Akebonocho 2-chome crossroads lay the main gate of the base, and English signboards called in customers. Today the site of that gate is a small square called “Ikoi no Ba,” which welcomes people like a front entrance to Faret Tachikawa, the public-art district. The shops with English signs that served American soldiers, and the soldiers who shopped there, are gone. But the North Exit’s line of trade, making a living by looking after whoever comes, carries on around the same crossroads today.

The base was also the town’s largest employer. An essay on urban history on a housing-information website, citing sources including “A Hundred Years of Tokyo,” says that about 20,000 Japanese people worked at US bases around Tachikawa, about 12,000 of them at Tachikawa Air Base, more than the total number of employees in the city. Paid on the inside of the fence, living on the outside. A large share of the town’s earnings lay beyond the wire.

When the Korean War began in 1950, Tachikawa Air Base became a hub of US military transport, and the base town prospered from business with American servicemen. At the same time, noise and incidents involving US personnel became the town’s headaches. Boom and noise arrived on the same runway, on the same flights.

Even so, there were days when each side tried to meet the other halfway. According to a local history compiled by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, around 1959 and 1960 events were held opening the base to the public, aimed at friendship between the US military and residents. Families walked into the fenced area they normally could not enter. A few days a year when the fence got a little lower.

To the north of the base, in Sunagawa Village, which was not yet part of Tachikawa City, a new school opened after the war. Under 1947, the city chronology lists the opening of Sunagawa Village Sunagawa Junior High School (now the city’s Fourth Junior High School). According to the summary of a doctoral thesis submitted to Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, this school stood 200 metres from the runway, and its pupils were troubled by the roar of aircraft even before any talk of expansion.

When a transport plane passed overhead during class, the teacher’s voice would have broken off, and everyone in front of the blackboard could only wait. A classroom where the sky outside the window rewrote the timetable as it pleased.

The pupils of this school would later put the town’s great upheaval into writing.

4 May 1955: the expansion notice reaches Sunagawa

According to a chronology compiled on Wikipedia, in March 1955 US Forces Japan asked the Japanese government to expand five airfields: Komaki, Yokota, Tachikawa, Kisarazu and Niigata. On 4 May, the head of the Tachikawa office of the Tokyo Procurement Bureau notified Denzaemon Miyazaki, mayor of Sunagawa Town, that Tachikawa Air Base would be expanded. Tachikawa City’s chronology and material from the Tachikawa City Library treat May 1955 as the start of the Sunagawa Struggle (Sunagawa Toso).

The plan was to extend the runway north. In the extension’s path lay the fields and houses of Sunagawa Town, a village cleared in long, narrow strips since the Edo period (1603–1868), along the Tamagawa Aqueduct and the Itsukaichi Kaido road.

On 12 May the Sunagawa Town Assembly passed a resolution opposing the expansion. According to the Tachikawa City Library material, the Sunagawa Struggle was a residents’ movement against the plan to expand US Tachikawa Air Base, lasting from 1955 into the 1960s. It began with local farmers and grew as labour unions, students and intellectuals from across Japan joined in support.

The movement is known for one line: “They may drive stakes into our land, but they cannot drive stakes into our hearts.” The stakes hammered in for surveying, and the hearts they could not reach.

Still, the town did not speak with one voice. That autumn, a group within the town assembly is said to have emerged that sought conditions, such as compensation or putting the runway underground. There were people who would not give up one step of the fields handed down by their ancestors, and people who would listen depending on the terms. Both were talking about the same town and the same fields.

Surveying began in the autumn of 1955, and each time protesters clashed with police units. The biggest clash came in October 1956; the thesis summary describes it as an event that left more than 1,000 people injured and became known as “Bloody Sunagawa.” Shortly afterwards, the government announced that surveying would stop.

Tachikawa Air Base and the Sunagawa Struggle by the numbers

• 4: the reasons Tachikawa was chosen for an airfield. One of them was “nothing here.”
• 13: air raids on Tachikawa City in 1945. The base’s story begins in the ashes.
• 200: metres between Sunagawa Junior High School and the runway. Lessons were sometimes interrupted by the roar.
• 7: people indicted over the 1957 incident. The trial of these seven moved the interpretation of the constitution.
• 52: pages in the court’s published version of the Supreme Court judgment in the Sunagawa case. A document about entering a few metres onto a base.
• 32: years from the arrival of US forces to the full return. From 1945 to 1977.

The people who gathered at Sunagawa, each at their post

At the heart of the struggle were the farmers who owned land in the expansion zone. According to the thesis summary, Ichigoro Aoki, leader of the opposition league’s action corps, appeared twice before Diet committees as a representative of local farmers to petition against the plan. The thesis argues that his words rested on three base-related experiences farmers shared from wartime through the occupation, which shaped a mentality of “non-compliance,” and that as the movement went on, a new rationale emerged: passing the land on to the next generation.

The deputy leader of the action corps, Masao Miyaoka, later wrote “A Record of the Sunagawa Struggle.” The Tachikawa City Library’s research guide introduces the author as one of the landowners in the expansion zone and a central figure in the struggle, and notes that the book includes a sketch map of the planned expansion area and a chronology.

The women of the town had their posts too. Chiyo Sunagawa, author of “Sunagawa: My Post-war History,” which the library guide lists, was head of the local women’s association, served on Sunagawa Town’s board of education and later became its superintendent of education. Some people sat in the line of the sit-in; others sat at a desk in the town office thinking about the education of the town’s children.

People came from outside as well. The historian Shin’ichi Takahashi went to Sunagawa as a correspondent for the magazine “Sekai” to cover the forced surveying, and afterwards formed, with Ikutaro Shimizu and others, a council of cultural figures on the base issue. Volunteers from this group wrote “They Cannot Drive Stakes into Our Hearts,” published in 1957. The thesis summary contains one striking episode. A delegate from India, in Japan for the World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, made a point of not visiting Sunagawa precisely because he respected the movement. Support is not only about marching in. Faced with that restraint, Takahashi was taken aback.

There were photographers too. According to the thesis summary, while many photographs captured the violence of the clashes, Kakuo Shinkai and Kiyoshi Mukai focused on the faces of women sitting in during the “time of waiting.” A clash lasts a moment; waiting lasts a long time. Most of the movement was, in fact, made of waiting. Mukai, it is said, was arrested at the scene of a clash and so missed the decisive moment. That one line says a good deal about how precarious it is to walk into such a scene with a camera.

There were farmers, town officials, intellectuals, photographers, and on the other side, police officers standing there because they had been ordered to. All their lives overlapped in a town called Sunagawa.

So how did that town’s children see this time?

The Sunagawa Struggle in the classroom: the essay collection “Sunagawa”

In its guide “Researching Tachikawa,” the Tachikawa City Library introduces sources on the Sunagawa Struggle. Among them is “Bunshu Sunagawa,” a collection of essays by the junior-high pupils of the time, compiled between 1955 and 1957 by the “Bases and Education” study circle of the teachers’ union branch at Sunagawa Junior High. The library guide says the collection conveys the atmosphere of a town split between supporters and opponents of the expansion, and what the daily roar of aircraft was like.

The thesis summary goes a step further. Through the essays, the teachers learned that in the classroom, children from families who opposed the plan outright and children from families seeking conditions were at odds and hostile to each other. And they found that the children of police officers were carrying wounds.

At that line I could not read on for a while. On surveying days, there were people sitting in front of the fields and people standing facing them. Both had children, and the next morning those children sat side by side at the same desks in the same classroom. People who appear in history books as two camps were, in the classroom, simply the kid at the next desk.

The thesis summary also says that the collections came out between the forced surveying in the summer of 1955 and the autumn of 1956, and that the pupils’ concerns changed as the movement unfolded. Essays that began as complaints about the noise came to include words such as “wish” and “pray.” The children were not watching the adults’ quarrel from outside. They were inside it, looking for words of their own.

The teachers had a bitter experience of their own. The circle’s teachers reported this work at a national education research conference as representatives of North Tama and Tokyo, but were criticised on the grounds that the collection stayed at the level of “feeling” and did not reach “theory.” Essays that were told feeling was not enough have become, more than half a century later, the surest guide to the town as it was. Theory dates. Feeling does not.

The essays do not judge who was right. Instead of judging, teenagers wrote down what they saw, the roar they heard, and the words exchanged at home, just as they were. As a record of a town split for and against, there is probably no other source with so little bias.

The Tachikawa City Library holds a reproduction of the collection. The adults of that town would before long be called into court.