Tachikawa Disaster Base and Life Safety Learning Center: A Guide

The spare brain: the Tachikawa Joint Government Building for Disaster Management

According to the Cabinet Office’s chronology, the reserve facility for the disaster headquarters was completed in two phases: the main building in September 1988, and the new annex in October 1998. In between, in January 1995, came the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that devastated Kobe.

The facility is inside the Tachikawa Joint Government Building for Disaster Management, which also houses the Kobu Building and Repair Office of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s Kanto Regional Development Bureau. That office’s web page introduces the building it occupies as the one that houses the Cabinet Office’s reserve facility for the disaster headquarters. A building and repair office is the agency that builds and repairs national government buildings. The office that looks after the nation’s buildings and the reserve for the nation’s command centre live under one roof.

The Cabinet Office explains the system most clearly. Depending on the scale of a disaster, the national government sets up an Extreme Disaster Management Headquarters under the Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act. When an extraordinarily severe disaster occurs, it sets up a Major Disaster Management Headquarters with the Prime Minister at its head and every Cabinet minister as a member. For an earthquake directly beneath the capital and similar events, a Cabinet understanding of 21 November 2003 decided the location, depending on the damage, in this order: first the Prime Minister’s Office, second the Cabinet Office, third the Ministry of Defense. If all of these are so badly damaged that the headquarters cannot operate, the government’s disaster headquarters is set up in the reserve facility in Tachikawa.

The 2001 White Paper on Disaster Management describes the arrangements concretely. The reserve facility is set up so that if the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and the central command post of what was then the Defense Agency are unusable because of an earthquake beneath the capital, the government’s emergency disaster headquarters can be quickly established and run. It is equipped so that about 500 summoned staff can work there for a week. On top of that, so that preparations can begin immediately when the headquarters is set up, staff are posted there 24 hours a day, holidays included.

The Cabinet Office’s 2010 material also describes what happens just after an earthquake strikes. First, the security guards stationed there around the clock inspect the facility. Then three more guards hurry in to inspect it and prepare to set up the headquarters. The first people to wake the nation’s spare brain are security guards. Until the ministers arrive from central Tokyo, the lights in this building are kept on by people whose names never appear anywhere. That sentence weighs more than any figure in the white papers.

Exercises have been held repeatedly. On 4 October 2017, the Cabinet Office ran an exercise around the base, assuming an earthquake directly beneath the capital, to prepare for setting up the disaster headquarters of the central government ministries. Twenty-two ministries and agencies took part. The scenario: at about 10:00 the previous day, 3 October, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3, with a maximum seismic intensity of 7 on the Japanese scale, struck with its epicentre in northern Tokyo Bay. Preparing for the functions of the Prime Minister’s Office to move to Tachikawa, set-up teams from each ministry travelled to substitute government buildings in Tachikawa, collected emergency-vehicle passes, and prepared to establish the headquarters. Besides the reserve facility, the exercise also used the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Tama Joint Government Building.

Many people may have seen this storyline in a film. In Shin Godzilla (2016), after central Tokyo is attacked, the government moves the functions of the Prime Minister’s Office to the disaster headquarters reserve facility in the Tachikawa base. Photo categories on Wikimedia Commons and other sources show that the real reserve facility was used for filming the scenes where the heroes regroup at their new headquarters. A fictional monster ran a test of the real scenario first. What taught many people where the capital’s spare brain is located was not a white paper but a monster.

At this point, something nags at me. I understand why the nation’s reserve command centre is on this base. But why are all the other agencies gathered here? Look at a map of the base and there is one name that makes you tilt your head.

The Coast Guard in a town without a sea

The Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Tachikawa is home to the Eastern Army Aviation Group, which operates helicopters. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Tama Joint Government Building houses the 8th District Headquarters, the 8th District Traffic Riot Police, the 8th District Patrol Unit, the 3rd Mobile Investigation Unit and the Tama Command Centre of the Communications Command Headquarters. There are also the police’s 4th Riot Police Unit, a general training centre and Tachikawa Police Station. Besides the Tachikawa Joint Government Building mentioned earlier, the Tokyo Fire Department has the Tama Aviation Center of its air unit and the 8th Fire District training centre. The Japanese Red Cross has its Tokyo West Red Cross Blood Center and the Tokyo Chapter’s disaster relief warehouse. Then the National Hospital Organization Disaster Medical Center. The Tokyo government’s Tachikawa Regional Disaster Prevention Center and Tama Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Warehouse. Housing for disaster staff.

And the Japan Coast Guard. The site plan lists its Japan Coast Guard Research Center. The 2010 material gives the area of maritime disaster facilities on the base as 3.52 hectares. Tachikawa has no sea. The nearest coast is a fair distance away. Even so, a facility of the agency that guards the seas sits on a plateau in the middle of the Tama area. A great disaster in the capital would hit Tokyo Bay too. It must be better to have the sea-side preparations next to the land-side command centre. I understand the logic. I understand it, and still, every time I spot the word “maritime” on a map of Tachikawa, I smile a little.

The Tokyo government’s facilities each have their own story. According to the “Basic Plan for New Disaster Prevention Bases in the Tama Area,” compiled by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in January 2026, the Tachikawa Regional Disaster Prevention Center was completed in January 1991. It consists of a disaster-prevention building with two basement floors and four above ground, and a residential building with one basement floor and ten above ground, where staff who are first to act in a disaster live. In a disaster, under the command of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s disaster prevention centre, it handles information gathering and liaison, stockpiling and transporting supplies, and securing personnel. Tokyo’s business continuity plan positions it as the substitute for the disaster prevention centre at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. A report on an inspection visit by the assembly of neighbouring Higashiyamato City says it serves as the fourth-ranked substitute facility for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s disaster headquarters.

The national disaster headquarters’ fourth location is in Tachikawa. And the substitute for the Tokyo government’s disaster headquarters is in Tachikawa too. The capital’s spare brain, both the nation’s and the metropolis’s, is kept in this town.

The history of the warehouse next door was even more surprising. According to the same Basic Plan, it was originally a rice-stockpile warehouse that the national government built in November 1990 as the “Tachikawa Government Warehouse.” The Tokyo government acquired it in July 2016, began partial operation in fiscal 2017, and after renovation started full operation in March 2020. It has a storage floor area of about 11,200 square metres and a capacity of about 5,900 pallets, and 180 solar panels sit on its roof. In a disaster it becomes a wide-area logistics base, receiving relief supplies from the national government, other local authorities and private companies, and sending them out to Tokyo’s municipalities.

The warehouse that once guarded the nation’s rice now guards blankets, food and portable toilets for the people of Tokyo. The contents have changed, but the warehouse still wears a warehouse’s face.

The Tokyo government’s document sums up the base’s character in one sentence: starting with the Tachikawa Joint Government Building for Disaster Management, which houses the national disaster headquarters’ reserve facility, facilities of the Ground Self-Defense Force, the Japan Coast Guard, the Metropolitan Police, the Tokyo Fire Department, the Disaster Medical Center and others are concentrated “within walking distance.” Within walking distance. In a disaster, even if roads are cut and phones go dead, people can run on foot to the office next door. Being able to walk there is surely the most important design of this base.

So why was it Tachikawa? It is time to return to the opening question.

Why the capital’s spare brain is in Tachikawa

Why Tachikawa?

The Cabinet Office gives several reasons. The first is distance. The base is about 30 kilometres from central Tokyo. It is unlikely to be hit at the same time as the city centre, yet it is close enough to move goods and people efficiently into the centre while serving as a temporary base until central functions are restored. A well-judged distance.

The second is the land. The base stands on a plateau with relatively good ground, next to a large park, and was developed to a plan. Here, on the site of a former airfield, was a size of land you couldn’t get anywhere else. The runway still lives on as a Ground Self-Defense Force airfield, and helicopters can take off from it.

When I read the third reason, I looked up from the document. The wind.

The Cabinet Office points out an advantage from the perspective of operating aircraft. In Tokyo the prevailing winds blow from the south or south-southwest in summer, and from the north or north-northwest in winter. Given those winds, even if a major fire broke out in central Tokyo, aircraft taking off and landing at Tachikawa would be unlikely to be affected by smoke.

My own reading goes like this. When central Tokyo burns, the smoke drifts with the wind. A summer south wind carries it north; a winter north wind carries it south. Tachikawa, off to the west and out of the wind’s path, is unlikely to be covered by smoke in either season. The capital’s spare brain was placed not only by distance on a map, but with the seasonal winds over Tokyo’s sky taken into account. To imagine the fires after an earthquake, and even where their smoke would go, and then decide where to put a base: behind that dry sentence in a government document were people whose imagination reached that far.

That said, I don’t mean to claim Tachikawa is a perfect location. The national Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion has assessed the Tachikawa Fault Zone, about 33 kilometres long, running from Naguri in Saitama Prefecture through Ome and Tachikawa to Fuchu in Tokyo. The expected magnitude of an earthquake on it is about 7.4. The probability of one within 30 years is put at 0.5 to 2 percent; the average interval between activity is about 10,000 to 15,000 years, and it is thought to have last moved about 20,000 to 13,000 years ago. A fault sleeps under the spare brain’s feet too. Perhaps that is exactly why this base does not rely on any single agency, but lines many of them up within walking distance, and layers the nation’s reserve on top of the metropolis’s. There is no perfect place. There are only better places, and many layers of preparation.

National forecasts put the probability of a magnitude-7-class earthquake directly beneath the capital within 30 years at around 70 percent. In the damage estimate compiled by a national working group in December 2025, the worst case is about 18,000 deaths. If that day comes, in the scenario the documents sketch, on a plateau 30 kilometres west of central Tokyo, security guards will switch on the lights, helicopters will rise into a sky the smoke cannot reach, and blankets will be carried out of a building that used to hold rice.

Half of the answer is just as the documents say: distance, land and wind. The other half is my guess. For more than a hundred years, this land has been a place for guarding the sky and the body. There was an airfield, and there was a hospital. Even as the owners changed, from the Japanese army to the US military to the citizens, this was always “the place that moves first when something happens.” Choosing to put a disaster base on the returned land may have been a way of rewriting, in the language of a peaceful age, the role this land had long played. Perhaps that is just a traveller’s liberty.

Tachikawa is sometimes called a plain town. But on the day the biggest disaster strikes this country, this is the town named as the place the nation’s disaster command will go. The substitute for the Tokyo government’s disaster headquarters is here; so is the only learning center of its kind the Tokyo Fire Department runs in the Tama area, and one of the pillars of Japanese disaster medicine. Far from having nothing, this is the town the capital will rely on when the moment comes.

One straight ride on the Chuo Line from Shinjuku, or on the Nambu Line from Kawasaki. Take the children to feel the shaking and the smoke at the weekend, then spread out lunch in Showa Kinen Park next door. A day spent beside the capital’s spare brain is, surprisingly, peaceful.

Quiz answer

The answer is A, rice stockpiles. According to the Tokyo government’s Basic Plan, the Tama Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Warehouse was built by the national government in November 1990 as the Tachikawa Government Warehouse (a rice-stockpile warehouse), and acquired by Tokyo in July 2016. The warehouse that once guarded rice now guards supplies for disasters.

Before you go

• From Shinjuku: take the JR Chuo Line (Rapid) to Tachikawa with no change of trains, a ride of thirty-something minutes. From Kanagawa Prefecture, the JR Nambu Line runs from Kawasaki to Tachikawa without a change (about an hour). From Tachikawa Station’s North Exit, take a bus.
• Tachikawa Life Safety Learning Center (Tokyo Fire Department Tachikawa Citizens’ Disaster Prevention Education Center): 1156-1 Izumicho, Tachikawa. From stop No. 1 at JR Tachikawa Station’s North Exit, take a bus to “Tachikawa Shōbōsho”; the center is right there. 15 minutes on foot from Takamatsu Station on the Tama Monorail (per the Tokyo Fire Department). The underground car park holds 28 vehicles under 2.1 metres high, but cannot be used by people attending training courses.
• Admission and hours: free. Open 9:00–17:00; closed Thursdays, the third Friday of the month (the following weekday if that day is a public holiday) and over the New Year holiday. Open on 1 September, 1 October and 17 January whatever the day of the week.
• Hands-on corners: each takes about 30 minutes; choose up to four on weekdays, three on weekends, holidays and in the summer holidays. Age limits: earthquake from age 3, firefighting from third grade, first aid from fourth grade, rescue from junior high school, VR from second grade and at least 100 cm tall. Check the official site for the latest information and bookings: https://www.tfd.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/taiken/tachikawa/index.html
• Time to allow: at 30 minutes per corner, four corners take about two hours on their own. Add time for the free-exploration areas and for the bus or walk from the station.
• What to wear: something easy to move in. The official site asks visitors to avoid sandals and high heels. Holidays and the summer holidays are especially crowded.
• About the base: each agency on the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base runs a working national or metropolitan facility. Whether anything besides the learning center can be visited, and any events, should be checked with each agency. Just looking at the buildings from outside and following the layout on a map is enough to give you a sense of the base’s scale. Cabinet Office page on the reserve facility: https://www.bousai.go.jp/oukyu/kunren/yobishisetu/index.html
• Combine with: Showa Kinen Park lies next to the base, so you can walk both of the “twins” born of the same report in one day. Midoricho also has the Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum, and if you ride the monorail back from Takamatsu or Tachihi Station to Tachikawa-Kita, the public art of Faret Tachikawa awaits by the station.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for buses, trains and the monorail. The new earthquake corner was designed to be easier for foreign residents to follow, but check the official site or ask when booking if you need language support.

After the shaking, over to Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

The learning center’s experiences use more of your body than you might expect. You walk crouched low through the smoke, bend down at the rescue scene, and tense your arms holding the extinguisher. Outside, you’ll probably notice your shoulders and lower back are tired in an unfamiliar way.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, on the third 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). It is a hot yoga studio with heated lava-stone floors, and 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, so even after the learning center closes at 17:00 there is plenty of time to drop by.

For first-timers there is a trial yoga lesson for ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and mat rental included.

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

Outside the window of the bus back to the station, the seasonal winds pass quietly, north and south, as they do every day.

Cover photo: Tachikawa Airfield and the surrounding town from the air, with wide green spaces beyond the runway (2023) (Photo: ブルーノ・プラス / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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All Tachikawa Walks (English)