Tachikawa Museums Guide: Art, 2,558 Instruments and Things to Do

Tachikawa has an art museum, 2,558 musical instruments and a 1,201-seat hall, yet almost none bears the name Tachikawa. A walk to find out why.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Kunitachi College of Music is not in Kunitachi. Its address is Kashiwa-cho, Tachikawa.

Put Tachikawa’s (立川) cultural sites on a map and this keeps happening. The word “Tachikawa” is almost nowhere on the signs.

The art museum is on the ground floor of the head office of a shinkin bank, a local cooperative bank, and it is called the Tamashin Museum. The museum of musical instruments from around the world is inside that “Kunitachi” music college. The civic hall’s official name is the Tachikawa Civic Hall, but nobody calls it that. The sign says “Tamashin RISURU Hall.” RISURU, it turns out, is the name of a squirrel character.

A shopping town. A transfer town. That is how most people who know Tachikawa, a city of the Tama area in western Tokyo, would describe it. Mention culture and some think instead of neighbouring Kunitachi, or of towns a little further east along the Chuo Line. Somewhere in my mind, I thought so too. But leaf through the city’s own materials and the story turns around. This town has an art museum, a museum of musical instruments, a hall of 1,201 seats, a thatched farmhouse from the end of the Edo period, and a culture “factory” made from an entire closed school.

So why doesn’t Tachikawa’s culture call itself “Tachikawa”? Carrying that question, I set off from the North Exit of the station.

What cultural sites does Tachikawa have?

First, let me answer the practical question. What cultural sites does Tachikawa have?

For art, there is the Tamashin Museum in Midori-cho, about 6 minutes’ walk from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station. It occupies the first two floors of the head office of Tama Shinkin Bank: the ground floor is a museum for special exhibitions, and the second floor is a gallery for young artists. For music, the Musical Instrument Museum of Kunitachi College of Music, in Kashiwa-cho to the north, collects and displays instruments from around the world. For the stage, there is the Tachikawa Civic Hall, alias Tamashin RISURU Hall, in Nishiki-cho to the south, whose large hall seats 1,201. For history, there is the Tachikawa Museum of History and Folklore in Fujimi-cho and the Kawagoemichi Ryokuchi Old Folk Houses Garden in Saiwai-cho. And near the Tama River there is Tachikawa Sozosha, made from a closed elementary school.

Around the station there are many more. At Faret Tachikawa by the North Exit, 109 works of public art are set into the streets; Tachikawa Manga Park, in the old city hall, has 40,000 manga to read on tatami mats; GREEN SPRINGS has TACHIKAWA STAGE GARDEN, with about 2,500 seats, and PLAY! MUSEUM, for picture books and exhibitions. Each has its own episode in this series. In Midori-cho, the National Institute of Japanese Literature has an exhibition room showing books from the Edo period.

Open the “Culture and Arts” page of Tachikawa City’s website and the categories run: painting and sculpture, music, literature, Faret Tachikawa art, cultural facilities. A wide front door. In this article I pick the places this series has not yet walked and visit them in turn. First, the ground floor of a bank.

Tamashin Museum: a room on a bank’s ground floor, waiting for first-class art

From the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, cross the pedestrian deck, pass the monorail’s Tachikawa-Kita Station, and walk north up Sun Sun Road, the broad avenue that runs north from the station. Beside it stands a large building with a lot of glass: the head office of Tama Shinkin Bank. On its ground floor is the Tamashin Museum.

According to the Tamashin Regional Culture Foundation, the public-interest foundation that runs it, the museum opened in May 2020, when the bank’s new head office was built and the bank moved in. The foundation describes “exhibition rooms whose air-conditioning and lighting we perfected on the assumption that first-class works of art would be shown.” A bank that fussed over the air-conditioning in its gallery before its vault.

Why does a shinkin bank have an art museum? The answer lies in its history.

According to the foundation, Tama Shinkin Bank began as the Tachikawa Credit Union, which opened in 1933. It later became the Tama Chuo Credit Union, and when the Shinkin Bank Act was passed in 1951, the Tama Chuo Shinkin Bank. In other words, this financial institution with branches all over Tama was, at root, a Tachikawa union. “Tachikawa” disappeared from its name not because Tachikawa shrank but because the business spread across all of Tama. And the head office of the union that hung out its sign in Tachikawa in 1933 is still in Tachikawa today.

In 1974 the bank opened a gallery on the 9th floor of its head office. In 1975 it launched a local-history magazine, Tama no Ayumi (“The Story of Tama”), and in 1976 it set up the “Tama Culture Resource Office” to run them. In April 1991 the Tamashin Regional Culture Foundation was established to take over this work. In the same month, the Tamashin History and Art Museum opened above the bank’s Kunitachi branch, out of a wish, the foundation writes, “to be a museum local residents can drop into casually.” Then in January 2006 three shinkin banks, Tama Chuo, Taihei and Hachioji, merged as equals to form today’s Tama Shinkin Bank. According to the foundation, it has 80 branches in the Tama area and ranks among the top ten shinkin banks in Japan.

Assessing a loan, judging a painting. Both are jobs of “looking.” That a bank arrived at an art museum over half a century was probably less a hobby outside its field than an extension of its trade.

In 1974 the bank’s gallery was on the 9th floor of the old head office, a high-up gallery reached by lift only by those with business there. Today the head office has been rebuilt and moved, and the art has come down to the ground floor on Sun Sun Road to wait for passers-by. Eight floors in half a century. As speeds go for art approaching the street, not bad.

The museum’s backbone is the “Tamashin Collection.” In the schedule for fiscal 2026, the pillars of the collection are named as “modern Japanese art” and “artists of Tama.” The introduction to the Kunitachi museum lists paintings, old ceramics, sculpture and ukiyo-e woodblock prints. The museum mixes works borrowed from other museums into this collection and holds several special exhibitions a year.

Look over the fiscal 2026 programme and you see the museum’s character. In spring, “Spring Tamashin Collection Exhibition 2026,” drawn entirely from its own collection. From summer into autumn, an exhibition of foreign landscapes painted by Tama artists, alongside picture postcards collected by Kurata Saburo. And from 21 October to 20 December 2026, the “51st National University Print Exhibition.” It brings together selected works by students majoring in printmaking at art universities, education universities, junior colleges and vocational schools across Japan, and has continued for half a century as part of the work of the Japanese Society of Printmaking. According to the foundation’s announcement, this is the first time it has been held at the Tamashin Museum. After the New Year, an exhibition of three Tama-based artists is planned.

A ground floor that shows the history of art through the collection, and a second floor that shows work being made now. The foundation explains that the second-floor community space is a place to show work by students at Tama’s art universities and by young artists heading from Tama out into the world. If the ground floor is the “deposits” room, the second floor is the “loans” room. The bank is lending its walls to future artists.

The Tamashin History and Art Museum in Kunitachi has been closed since 12 November 2024 in preparation for renovation of the Kunitachi branch. The foundation’s page notes that the Tamashin Museum stays open in the meantime. So in autumn 2026, if you want to see Tamashin’s art, Tachikawa is where you go.

In winter, the plaza in front of the museum has another job. The lighting ceremony for the Sun Sun Road illuminations is held on a special stage in front of this head office. Every year, the winter lights come on at the museum’s front door.

So, even the bank’s name was once “Tachikawa.” Then why is a college named “Kunitachi” in Tachikawa?

The Musical Instrument Museum of Kunitachi College of Music: “Kunitachi” is in Tachikawa

Take the monorail north from Tachikawa and get off at Tamagawa-Josui Station. According to the college, turn right out of the ticket gate and walk 7 minutes along the Seibu line tracks. The campus of Kunitachi College of Music is at 5-5-1 Kashiwa-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo.

Just to be clear, the college’s name is read “Kunitachi.” Written 国立, the same characters can be read kokuritsu, “national,” but it is not a national university. And it is not in Kunitachi City either.

The college’s history explains this matter-of-factly. Its forerunner, the Tokyo Higher School of Music, opened in April 1926 in temporary premises in Yotsuya Ward, Tokyo City. In November of the same year its school building in the Kunitachi university town was finished and it moved there. In 1947 it was renamed Kunitachi School of Music, and in 1950 it became Kunitachi College of Music. Then, under April 1978, there is a single short line: “College location changed (Tachikawa City).”

That was 48 years ago. The college has spent nearly half a century in Tachikawa, its northern neighbour, still carrying the name of the town it was born in. For Tachikawa residents it is a name they hear almost daily, yet on the map it is the name of the next town. I find this slightly twisted relationship rather charming. If anyone loses out on the naming, it is probably Tachikawa.

It is not only the name that is twisted. This college holds a number of “firsts” in Japanese music education. According to its history, in 1940 it became the first private music school to be designated by Tokyo Prefecture as a school whose graduates could be certified as elementary-school music teachers without examination. When it became a college in 1950, it set up Japan’s first department of music education. And in December 1928 it performed with the New Symphony Orchestra, today’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, singing the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. A school like that is now sounding its pianos at the northern edge of Tachikawa.

The Musical Instrument Museum is on the ground floor of Building 4 on that campus.

It began with 27 instruments

The museum’s history begins in 1966. That year, with a research grant from the Ministry of Education, the college bought 27 instruments for performing and studying Renaissance and Baroque music. The next year, 1967, it bought about 30 instruments for the study of Japanese music, including gagaku court music, Noh and koto music, together with historical keyboard instruments.

In 1976 the college set up a Music Research Institute, with an instrument research section holding the 124 instruments collected so far and a display room closed to the public. The next year, 1977, it began opening the display room one day a week. In 1978 the display room was enlarged to 290 square metres. That was the same year the college moved to Tachikawa.

In 1980 the instrument research section was renamed the Instrument Museum, and in 1988 it became independent of the Music Research Institute as the Musical Instrument Museum. In 2016, with seismic reinforcement work, it moved to a new facility with a 442-square-metre display room, a storeroom, a workshop, a studio and offices.

Today it holds 2,558 instruments, according to the museum’s figure for January 2022. From 27, the collection has grown about 95 times in a little over half a century.

Where did those 2,558 come from? The museum divides its instruments by region: East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southwest Asia, Africa, the former Soviet Union, Europe, North America, Central and South America, the Pacific Islands. And at the very end there is one more region. What it is, we will come to in a moment.

Besides instruments, the museum holds some curious things. About 100 measured drawings and acoustic analysis graphs of instruments. About 2,000 slides of the instruments in the collection. And 98 X-ray photographs. They look through the instruments to see what is inside, the way doctors look into human bodies.

The Musical Instrument Museum in numbers

• 2,558 — Instruments in the collection (January 2022). Look at one a day and it will take you seven years.
• 27 — Instruments bought first, in 1966. About one ninety-fifth of today’s collection.
• 442 — Square metres of the display room it moved into in 2016. About 1.5 times the 1978 room.
• 98 — X-ray photographs. Instruments, it seems, get health check-ups too.
• 5332343 — The shamisen’s “systematic number.” Not a phone number.
• 10 — Minutes. The length of the curators’ “10-Minute Instrument Talk.” It fits in a lunch break.

A detour quiz for travellers

When the Musical Instrument Museum lists its instruments by region, which region comes last?

• A — Antarctica
• B — The Moon
• C — The deep sea

The answer is near the end of this article.

Instruments are “a miscellaneous collection of objects”

I have to explain the shamisen’s number.

The museum organises its instruments with two kinds of number. One is the “classification number,” based on the system proposed in 1914 by the Austrian musicologist Hornbostel and the German-born musicologist Sachs. It divides instruments into four broad groups by how they make sound: idiophones, mostly percussion; membranophones, the drums; chordophones, the string instruments; and aerophones, wind instruments and organs. According to the museum, this method is widely used in instrument collections around the world, and the numbers use the idea of the decimal classification used in libraries.

The other is the “systematic number,” based on the system of Gunji Sumi, an instrument scholar who was professor emerita at Kunitachi College of Music and the museum’s first director. It organises instruments not by history or region but by how they produce sound and what they are made of, and assigns numbers accordingly. The shamisen, Japan’s three-stringed lute, is “5332343.” Search by this number, the museum says, and you can find instruments outside Japan with a structure or way of producing sound similar to the shamisen. Seven digits summon its relatives from across the sea.

On the page explaining Gunji’s system, I found a passage that stopped me. An instrument, it says, is only a tool serving the human act of making sound, and anything at all can become an instrument as long as it meets the condition that “music can be made with it.” So the group of things we call instruments can be described as “a miscellaneous collection of objects” with nothing else in common.

These are the words of the first director of a museum that gathered 2,558 instruments. I know of no definition so blunt, and so loving.

In that system, the materials of an instrument’s vibrating part include plants, animals, minerals, gases and synthetic materials, along with “parts of the human body” and “liquids.” Water can be an instrument, and so can a part of my own body. Every time I hummed in the bath, it seems, I was unknowingly fitting into some slot in a seven-digit number.

The display room, according to the museum, is divided into two areas. The permanent area shows keyboard instruments such as a 19th-century fortepiano, harpsichord and clavichord, along with folk instruments from all over the world. “What was the piano like in Beethoven’s day?” the museum’s guide asks. The other is a special exhibition area with themed shows for limited periods. Some instruments are available to make sound with, and some can be tried out.

The curators’ “10-Minute Instrument Talk” is held in fiscal 2026 every Wednesday and Friday from 12:40 to 12:50 in the display room. No booking is needed. But note that photography inside the display room is entirely prohibited. You will have to take it home with your eyes and ears.

A blog by someone who visited records that if you speak to the security guard, they will kindly show you to the building with the museum; that you leave your bag in a free, lockable locker; and that touch-panel screens here and there explain the instruments. It also has an honest line: knowing the instruments could be touched and played, the writer was too nervous and just looked from a distance. In front of 2,558 instruments, most people would probably feel the same.

Let us leave the land of instruments and return to Tachikawa’s streets. South of the station, a hall with a squirrel’s name is waiting.