Tachikawa Cycling Guide: Showa Kinen Park’s 14 km and the Tama River

Cycling in Tachikawa: Showa Kinen Park’s 14 km bike-only course, about 2,000 rental bikes, the Tama River path, and the airfield that chose this flat land.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Japan’s first scheduled commercial passenger flight took off from Tachikawa (立川). It was July 1929 (Showa 4), and the destination was Osaka. The ground chosen for the runway was this town’s flat, endlessly flat earth. Today, the thing that runs across that flatness with the most obvious joy is the bicycle.

To say Tachikawa has no hills would be going too far. There are hills. You just have to look for them. For anyone on a bicycle, there is no better news. City of Tachikawa documents describe the terrain as broadly flat, apart from the Tama River flowing along the south of the city and the green slopes of its terrace cliffs. Head north from the station, or west, and the pedals hardly get any heavier.

But while I was looking into where this flatness came from, I noticed something a little odd. The first people to take an interest in Tachikawa’s flatness were not cyclists. About a hundred years ago, someone chose this place as “vast, flat land.” What were they planning to run on it? And how did that flatness find its way, in the end, to our bicycles? To find out, I began by reading the bicycle-rental guide for Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park) from one corner to the other. With any guide, the corners are where the fun is.

Cycling in Tachikawa: the 14 km bike-only course in Showa Kinen Park

The official website of Showa Kinen Park, a national government park, says that inside it there is “a bike-only course of about 14 km where you can ride without worrying about cars or pedestrians.” Fourteen kilometres of path, inside a park, built just for bicycles. Anywhere in Tokyo, I cannot immediately think of another place where you can ride 14 kilometres without a traffic light and without a car coming the other way.

Bikes can be rented at three cycle centers in the park. The Tachikawa Gate cycle center, just inside the Tachikawa Gate on the left, has about 900; the Nishi-Tachikawa Gate cycle center about 600; the Sunagawa Gate cycle center about 500. About 2,000 in all. The official FAQ says the park keeps about 2,000 bicycles, from 18-inch to 26-inch, including two-seater tandems and bikes with child seats. There is a charge, and it is first come, first served on the day. A single park holds as many bicycles as the bike park of a small town.

Read the list of models and the thoughtfulness toward families is meticulous. Adult bikes come in 22, 24 and 26 inches; children’s in 18 and 20. Bikes with child seats have weight limits: up to 15 kg in the front seat, up to 21 kg in the rear. Tandems require a height of 140 cm or more. The park has also added cross bikes, with an explicit note that these have no basket and no mudguards. If you are planning to bring a packed lunch, an ordinary bike might be the better choice.

And then there is the line I liked best in the whole guide. Unicycles: Tachikawa Gate cycle center only. Tachikawa Gate is the only cycle center that rents unicycles, in sizes from 14 to 24 inches, and next door there is even a unicycle course. You come to rent a bicycle and discover you can also rent a vehicle that is one wheel short. How many national parks in Japan lend out unicycles, I don’t know. I do know that the day I find the courage to rent one will probably never come.

According to the official price list, three hours costs ¥600 for adults, ¥350 for junior-high students and younger, ¥800 for a cross bike and ¥1,500 per tandem, with extra charged for every additional 30 minutes (as listed in October 2026). Rentals are accepted from 9:30 until one hour before the park closes, and bikes must be returned by 30 minutes before closing. The rule is that you return the bike to the center you rented it from; other centers won’t take it. However far you ride, you end up where you started. The bicycles in this park have a homing instinct.

For those for whom three hours isn’t enough, there is also a one-day ticket, except in the busy seasons: ¥800 for adults, ¥400 for junior-high students and younger. But one-day tickets are not sold for tandems, the official notes point out. Riding a two-seater all day long, perhaps they worry, the relationship gives out before the legs do.

Incidentally, bicycles are not the only things you pedal in this park. The price list also includes the two-seater “cycle boats” rented at the boathouse. Legs that have pedalled 14 kilometres on land can go on pedalling on the pond. Tachikawa’s park, it seems, has no intention of letting your legs rest.

Practising to ride: not allowed

Read the rules and you come upon a sentence you have to read twice. Practising riding a bicycle is prohibited on the cycling course.

A bicycle park where you may not practise. At first it sounded mean, but read on and the logic holds. The course is for bicycles only: you cannot walk on it, run your dog alongside, or enter with training wheels, a pedal-less balance bike or a kick scooter. The park doesn’t rent bikes with training wheels either. It is a path where people who can ride flow in one direction at a reasonable speed. Riding against the flow or off the course is forbidden, and so is riding with an umbrella up or while using a phone. Modified bicycles cannot even be brought into the park.

The course is a reward for people who have learned to ride. Get the practice done near home, then come — that is the message. For a child who has just lost the training wheels, this is the destination of the first real outing.

The park also asks riders to wear helmets. There are rental helmets for adults and children, but numbers are limited, so the official side asks you to bring your own. The rental bikes carry a “red TS mark,” which means they come with insurance for cyclists.

If you bring your own bike, the official FAQ says you can enter through any gate. Tachikawa Gate and Nishi-Tachikawa Gate have dedicated bicycle entrances, and inside the park you must ride on the cycling course. The park has five gates to the paid area — Tachikawa, Nishi-Tachikawa, Sunagawa, Akishima and Tamagawa-Josui — and three to the free “Midori no Bunka Zone” (Green Culture Zone): Akebono, Showa Tenno Kinenkan and Takamatsu. Choose how you come — train, monorail, car or bicycle — according to where you are heading, the official site says. In a park with eight gates, fixing where bikes come in is a kindness to stop people getting lost. Even the directions for drivers add that there is a cycling road near the Nishi-Tachikawa Gate car park, so take care when entering. In this park, it is the cars that give way to bicycles.

The notes on the road surface are honest too. Depending on the weather there are fallen leaves and puddles, and some slippery spots. In places the trees have grown and their roots have pushed the surface up into bumps. When the trees grow, the path ripples. Proof, at least, that the park’s trees are properly alive.

A slope in a flat park

There was one more place in the cycle-center guide that made me laugh. The Nishi-Tachikawa Gate cycle center is about 100 metres to the right after you enter the Nishi-Tachikawa Gate — at the bottom of a slope.

A slope in a flat park. The park office’s documents say the ground inside the park is almost flat, on a bed of Tachikawa loam. Even so, to reach the Nishi-Tachikawa center you go downhill. Tachikawa’s hills are hard to find, but there is one, without fail, on the way to rent a bike. On the way back you will have to climb it — but by then you have returned the bike, so you climb it on foot.

The park’s official guide to seasonal pleasures recommends riding along the rows of cherry trees in spring and getting all the way to the bike racks near whichever flower fields are in bloom; shade and fresh green in summer; autumn leaves in autumn; and in winter, clear air with days when you can see distant mountains — warm up with a ride, it says. There are bike racks near each facility, so you can park and walk in whatever area you want. The guide also says you can get round the huge grounds efficiently, making better use of your time than on foot. A park big enough to turn your legs to wood on foot becomes, by bike, a place where you can chase the flowers from one end to the other.

But why is this park so big, and so flat? The answer lies in what this land did before it was a park.

The broad, flat land an airfield chose

A City of Tachikawa walking-route guide gives the reasons an airfield was to be built in Tachikawa in 1921 (Taisho 10): it was close to the capital; there was vast, flat land; the railway ran here; and the weather conditions. In the following year, 1922, the army’s 5th Air Battalion arrived from Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture.

Airplanes cannot land without broad, flat ground. Tachikawa’s earth met the order. The Tachikawa–Osaka service of July 1929 that I mentioned at the start is recorded, in the city’s summary of the airfield’s history, as Japan’s first scheduled civil passenger transport. The flat ground from which Japan’s first passenger service took off: that was Tachikawa’s ground. Civil aviation moved to Haneda in 1933, so the era when Tachikawa was Tokyo’s gateway to the sky did not last long. Still, where the first flight left from will never change. Every time they board a plane at Haneda, the people of Tachikawa are entitled to feel just a little senior.

After the war, the airfield became a US military base, and it was fully returned to Japan in 1977. One part of that land is Showa Kinen Park, where we are now riding. The park straddles the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima and covers a total of 180 hectares. According to the park office’s chronology, the first 70 hectares opened on 26 October 1983. The flatness chosen for a runway turned, more than half a century later, into flatness for bicycles. On land graded for airplanes, children now ride without training wheels.

So just how flat is Tachikawa? Volume 6 of Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the city’s history-compilation office, describes the city’s landforms as divided between lowland along the Tama River and the Musashino Plateau, a step higher. The highest point in the city is Nishisunacho in the northwest, at 125 metres above sea level. From there, the land gradually falls away toward the southeast.

The word gradually matters. Tachikawa’s ground drops from northwest to southeast at an angle you barely notice. If, on a day you ride northwest, your legs feel a little heavy for no reason, it may not be your imagination. Though it is kinder on the body to call it imagination.

And at the southern edge, the plateau ends abruptly. There is a line of cliffs that the Tama River carved out of the plateau over long ages, and below it lies the riverside lowland. Volume 12 of Tachikawa Monogatari calls such lines of cliffs gaisen — “cliff lines” — and explains that while the foot of a cliff has plentiful springs, it is also a place prone to flooding. On top of the plateau, water was scarce; at the foot of the cliff, it was close. Life in Tachikawa has been built on either side of that step. For a cyclist, it means an easy descent on the way out and, on the way back, one of the few genuine climbs in Tachikawa. If you want to meet a real hill in Tachikawa, head south.

A footpath on an old railway line

Besides flat ground, the airfield left one more road behind. According to Volume 3 of Tachikawa Monogatari, a freight-only branch line was laid to the east and west of the airfield when it was built in 1922. After the war the US forces used it too, but when the base was fully returned in 1977 the tracks were removed, and in 1980 the line was reborn as a footpath. The same issue names “Sakae Ryokuchi” (Sakae Green Space) as a footpath built on that land.

Where freight once rolled to the airfield, people now walk. A railway cannot turn sharply, so a path on an old railway line nearly always runs on in gentle curves. For someone like me, with no sense of direction, who checks the map at every corner, it is a path with an agreeable character.

One more tie between Tachikawa and the bicycle cannot be left out: Tachikawa Keirin, the track-cycling stadium that opened in 1951 as the 59th keirin velodrome in Japan. I’ll keep that story to a line here. Tachikawa’s flatness has been the stage for professional racers’ battles and for children’s first long rides alike.

Now, if you have finished the park’s 14 kilometres and your legs still have some left in them, head south next. Past the cliff at the edge of the plateau, a much longer road is waiting.