Tachikawa Festivals Guide: Bon Dances, Flamenco, Nebuta and Yokai

Tachikawa dances all year: four versions of its bon-dance song, an Aomori nebuta parade, 500 flamenco dancers, hula, a yokai bon dance, and YOSAKOI.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

“Tachikawa’s all fura-fura, isn’t it?”

Someone passing in the street is said to have remarked that. The local magazine Ecutbien jotted it down in an editor’s note. Fura-fura means wobbly, unsteady — but this is not a story about drunks. By the South Exit there is flamenco — furamenko in Japanese — and by the North Exit, hula, which Japanese calls fura. Both start with “fura”. Hence, fura-fura.

Tachikawa’s dancing does not stop there. In summer, Aomori’s giant lantern floats, the nebuta, parade through the shopping street of Hagoromo-cho, and the chant “Rasseraa!” rings out. In autumn, in the plaza by the North Exit, people dressed as yokai — the ghosts and goblins of Japanese folklore — form the ring of a bon dance. The next day, YOSAKOI dancers’ wooden clappers rattle under the monorail. The fireworks night I described in another article in this feature. In the shadow of the fireworks, Tachikawa (立川) — a city in the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards — is dancing something or other all year round.

Almost as soon as I started looking, I came across a curious sentence. The town’s own bon-dance song, the “Tachikawa Ondo”, apparently exists in four versions. (An ondo is a folk-style song for the circle dances of summer bon odori.) Four songs with the same name in one town. How did that happen? And why do so many of Tachikawa’s dances come from elsewhere — from Aomori, Spain, Hawaii, Fussa? To chase those mysteries, let me turn the pages of Tachikawa’s dancing calendar.

Tachikawa’s dance festivals through the year: from spring flamenco to the autumn yokai bon dance

First, a quick lap of the calendar. Dates change every year, so what follows is only a guide — “this is how it went in such-and-such a year”.

Around Golden Week, the big spring holidays, “Tachikawa Flamenco” is held on Suzuran-dori by the South Exit. It is organised by the Tachikawa South Exit Suzuran-dori Shopping Street Promotion Association, and the 23rd edition took place on 29 April 2026. Around the same time, at GREEN SPRINGS by the North Exit, there is the “Aloha Hawaiian Festival”; in 2026 it ran for two days, 25 and 26 April, with hula, music and Hawaiian food.

Summer is bon-dance season. On Sun Sun Road by the North Exit the “Akebono Summer Festival” is held; in 2025 there was bon dancing on 2 and 3 August from 6 to 8 p.m. In August the station building hosts a hula festival where students from hula schools across the Tama area dance. And in Hagoromo-cho there is the Hagoromo Nebuta Festival. Bon dances held by neighbourhood associations and shrines also take place all over the city from late July into August.

Autumn. In October 2026, “Yokai Bon Odori 2026” runs at GREEN SPRINGS from the 10th to the 12th. On the 11th, the “38th Tachikawa Yoito Festival” is held on Sun Sun Road, with a folk-dance procession, YOSAKOI and torch-twirling all on the same day. As I write this article, it is exactly that weekend.

Flamenco, hula, bon dancing, nebuta, yokai, YOSAKOI. Line them up and it is practically a trip around the world. But one thing has gone nowhere and has always been in this town: the ondo.

There are four Tachikawa Ondo: the phantom ondo, and the Miki Toriro ondo

A local historian born and raised in Sunagawa wrote a piece titled “There are four Tachikawa Ondo” for his series “Tachikawa in Depth” in a local magazine. It is illustrated with record labels and photographs of bon dances supplied by the Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore. Following it, the story goes like this.

The first was in June 1937. It was made mainly by the youth association of what was then the town of Tachikawa, with words by Matsumoto Issei and music by Omura Nosho. It is said to have been sung by a geisha from Shinbashi and recorded for Columbia. But the month after it was released, the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, and it hardly spread at all. No record or score survives, and it is known as “the phantom Tachikawa Ondo”. All that remains is one line of the lyrics: “Sora no Tachikawa, kiyoku ni akete yo” — “Tachikawa of the sky, dawn breaks on the wings.” An aeroplane wing appears in the very first line of the ondo. A song of an airfield town if ever there was one.

The second was in 1951. The same lyricist-and-composer pair; a King Records singer sang it, but this one did not spread either. Its lyrics mention the Suwa woods and the Hino Bridge. From a town of wings to a town of river and woods. Across the war, the words Tachikawa used to sing about itself changed.

The third was in 1963. With the City of Tachikawa and the Chamber of Commerce at the centre, words and music were written by Miki Toriro, popular for the comic songs of the radio show Nichiyo Gorakuban (“Sunday Entertainment”), and the choreography was by the first Nishizaki Midori. This is the “Tachikawa Ondo” best loved by citizens today. It has eleven verses in all, four of which were recorded. “West and east and south and north, make a round circle, clap in time — the Tachikawa Ondo.” That year was also the year Tachikawa City merged with the town of Sunagawa. To me, a lyric about joining east, west, south and north in a round circle can’t help sounding like a song to celebrate the merger.

The fourth was in 1973. It sang of the cherry blossoms along the Nekawa and of a town “that opens, linking Tama and Tokyo”, but it did not catch on much, and, the historian writes, it is on the verge of being forgotten.

On top of that, for the first Tachikawa Yoito Festival in 1989, the musician Uzaki Ryudo wrote words and music for a song called “Tachikawa My Home Town”. This too, it is said, now has few people who know the song or the dance.

Four ondo and one “My Home Town”. In half a century, Tachikawa tried five times to make its own song. Only one of them took root in the town. As a batting average, that is .200 — a slightly embarrassing figure for a professional baseball player. Yet each time, the face of Tachikawa at that moment was left inside the song: wings, river, circle, cherry blossom, and home town. The ondo were also a series of self-portraits of the town.

The Sunagawa Ondo, and Shoji Taro in the back of a three-wheeler

Sunagawa, in the north of Tachikawa, has its own ondo too.

According to the same historian, the Sunagawa Ondo was made in 1948, the third year after the war. The youth association of Sunagawa village, rebuilt after the war, wanted an ondo and an association song, and invited its members to write lyrics. A dozen or so came in, but none were good, and in the end they asked a professional — Matsumoto Issei, who had written the first and second Tachikawa Ondo. To write the words, he is said to have cycled around Sunagawa with the association’s leaders. The music was again by Omura Nosho. On 15 October a launch was held in the grounds of Azusami Tenjin-sha Shrine.

The lyrics put the Sunagawa of the day straight into the song. “Our village has many specialities: wheat and sweet potatoes, avenues of zelkova, and for mulberry saplings, the best in Japan.” After each verse comes the refrain, “Sore, Sunagawa ippon kaido, yoi yoi to sa no, yoi yoi yoi” — “Sunagawa, the one-road village.” When the song was made, Sunagawa was a village about 9 kilometres from east to west, with only one road, the Itsukaichi Kaido, running through it. That is what “one road” means.

This time, though, it was not recorded, and the song did not spread. Five years later, in 1953, voices rose saying it should somehow be put on a record, and this time it was sung and recorded by the popular singers Shoji Taro and Nomura Yukiko. A dance was choreographed, and a launch of the song and dance was held at Azusami Tenjin-sha. Because Shoji Taro was coming, such a crowd gathered that it was said to be the biggest since Sunagawa began.

And then comes this line. There was no television, of course, and three-wheeled trucks were only just beginning to spread; so a straw mat was spread in the back of a three-wheeler owned by one of the youth association’s officers, a cushion placed on top, and Shoji Taro was driven to and from Tachikawa Station like that.

One of the great singers of the Showa era, sitting on a cushion in the back of a three-wheeled truck, bouncing along the Itsukaichi Kaido. Imagining the scene, I cannot keep a straight face. The historian writes that he himself was master of ceremonies that day, as an officer of the youth association, and remembers being praised by Shoji Taro.

Sunagawa also kept songs much older than the ondo. In November 1965, the “Sunagawa Traditional Folk Song Preservation Society” was formed with over 200 members; they took down the folk songs handed down from long ago and recorded them on tape. Wheat-threshing songs, millstone songs, tea-picking songs, tea-rolling songs, silkworm-counting songs, weaving songs, thread-reeling songs, indigo-leaf-beating songs, and several kinds of children’s songs. Of these, the wheat-threshing song, the thread-reeling song and the tea-rolling song were chosen for NHK’s “100 Selected Performing Arts” in fiscal 1969 and broadcast nationwide. That autumn, dances were set to the collected songs and a performance was held at Azusami Tenjin-sha. Songs for working became songs for dancing.

Incidentally, when the society looked into it at its founding, almost no folk songs were found in former Shibasaki village apart from the “Tama Sweetfish-Carrying Ondo”. The song stores of Tachikawa’s south and north had very different contents.

How Sunagawa’s post-war youth association spent years bringing together the bon dances that had differed from hamlet to hamlet, finally achieving a “unified bon dance” in 1960, I told in the feature’s article on sericulture. Getting everyone into the same dancing circle was no easy job either.

Tachikawa’s dances by the numbers

• 4 — versions of the Tachikawa Ondo: 1937, 1951, 1963 and 1973. One took root.
• 1 — nebuta float at the first Hagoromo Nebuta Festival. By the 20th there were eight.
• 500 — dancers in Tachikawa Flamenco’s street dance (according to the local magazine in some years). One worries about the width of the shopping street.
• 50,000 — people the organisers estimate came to the three-day Yokai Bon Odori in 2025. A good share of them were yokai.
• 9 — kilometres: the length of the Itsukaichi Kaido, the “one road” of the Sunagawa Ondo, through the village. Shoji Taro bounced along part of it in a three-wheeler.

The wanderer’s quiz

Why did Aomori’s nebuta come to a shopping-street festival in Hagoromo-cho? Which is closest to how it started? (A) A shopping-street chairman from Aomori, and a sumo wrestler’s chanko stew; (B) a sister-city agreement between Tachikawa and a town in Aomori; (C) a nebuta craftsman moving to Hagoromo-cho. The answer comes at the end.

The answer lies in a story that begins at the front of a tofu shop in Hagoromo-cho.

The Hagoromo Nebuta Festival: shopkeepers parading Aomori’s nebuta

Every August, the Hagoromo Nebuta Festival is held on the Higashi-Tachikawa shopping street in Hagoromo-cho. Nebuta are huge illuminated paper floats, usually of warriors and mythical figures, best known from the summer festival in Aomori in the far north of Japan.

In 2018, the local magazine Ecutbien interviewed the chair of the festival committee as it reached its 20th edition. He ran a tofu shop on the street, carried on from his parents’ generation, and also chaired the Nebuta Society. Let me trace his story in his own words.

It began with a subsidy. Tokyo and Tachikawa City had subsidies for shopping-street projects with names like “Cheer Up!”, and the Higashi-Tachikawa shopping street agreed to hold some kind of event of its own. The street’s chairman at the time came from Aomori — and, what is more, from the same home town as the sumo wrestler Mainoumi, and was a junior of his at the same high school. So the first event they held was one where Mainoumi made chanko, the sumo wrestlers’ hotpot, and young volunteers handed it out.

The following year, a member of the shopping street asked whether they could bring even a single nebuta from Aomori and hold a festival. That, he says, was the first one. One figure nebuta. They simply paraded the nebuta together with the Hagoromo Festival. It was an era, the committee chair recalls, when you didn’t even need to apply to close the road, and that was that. They started applying to the police from the third year, and from then on added one float at a time.

From chanko to nebuta. A leap straight from the sumo ring to an Aomori summer. But without that leap, “Rasseraa!” would never have rung out in Hagoromo-cho.

By the 20th festival, in 2018, there were eight nebuta in all: four figure nebuta, one fan-shaped nebuta, one original gourd-lantern float, and two lettered nebuta used to block the road. All the figure nebuta come from Aomori. Every year on 6 August, the nebuta arrive from Aomori. By then, the stands to carry them and the electrical wiring must be ready. Preparations used to start in April and run every week; now they start in June.

The cast of helpers is wonderful. Shopping-street members alone were not enough, so they set up a “Nebuta Society” with an annual fee of ¥1,000. Among the members are a painting contractor and an electrician. For some years, a member who is a painter has been waterproofing the nebuta — because it rained heavily five years in a row. A shopping street that had battled rain on festival day finally made the nebuta themselves rain-resistant. Most of the youth section, he says, are not locals but people who joined through local connections, mostly coming from elsewhere in Tokyo.

That year, through the nebuta connection, the chair of the city council and city officials from Kuroishi in Aomori Prefecture came as guests. There were about 60 guests, and the speeches of greeting alone took more than half an hour, the committee chair laughs.

It is big, too. A 2019 Tokyo events guide wrote that about 160,000 people come each year, and another issue of the local magazine wrote that it “is said to draw 170,000, the most in the Kanto region”. Asked whether it was true that 300,000 came, the committee chair answered honestly that it doesn’t get as far as 300,000. A festival that doesn’t inflate its numbers is one you can trust.

The magazine article lined up, like headlines, the prize-winning senryu and haiku sent in to the festival that year. One of them reads: “Hagoromo de / sodatta bokura wa / nebutakko” — “We who grew up in Hagoromo are nebuta kids.” Someone who grew up inside a festival that began with a subsidy and chanko is calling themselves a “nebuta kid”. Twenty years is long enough to make a home town.

If Hagoromo-cho is summer in Aomori, spring at the South Exit is Spain.