Tachikawa History Walk: Famous People, from Seiji Ozawa to a Comet

Seiji Ozawa went to school in Tachikawa, a comet’s discoverer was born here, and a band’s name became a real park. A walk among their traces.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

How many honorary citizens does Tachikawa have?

The city’s official website has the answer. One. Since the bylaw was made in Showa 41 (1966), only one person has ever been chosen: Shunji Nakajima (中嶋舜司), in Showa 43 (1968). (Showa is the Japanese imperial era from 1926 to 1989; local records count years by era.) His bust, apparently, stands inside City Hall.

One. Seeing that number, I felt slightly deflated. A city of more than 180,000 people has picked a single person in nearly sixty years. Either the standard is formidably strict, or this town is simply bad at boasting about its own people.

And yet, when you look up records of people under the place name Tachikawa (立川), a city in the Tama area of western Tokyo, unexpected names come pouring out. Someone who stood on the world’s podiums. Someone who found a comet in the night sky. Someone who drew the monsters of Ultraseven. Ask a Tachikawa local “Did you know?” about any of them, and you would most likely get a shake of the head. Is Tachikawa a town that raises people and then lets them go without a word? With that question in hand, I set out to trace the footsteps of people who are no longer living. If I started counting the living, this article would never end.

Tachikawa’s famous people, and a town with just one honorary citizen

Let me begin with that one.

According to the city, Shunji Nakajima was born in Meiji 28 (1895) in Tachikawa Village. He graduated from Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School, today’s Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School, served as a village councillor, a town councillor and a city councillor, and went on to be mayor of Tachikawa Town, chair of the city assembly, and the third and fifth mayor of Tachikawa City. He died in Showa 56 (1981). The list of past assembly chairs shows that the second chair was also Shunji Nakajima, taking office on 12 June Showa 18 (1943). From village councillor to mayor, he climbed every step of one local government’s staircase.

His name also appears on the page about the city song. In Showa 32 (1957) the Tachikawa Citizens’ Choir invited lyrics for a citizens’ song and chose one from 97 entries. Among the eleven judges is the name “Shunji Nakajima”. And in the same row stands another, unexpected name: Kishiko Wakayama, wife of the poet Bokusui Wakayama. I’ll come back to her later.

The winning lyrics, read today, seal in the air of their time. Verse one has “Great Tachikawa, the morning opens”; verse two, “Great Tachikawa grows and grows”; verse three, “Glory to Great Tachikawa”. All three times, the word “Great” (dai, 大) is fixed to the front. In Showa 32 Tachikawa had a US military base north of the station, and nearby Sunagawa was in turmoil over its expansion. Nobody hesitated to sing of their own town as “Great”. If today’s residents sang the same song, they would probably blush a little. Perhaps the town has grown up by exactly the amount of that blush.

The city has one more system, the Citizens’ Honour Award. Its first recipient, in Heisei 31 (2019), was the jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita. According to the city, in Heisei 27 (2015) he became the city’s first “Tachikawa Exchange Ambassador”, and besides free concerts at the civic hall and coaching at junior high schools, he even composed the school song of Wakabadai Elementary School. A pianist known for playing the keys with his elbows wrote an elementary school song. The parents may know better than the children who composed the song they sing every morning.

Honours are few. But that doesn’t mean the town lacks people with ties to it. From here on is the real story.

Seiji Ozawa and Tachikawa National School, and the piano hauled on a cart for three days

Seiji Ozawa, the conductor who was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 29 years and also became music director of the Vienna State Opera, died in February 2024. I suspect that not many people, even locally, know that he spent part of his boyhood in Tachikawa.

The encyclopaedia entry on Seiji Ozawa, based on his biographies, records this. In March Showa 16 (1941), Ozawa returned to Japan with his mother and older brothers, leaving his father in Manchuria, and entered Wakakusa Kindergarten in Tachikawa. In April Showa 17 (1942) he entered Tachikawa National School (kokumin gakko, the wartime name for elementary schools), today’s Tachikawa Daiichi (First) Elementary School.

When the boy arrived, Tachikawa had only just become a city. According to the city chronology, Tachikawa Town gained city status in Showa 15 (1940). The encyclopaedia says it was the third city in Tokyo Prefecture after Tokyo City and Hachioji City, and also the last municipality to become a city in the days of Tokyo Prefecture. The chronology’s entry for Showa 17 notes that the district names Fujimi, Shibasaki, Nishiki, Hagoromo, Akebono, Takamatsu and Midori were fixed that year. The “Akebonocho” and “Nishikicho” we write in addresses today were born in the same year that young Ozawa started at the national school.

The history of Tachikawa National School is interesting too. According to the city chronology, in Meiji 3 (1870) a local school, a gogakko, opened at Fusai-ji Temple. This, it says, was the origin of today’s First Elementary School. Tachikawa’s first school was born inside a temple, and some seventy years later a boy from Manchuria walked through its gate: a boy whose name the world’s podiums would later come to know.

Of the Ozawa family’s life in Tachikawa, the story I like best is about the piano. According to the encyclopaedia, in Showa 20 (1945) the boy was given his first lessons on the accordion and piano by his eldest brother, Katsumi. Sensing talent, the family decided he should study the piano properly. A piano was passed on cheaply by relatives in Hakuraku, Yokohama; they lashed it to a two-wheeled handcart, and his father, his eldest brother Katsumi and his second brother Toshio hauled it to the family home in Tachikawa over three days.

Three days, pulling a piano from Yokohama to Tachikawa. Showa 20 was the last year of the war, or just after it. The city chronology says that in that year Tachikawa was bombed thirteen times and badly damaged. A father and two sons walking roads still scarred by air raids, pulling a piano. Which road they took, whether it rained: the records don’t go that far. But it is no exaggeration to say that the later Boston podium began with one piano that took three days to cross the Tama tablelands.

The second brother, Toshio, would also become well known: Toshio Ozawa, scholar of German literature and folk tales. His encyclopaedia entry says that while he was at Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School, today’s Tachikawa High School, he was mobilised for labour and assigned to an army arsenal. The older brother was sent from a Tachikawa middle school to wartime labour; the younger brother met the piano in a Tachikawa house. In Showa 22 (1947) their father started a sewing-machine company with a friend, and the family moved to Kaneda Village in Kanagawa Prefecture. They had lived in Tachikawa for about six years.

Then, Tachikawa National School was a wartime school in a town that was bombed thirteen times. Now, according to the chronology, demolition for the rebuilding of the First Elementary School began in Heisei 24 (2012), and in Heisei 26 (2014) it was completed as the “First Elementary School Complex”. More than 150 years since the local school at Fusai-ji. The school of the town where the boy met the piano now welcomes children inside a multipurpose complex.

While I’m at it: the encyclopaedia says the name Seiji was formed by taking one character each from the names of two military men connected with his father. The first character, 征, means “to subjugate” or “to march on”. The boy who carried that name went on to wield not a sword but a baton. Those who named him must have been surprised.

Alan Hale, the comet discoverer born in a base town

I want to talk about one more person, a person of the sky.

In the spring of 1997, a great comet trailed its long tail across the night sky: Comet Hale-Bopp. When its discoverer died, an American newspaper headlined the story along the lines of “astronomer who helped discover brightest comet in decades dies”. One of the two discoverers, Alan Hale, was born in Tachikawa.

According to the English-language encyclopaedia, Hale was born on 7 March 1958 in Tachikawa, Japan, where his father was serving in the United States Air Force. Four months later, his father was transferred to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. He spent just four months in Tachikawa.

I try to picture Tachikawa in 1958. Following the city chronology, three years earlier, in Showa 30 (1955), the Sunagawa Struggle against the expansion of the base had begun. North of the station spread the US military’s Tachikawa base, and the encyclopaedia says that after its requisition following Japan’s defeat, Tachikawa became known nationwide as a “base town”. What the infant Hale heard was most likely the roar of transport-plane engines.

Then, in that town of runways, an American baby was born. Now, much of the same land has become Showa Kinen Park, a national government park, and a disaster-prevention base, and Japanese babies nap on the lawns. The US airfield was fully returned in Showa 52 (1977), and the park opened in Showa 58 (1983). In little more than twenty years, a town of runways became a town of lawns.

In Showa 34 (1959), the year after Hale was born, Tachikawa signed a sister-city agreement with San Bernardino, California. The city chronology also records that in Showa 37 (1962) it started an exchange-student programme for high school students. A town with an American base north of its station also joined hands with an American city across the ocean. Inside and outside the fence, Tachikawa in the late 1950s and early 1960s was surprisingly close to America.

Hale grew up in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Although, as he said in 2013, “I refuse to say that ‘I grew up there’ because anyone who knows me knows that I really haven’t grown up yet.” The man born in Tachikawa moved away before he grew up, and had no intention of growing up anyway.

On the night of 22–23 July 1995, at his home in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, while waiting for another comet to rise, Hale decided to pass the time by looking at objects around Sagittarius, and noticed an unfamiliar light. That was the future great comet. A place in history, earned by killing time. When I kill time, history usually takes no notice.

Hale died at his home in Cloudcroft on 6 June 2026, aged 68. Of all the people who looked up at Comet Hale-Bopp in the skies over Tachikawa, how many knew it had been found by someone born in Tachikawa?

Tachikawa’s people in numbers

• 1 — Tachikawa’s honorary citizens. Just one in nearly sixty years. The modesty of the selectors shows in the number.
• 3 — days it took the Ozawa family to move a piano from Yokohama to Tachikawa. Probably the sweatiest piano delivery in history.
• 4 — months Alan Hale spent in Tachikawa. A stay shorter than a comet’s tail.
• 97 — entries received in Showa 32 for the lyrics of the citizens’ song. The one chosen says “Great Tachikawa” three times.
• 14 — monuments on the “Poetry Path” of the Nekawa Greenway (the number of writers listed in the city’s guide). You can read an anthology while you walk.

Quiz for the wandering traveller

How long did it take the Ozawa family to haul the piano on a handcart from Yokohama to their house in Tachikawa? (A) 3 hours (B) 3 days (C) 3 weeks. Think about it as you walk on.

Having written about the piano, I want to move on to words. Tachikawa suffers from a slightly awkward misunderstanding about its very name.