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

The “Tatekawa” of rakugo: the name of a canal in Sumida

Tachikawa and rakugo, Japan’s centuries-old art of comic storytelling, in which a lone performer kneels on a cushion and plays every part. Put the two together, and many Japanese will think of Danshi Tatekawa, the late head of the Tatekawa school. But Danshi’s name is read Tatekawa, written 立川, exactly the same characters as the city. The city is Tachikawa. Even the reading is different.

So where does the rakugo world’s 立川 come from? The clue lies with Utei Enba, a writer of popular fiction in Edo (old Tokyo). According to the encyclopaedia, Enba was born in Kanpo 3 (1743), the son of a master carpenter in Honjo Aioicho, now Midori 1-chome in Sumida Ward, and is sometimes called the man who revived rakugo. Punning on the Tatekawa canal (竪川) that flowed near his home, he also called himself “Tatekawa (立川) Enba”. Among his disciples was the first Tatekawa Dansho.

In other words, the source of rakugo’s “Tatekawa” apparently lies in the name of a canal in Sumida, in eastern Tokyo. It has nothing to do with the Tama tablelands. If you meet someone outside Tachikawa Station proudly claiming “this is where Danshi came from”, gently stop them.

Even so, I feel the misunderstanding is a slight loss. If rakugo’s Tatekawa really were this town’s name, perhaps Tachikawa would have become a town that laughs at itself more easily. A town bad at boasting could use a little of the storyteller’s nerve.

Bokusui’s wife, Kishiko Wakayama, and the poets of the Poetry Path

Now for Kishiko Wakayama, who sat among the judges of the citizens’ song.

By the North Exit of Tachikawa Station stands a monument inscribed with a tanka (a 31-syllable poem) by Bokusui Wakayama, one of Japan’s best-loved poets. It carries the poem he wrote in Meiji 39 (1906), when he was a student and rested at a teahouse in front of the station. According to the city’s walking-course guide, the monument was erected in Showa 25 (1950) by volunteers to mark the tenth anniversary of city status. The characters on its face, the guide says, were written by Bokusui’s widow, who had moved to Tachikawa after the war with her son Tabito, an architect and poet.

That widow was Kishiko Wakayama. According to the encyclopaedia, Kishiko, despite her own illness, kept the home while her husband was forever travelling, wrote poems, and after Bokusui’s death in Showa 3 (1928) completed The Complete Works of Bokusui in twelve volumes. As one of the leading women poets of the early Showa era, she also selected poems for women’s magazines for many years. She died in Showa 43 (1968).

Bokusui himself was only a passing traveller who stopped at a teahouse by Tachikawa Station. But his wife and son became residents of this town after the war. She wrote out her husband’s poem on the monument by the station and judged the citizens’ song. Today a monument with Kishiko’s own poem stands on the Nekawa Greenway. The family of a passing poet became caretakers of the town’s culture.

On the Nekawa Greenway is a stretch the city calls the “Poetry Path” (Shiika no Michi). Monuments carrying haiku, tanka and poems by writers closely connected with Tachikawa line a route of about 2.4 km. Kishiko’s reads: Hitori iru wa / asa koso yokere / wakatake no / tsuyu furikobosu / kaze ni fukarete — “If you are to be alone, / morning is the time: / blown by the wind / that shakes the dew / from the young bamboo.” When you remember that the woman who sang that solitude is best in the morning was the woman who spent her life waiting for a travelling husband, the poem reads a little differently. The monument to her son Tabito sings of rain beginning to fall on the Tama River and of budding willows.

On the same path is a monument bearing the name Togo Nakano. According to the encyclopaedia, Nakano was born in Meiji 41 (1908), the eldest son of a wealthy family in what was then Sunagawa; he was a scholar of the history of economic thought, and a tanka poet. He became the first principal of the old-system Tachikawa Senmon Gakko (a vocational college), which opened in Showa 22 (1947), and later the first president of Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa Junior College. The city chronology also records, under Showa 22, “Tachikawa Senmon Gakko (now the Metropolitan Junior College) opens.” What this man, who led a school in the town so soon after the war, wrote was a remarkably gentle poem: Kawara ni kawara nadeshiko / saku mo yoshi / sora o utsushite / mizu sumu mo yoshi — “On the riverbank / the river pinks in bloom: good. / The water running clear, / mirroring the sky: / good, too.” According to the encyclopaedia, Nakano died in a Tachikawa hospital in Heisei 2 (1990), and ten years later, on 7 July Heisei 12 (2000), the monument to this poem of the river pinks (wild kawara-nadeshiko) was unveiled below a park on the river terrace in Shibasakicho. On the day of Tanabata, the star festival, a poem about riverbank flowers turned to stone.

Incidentally, in the row of judges for the Showa 32 citizens’ song you can also see the name of another poet with a monument on this path, Teiji Yagishita (八木下禎治). The Poetry Path is also the path of the people who chose the citizens’ song.

Osamu Mori, garden scholar born in Tachikawa Village

There is also someone who was born in Tachikawa and gave his whole life to the gardens of Kyoto and Nara.

According to the encyclopaedia, Osamu Mori (森蘊) was born in Meiji 38 (1905) in Tachikawa Village, Kitatama District. He graduated from the Faculty of Agriculture of Tokyo Imperial University and in Showa 27 (1952) joined the Nara National Cultural Properties Research Institute. He earned a doctorate in engineering for his study of Katsura Imperial Villa, and worked to restore Japanese gardens by combining the study of old documents with on-site surveys and excavations of the gardens themselves.

The vermilion arched bridge in the old Daijo-in Garden in Nara, and “Seijo no Taki” at Hokongo-in in Kyoto, Japan’s oldest man-made waterfall, were restored by Mori, it says, after repeated historical research and field surveys. After his death, the drawings, sketches, manuscripts and notes he left at the Nara institute were catalogued in 2019 and exhibited in 2021 at the Heijo Palace Site Museum. Measure, draw, write it all down. He must have been a meticulous man.

A boy born in a village of mulberry fields and woodland would later dig up the flow of water in gardens a thousand years old. According to the encyclopaedia entry on Tachikawa Airfield, when the airfield was built in Taisho 11 (1922), the land was forest, wild grassland and farmland that was mostly mulberry fields. Mori was born seventeen years before that. The only thing you could call a garden was probably the windbreak woods around farmhouses. Perhaps people raised on flat land with nothing on it are the ones most strongly drawn to where a single stone, or a single thread of water, is placed.

Ultraseven’s monsters, and a Faret ventilation shaft

There was a Tachikawa man behind the tokusatsu (special-effects) shows that obsessed Showa-era children too.

The art director Noriyoshi Ikeya (池谷仙克) was born in Tachikawa in Showa 15 (1940). According to the encyclopaedia, he worked as an assistant in special-effects art and as a designer of mechanical props on Tsuburaya Productions’ Ultraman, and was promoted to special-effects art designer on Ultraseven. From episode 31 he also took over monster design, replacing Toru Narita, who had left the show. Later he formed the Kodai Group with the director Akio Jissoji, with whom he had worked in television, and moved into art direction for films, winning the Japan Academy Film Prize for Best Art Direction for Masahiro Shinoda’s Sharaku and Setouchi Moonlight Serenade. Seven’s monsters and the Edo streetscapes of Sharaku came from the same hand.

One anecdote conveys his character. Because he had done gymnastics, he tried acting in the hero’s suit during the filming of the special-effects show Silver Kamen, failed a landing and broke a bone, and afterwards came to the set on crutches. The man who drew the monsters got hurt inside the hero. From the monsters’ point of view, it may be a little satisfying.

Another artist was born in Tachikawa in the same Showa 15: the sculptor Shintaro Tanaka. According to an obituary published by the Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tanaka was born in Tachikawa on 13 May 1940 and later moved with his family to Hitachi in Ibaraki Prefecture. He took part in avant-garde art movements and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in Showa 47 (1972). There, the obituary records flatly, a work of acrylic sheets propped against the wall slid down early in the exhibition, and the tens of kilograms of golden iron filings held between them flew into the air. On the opening days of an international show, the work started dancing by itself.

A work by that same Tanaka is in Tachikawa now. Faret Tachikawa, north of the station, is a public-art district where the town’s street fixtures were turned into art, and the city’s list of works includes Shintaro Tanaka’s ventilation shaft, Kaze no Fuku Basho (“A Place Where the Wind Blows”). The sculptor came back to the town of his birth as a ventilation shaft. I wonder how many people walk past it without stopping, as it goes on breathing out the air from underground.

A film director, a haiku poet and a composer, born or raised in Tachikawa

Showa-era cinema has a Tachikawa name too.

The film director Kiyoshi Nishimura was born in Tachikawa in Showa 7 (1932). According to the encyclopaedia, he went to Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School and spent his days steeped in films while working part-time at the US military’s Yokota Air Base. He graduated from Hitotsubashi University, joined the Toho studio, served as assistant director to Akira Kurosawa, Mikio Naruse and others, and made his directing debut in Showa 44 (1969) with Shinu ni wa Mada Hayai (“Too Early to Die”). Toho had high hopes for him as an unusual action director, and he later made many television dramas. Did the American air he breathed in that part-time job on the base flow somewhere into his urban, hard-boiled images? That is only my imagination, but it’s a career that makes you want to imagine it.

The haiku poet Momoko Tsuji, according to the encyclopaedia, was born in Yokohama in Showa 20 (1945) and grew up in Tachikawa. Her father, a painter, drilled sketching from life into her; she later led the haiku magazine Doji under the banner “Haiku is fun”. According to a newspaper obituary, she died on 11 June 2025 in a hospital in Tachikawa. She spent her later years in Aomori, but she reached the end in a hospital in the town where she grew up.

Anyone who has played in a Japanese school wind band may recognise the name of the composer Hiroaki Kuwahara. According to the encyclopaedia, he was born in Tachikawa in Showa 16 (1941), studied composition at Kunitachi College of Music, and won a wind-band composition prize in Showa 45 (1970). He also composed “Dorian Rhapsody for Wind Band”, the set piece for the junior high school division of the All-Japan Band Competition in fiscal Showa 52 (1977). Anyone who was in a junior high school band that year spent a summer wrestling with the score of a man born in Tachikawa. He died in 2022.

In the world of book design, too, there is a Tachikawa native. According to the encyclopaedia, the graphic designer and film critic Hitoshi Suzuki was born in Tachikawa in Showa 25 (1950), spent twelve years at the office of Kohei Sugiura and then went independent. He died in 2023. Behind the cover of a book you pick up in a shop, the work of someone born in Tachikawa is sometimes hidden.

In an unexpected place, professional baseball, there was a Tachikawa man too. According to the encyclopaedia, Hajime Toyokura, a former administrative vice-minister of construction, was born in Showa 2 (1927) in what was then Tachikawa Town, and from Heisei 12 (2000) until the post of league president was abolished in 2008, he was president of the Central League, one of Japan’s two professional baseball leagues. He died in 2013. Tachikawa, never once called a baseball town, produced a man who sat at the top of a league.

Akai Koen: a band’s name that became a bench

Finally, I want to tell of someone who died young.

The four original members of the girls’ band Akai Koen (“Red Park”) came from Tachikawa. According to the local news site Tachikawa Keizai Shimbun, they met as older and younger members of the light-music club at Higashimurayama-Nishi High School, formed the band in 2010, began playing with a live house in Tachikawa as their base, and made their major-label debut in 2012. On guitar was Maiko Tsuno.

In 2014 the band set out to give something back to their home town. According to the music news site Natalie, they raised 1,376,000 yen through crowdfunding, beating their 1-million-yen target, and Tachikawa City, backing the plan, decided to give the square in front of the Children’s Future Center the popular name “Akai Koen” — Red Park. On 9 November a red bench with the band’s logo carved into its legs was placed there, and an unveiling ceremony held. The band also wrote a drawing song for Tachikawa’s mascot Kururin (a children’s song that teaches you to draw a character line by line), and the city still introduces that song on its official website as “written by Akai Koen, a girls’ band from Tachikawa”.

A band’s name became the name of a real park. The other way round is common enough; this direction is rare.

Tsuno died in October 2020, and the band ended about twelve years of activity at a concert the following May. The square in front of the Children’s Future Center is right by the entrance to Tachikawa Manga Park, a library-like reading space packed with manga. There must be children who finish their manga and sit on the red bench to put their shoes back on. When they learn where the bench’s name came from will probably be a long time from now.

Is Tachikawa a town that lets people go without a word?

Back to the opening question. Is Tachikawa a town that raises people and then lets them go without a word?

Half of the answer, I think, is yes. Seiji Ozawa left after six years, Alan Hale after four months. Osamu Mori went to Nara, Shintaro Tanaka to Hitachi, Kiyoshi Nishimura to the film studios. There is only one honorary citizen. Tachikawa is not a town that calls out names loudly at the backs of those leaving.

But the other half is different. This town took in the family of a passing poet, had her write the characters on the station monument and choose the citizens’ song. It welcomed back, as a ventilation shaft, a sculptor who had left the town of his birth. It turned a local band’s name into the name of a square. Instead of calling out loudly, it quietly makes a place for people somewhere in town, before anyone notices. That seems to be Tachikawa’s way.

The citizens’ song of Showa 32 sang “Great Tachikawa” three times. Today’s Tachikawa probably no longer adds the “Great”. Instead, on the monument at the North Exit, on the Nekawa Greenway, on a Faret ventilation shaft, and on a bench in front of the Children’s Future Center, people’s names remain in silence. Only those who walk notice them.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), three days. According to the encyclopaedia entry on Seiji Ozawa, the father, eldest brother Katsumi and second brother Toshio lashed the piano, passed on by relatives in Hakuraku, Yokohama, to a handcart and hauled it to the family home in Tachikawa over three days. On that piano, the boy began to study music seriously.

Before you go

• Bokusui Wakayama’s poem monument: in front of the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, in a corner of the bus terminal. According to the city’s walking-course guide, the characters on it are in the hand of his wife, Kishiko Wakayama. Guide: Tachikawa City, “Walking courses in Tachikawa”: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004848/1004888.html
• The Poetry Path (Nekawa Greenway): monuments to Kishiko Wakayama, Tabito Wakayama, Togo Nakano and others. About 15 minutes on foot from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, or about 1 minute from Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail (per the city’s guide to Tachikawa Park). The monuments’ locations are on the “map of poem monuments in the city” on the city page above.
• Shintaro Tanaka’s Kaze no Fuku Basho at Faret Tachikawa: in Faret Tachikawa, about 3 minutes on foot from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station. Find the work’s location in the official guide: https://www.faretart.jp/
• The square in front of the Children’s Future Center (“Akai Koen”): 3-2-26 Nishikicho, Tachikawa. 13 minutes on foot from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, or 7 minutes from Nishi-Kunitachi Station on the JR Nambu Line (per Tachikawa Manga Park’s official access guide).
• Tachikawa Daiichi Elementary School: formerly Tachikawa National School, where Seiji Ozawa studied. Visitors cannot enter the school, so please just pass by the gate.
• Tachikawa’s honorary citizen and Citizens’ Honour Award: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/gaiyo/1005930/1005953.html / https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/gaiyo/1005930/1005950.html
• From Shinjuku: take the JR Chuo Line (Rapid) to Tachikawa without changing trains. The Bokusui monument and Faret are on the North Exit side; the Poetry Path, the Children’s Future Center and Fusai-ji are on the South Exit side.
• Combine with: start at Bokusui’s monument at the North Exit, cross to the South Exit, walk the Poetry Path on the Nekawa Greenway, and drop in at Fusai-ji Temple (where Tachikawa’s first school opened) on the way back, and you can link the footsteps of these people in half a day.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains and the monorail, and check opening days on official sites before visiting any facility.

After the walk, back to Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Spend half a day following people’s footsteps, and your head is full while your body is colder than you expected.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the same North Exit side as Bokusui’s monument, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. 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 you can drop in after looking at the monument in the morning, or after coming back from the Nekawa Greenway in the evening.

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. You can come empty-handed.

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

The woman who wrote the characters on the station monument must surely have walked through this North Exit crowd almost every day. On a floor above it, you can let out a long breath.

Cover photo: Front gate of Tachikawa Daiichi Elementary School, today’s form of the national school Seiji Ozawa entered (Photo: Suikotei / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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