Tachikawa History Walk: Famous People Who Passed Through the Town

None of them was born in Tachikawa, yet a silent TV star, a jazz composer, a US civil-rights pioneer and a crime novel all left traces here. Follow their steps.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Noppo-san graduated from a high school in Tachikawa.

Write that down for a Japanese reader and most of them will not believe it. I didn’t either. For two decades Noppo-san, the tall, silent man of the NHK children’s programme Dekiru ka na (“Can You Do It?”), cut paper, glued boxes together and spoke to the children of Japan with nothing but gestures. His nickname means, more or less, “Mr Beanpole”. That this man finished high school not in Kyoto, not in the old downtown of Tokyo, but in Tachikawa (立川), in the middle of the Tama area, the long western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, seemed somehow wrong.

The previous article in this series chased the people who were born in Tachikawa (see Tachikawa’s famous people, from Seiji Ozawa to a comet): the conductor Seiji Ozawa, the discoverer of a comet, a scholar of gardens. While I was making that list, a number of names kept spilling off its edge. They were not born in Tachikawa. But they studied in Tachikawa, played music in Tachikawa, lived in Tachikawa, or hid Tachikawa deep inside a novel.

Once I started pulling on the thread, they just kept coming. The man who composed the “dabada” jingle of the Nescafé commercials. A man who changed the history of the American civil rights movement. A grand master of the Japanese detective novel. And the inspector from that TV police drama.

Why did so many people leave footprints in Tachikawa, a town where none of them was born? Is Tachikawa simply a place people happen to stop at on their way somewhere else? Or is it precisely because it is on the way that something begins here? With that question in my pocket, I set out to follow, one by one, the traces of people who came from elsewhere.

Counting Tachikawa’s famous connections, everything but birth

First, I set myself one rule.

A connection between a person and a place, once repeated without checking, quickly turns into legend. Every town in Japan has its share of “apparently so-and-so used to live here”. So this time I write only about connections on which at least two sources agree: biographical dictionaries, the person’s own words, newspapers, official university records. For people who are still active today, I limit myself to what they have said in public and to their public careers.

With that rule in place, I sorted the connections by type, and four types emerged.

The first is people who studied here. Tachikawa has a high school that goes back to the Meiji era (1868–1912), and since the last years of the Showa era (1926–1989) it has had a college of music. The second is people who were in Tachikawa during the base years, when the town hosted a large US air base: people who played music there, and people who lived there as servicemen. The third is people who put Tachikawa into their work. The fourth is people who lived here: those whose first home in Tokyo was in Tachikawa, and those who moved here as children because of a parent’s job.

Each type includes someone whose face anyone in Japan could picture from the name alone. And every one of them is the kind of person about whom, if you asked a Tachikawa local “did you know?”, you would probably get a shake of the head.

Let us begin with those who studied. And let us begin at the gate of one high school in Nishikicho.

Noppo-san graduated from Tachikawa High School

According to NHK’s records, Noppo Takami (高見のっぽ) was born in the city of Kyoto in 1934. According to the encyclopaedia, he was born in Uzumasa in Kyoto, and his father was a performer, a stage magician and an actor as well. From the age of four he grew up in Mukojima in Tokyo, and in the fourth year of primary school he was evacuated to the town of Kasamatsu in Gifu Prefecture. He finished junior high school there, entered Gifu Prefectural Kano High School and spent the time up to his second year of high school in Gifu. Then he came back to Tokyo, transferred to Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School, and graduated from it.

The school he transferred to was founded in 1901 as the Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School. A school guide written for prospective students says that it has built up more than 120 years of history since its foundation in 1901, and that its ethos is shitsujitsu goken (“simplicity and fortitude”) and jishu jiritsu (“self-direction and self-discipline”). The school was born because people in the Tama area raised their voices, asking that their children be able to receive a secondary education. Today, alongside its general course, it also has a course called Creative Science and Mathematics.

Kyoto, Mukojima, Gifu, and then Tachikawa. A boy who had straddled two high schools finally received his diploma from this school, heir to Tama’s old prewar middle school.

The road after that was anything but smooth. According to the encyclopaedia, Takami began his career as a dancer, working his way up from cabaret jobs until he appeared at the Nichigeki Music Hall, but after that the work did not keep coming. According to NHK’s records, he taught himself tap dance and went on stage while working as the bag carrier for his father, the performer.

The turning point came in 1966. He appeared for more than twenty years on Nani Shite Asobo (“What Shall We Play?”), which started that year on NHK’s educational channel, and on its successor, Dekiru ka na. With no lines at all, using only gestures, he made things with his hands. Japanese children of the Showa era grew up in front of the television, watching a tall man fold paper in silence.

Dekiru ka na reached its final episode in March 1990. The encyclopaedia and several other records say that in that last episode Noppo-san spoke to the children for the first time. A man who had kept quiet for twenty years opened his mouth on the final day.

All the same, I can’t help thinking about it. The ethos of the school he graduated from is “self-direction and self-discipline”. Discipline yourself. If the result of that discipline was a man who did not say a single word for twenty years, then few graduates can have embodied their school’s ethos so completely. Though, of course, the school surely never asked that much of anyone.

Noppo Takami died in September 2022. The last days of high school for a man who spent his life facing children without words were spent in Nishikicho, Tachikawa.

And through the same gate passed one more unexpected person. This one, far from keeping quiet, talked for his whole life.

Sadao Shoji, through the same gate at Tachikawa High

Asatte-kun, Tamma-kun, Salaryman Senka (“A Course for Salarymen”). Anyone of the generation that leafed through Japanese newspapers and weekly magazines will have seen at least one of these comic strips.

Their creator, Sadao Shoji (東海林さだお), is also a graduate of Tachikawa High School. According to the memorial article in the monthly magazine Bungeishunju, Shoji was born in 1937 in Koenji, Tokyo. His father worked for Konishiroku, the photographic company now known as Konica Minolta, but after the war he started a liquor shop in Hachioji. Shoji graduated from Tachikawa High, spent a year studying for the entrance exams again, and then entered Waseda University, where in his second year he joined the newly founded manga club and met the cartoonists Shunji Sonoyama and Hosuke Fukuchi. The encyclopaedia entry follows exactly the same course.

According to the encyclopaedia, the boy moved from his wartime evacuation in Yamanashi to Tochigi, spent the years up to his second year of junior high school there, and set his heart on becoming a cartoonist. How that boy found his way to a high school in Tachikawa, the sources do not say. What did a high-school student who had decided to become a cartoonist draw in the classrooms of a school descended from Tama’s old middle school? We can only imagine, which is a little frustrating.

Shoji left university without graduating, kept taking his work to publishers, and in 1967 began serials such as Shoji-kun. Alongside the comics, he was read for decades as an essayist on food. One look at the title Are mo Kuitai Kore mo Kuitai (“I Want to Eat That, and I Want to Eat This Too”) tells you most of what you need to know about the man.

And in April 2026 he died, aged 88. That was this spring.

Here I made one unnecessary calculation. Noppo-san was born in 1934, Sadao Shoji in 1937. Three years apart. Going by their birth years, if the two were ever in the school buildings at the same time, it was only very briefly. Most likely they missed each other. But imagining is free. A senior who goes on making things without saying a word, and a junior who wrote book after book about food. The same school sent out into the world a master of silence and a master of talk at almost the same time.

Of all the people who walk past the school gate in Nishikicho, I wonder how many picture these two faces.

Let us leave the school for now and turn to the days when Tachikawa was still a “base town”. There, we find the composer of a melody that played in living rooms all over Japan.

The composer of the “dabada” jingle played piano at the US Tachikawa base

A wordless “dabada” scat sung over a coffee commercial on television. Anyone born in Japan in the Showa era can hum it.

According to the encyclopaedia’s entry on Nescafé, the music used in the commercials for Nescafé Gold Blend has been, with some exceptions, “Mezame” (“Awakening”), composed by Masao Yagi (八木正生), with the “dabada” scat sung by Kayoko Iju. A biographical dictionary also lists the Nescafé commercial song “Mezame” among Yagi’s compositions.

As a young man, that same Masao Yagi played music at the base in Tachikawa.

According to a biographical dictionary published by Nichigai Associates, Yagi was a jazz pianist born in Tokyo in 1932, and after the war he played at Club Rio in Tsukiji and at the US military’s Tachikawa base, among other places. The encyclopaedia names the same two places. The name of the Tachikawa base appears, plainly written, in the very first lines of a jazz pianist’s career.

Another entry in the same dictionary carries a story that made me laugh a little. After the war, from about his third year of junior high school, Yagi formed a Hawaiian band with his friends and played the steel guitar. The band also played at the camps of the occupation forces, but there were frequent blackouts in those days, and without electricity a steel guitar makes no sound. So, the dictionary says, there were times when he had no choice but to play the piano. It does not say which camp the story comes from. Even so, if a blackout produced a pianist, then the electricity shortages of the postwar years were quite a talent scout.

The range of his later work is astonishing. According to the dictionary, over his lifetime Yagi wrote music for nearly 200 films: the Abashiri Bangaichi (“Abashiri Prison”) series, the Furyo Bancho (“Delinquent Boss”) series. The theme song of the TV anime Ashita no Joe (“Tomorrow’s Joe”) is also Yagi’s composition. In the 1980s he took part in arranging songs for the Japanese rock band Southern All Stars.

Let me line them up. The stage at the Tachikawa base, the snowfields of Abashiri, Joe in the boxing ring, and the morning cup of coffee. In the work of a single composer, places this far apart are joined together. The Nescafé commercials were famous for their tagline about “the man who knows the difference”. Perhaps the man who wrote their music first learned, by ear, to tell the differences while playing in a base club to American servicemen who did not speak his language.

Yagi died in 1991. Now, whenever the “dabada” plays, I find myself picturing, just a little, the stage at the base in Tachikawa.

But the same base was home to a different kind of person too. One American serviceman, on the audience side of the stage. What he thought about in Tachikawa would later shake the United States itself.

James Meredith and Tachikawa Air Base, “where I became a man”

In 1962 a Black student enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the American South. It was the first time an African American had been admitted to this racially segregated state university. His enrolment set off a riot, and the federal government sent in troops to put it down: an event that stands in the history of the civil rights movement. The student’s name was James Meredith. According to the English-language encyclopaedia, 31,000 American servicemen were required to quell the violence. For one student to enrol, a small town’s worth of soldiers was set in motion.

According to the same encyclopaedia, Meredith was born in 1933. After graduating from high school in 1951 he enlisted in the Air Force, and he served until 1960: nine years in uniform.

The last three of those years were spent in Tachikawa.

According to an article in the American military newspaper Air Force Times, Meredith spent his last three years in uniform, from 1957 to 1960, at Tachikawa Air Base near Tokyo. And he described that base as the place “where I became a man”. The Japanese-language encyclopaedia also records that during his Air Force years he was posted to the Tachikawa base in Tokyo.

Why Tachikawa? The article quotes him at some length. “I never felt inferior as a human being in Japan,” he said. Japan was, to him, a whole different universe: a nonwhite, thousand-year-old civilization. And it was in Japan, he said, that he came to fully realize that white supremacy and the inferior position of Black people in America were not natural, but something human beings had constructed.

The article also describes a scene. Out walking in the Japanese countryside, Meredith met a young boy. The boy was surprised to learn that he came from the American South, and turned out to know a great deal about America’s racial problems. This time it was Meredith who was shocked, and ashamed of the stain on his own country. “I knew then,” he said, “that I had to leave the Air Force, come back to Mississippi, and go to war.”

The American review journal Kirkus Reviews, writing about his 2012 memoir A Mission from God, also notes his recollection that the only time he experienced fairness and respect was while stationed in Japan in the late 1950s.

In 1960 Meredith left the military and went home. Two years later he made the University of Mississippi open its doors.

When we talk about Tachikawa as a base town, we tend to remember only the stories of American culture flowing into Japan: jazz, films, Coca-Cola bottles. But the current did not run one way. Among the American servicemen who lived in Tachikawa were some who received something in Japan and carried it home with them. What one of them carried home forced open the gate of an American university.

When I lie on the lawn of Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park), which was laid out on part of the former base, and remember that this was once a military airfield, I make a point of remembering one more thing. This land was also the place where a young man realised what was wrong with his own country.

There was also someone who turned his eyes to the shadow side of the base town: a writer who changed the Japanese detective novel.