イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

Tachikawa History Walk: Famous People Who Passed Through the Town

Tachikawa in the shadows of Seicho Matsumoto’s Zero Focus

Say Zero no Shoten (ゼロの焦点, published in English as Zero Focus) to a Japanese reader and most will picture the cliffs of the Noto Peninsula. The winter Sea of Japan, waves breaking against the rocks: a scene filmed again and again for cinema and television.

Seicho Matsumoto in 1955, aged 46, three years before Zero Focus began its serial run
Seicho Matsumoto in 1955, aged 46, three years before Zero Focus began its serial run
Photo: 文藝春秋 / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Yet the root of the novel’s mystery lies not on the Hokuriku coast but in Tachikawa.

According to the encyclopaedia, Zero Focus began its serial run in 1958 in the magazine Taiyo under the title Kyosen (“Dotted Line”). When that magazine ceased publication, it was continued in the magazine Hoseki under a new title, Zero no Shoten, now written with the kanji for zero (零). It came out as a book from Kobunsha’s Kappa Novels imprint at the end of 1959.

A newly married woman’s husband vanishes on a business trip to Kanazawa. She follows his trail through Kanazawa and the Noto Peninsula and arrives at a past she knew nothing about. According to a paper published this year in a bulletin of Hokkaido University, that past was this: during the occupation, he had worked in Tachikawa as a police vice-squad officer, rounding up women who sold themselves to American servicemen. A review introducing the 1961 film directed by Yoshitaro Nomura likewise describes how it emerges that the husband was for a time a vice-squad policeman in Tachikawa.

I will say no more here, for those who have not read it. I want only to say this: every thread of the story is tied in a knot somewhere in the night streets of postwar Tachikawa.

Tachikawa appears in the story of how the novel was born, too. The encyclopaedia, citing the recollections of the mystery writer Masao Yamamura, reports it like this. Matsumoto, who was then living in Kami-Shakujii in Nerima, went out between bouts of writing to a diner in his neighbourhood, and there encountered women who seemed to be from the US base in Tachikawa. What became of women like them afterwards? It was from turning that question over, the story goes, that he developed the idea.

The novel famous for the cliffs of Noto started out in Tachikawa, a town on a flat plateau with neither sea nor cliffs. People talk only about the scenes on the clifftop, but beneath them lies buried a broad, flat base town on the Musashino plateau.

Matsumoto wrote about the desperation of people trying to live with their pasts hidden. And he chose Tachikawa as the stage for that past. For the people who lived in the base town, that was not necessarily a welcome role. But Tachikawa did take on its share of the pain of the postwar era. More than half a century on, the novel still quietly teaches us that.

That has been a run of heavy stories. Next, I would like to tell one that is a little more fun.

Tachikawa’s famous connections in numbers

  • 1901 — the year the Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School, forerunner of Tachikawa High School, was founded. Noppo-san and Sadao Shoji are both graduates.
  • 20+ — years Noppo-san appeared on Nani Shite Asobo and Dekiru ka na. Almost entirely without words.
  • Nearly 200 — films Masao Yagi wrote music for. And on top of them, the “dabada”.
  • 3 — years James Meredith spent at the Tachikawa base. After that, two more years until an American university’s gate opened.
  • ¥50,000 — the monthly pay of a member of The Rockers (by his own account). The phone bill of their house in Tachikawa was split five ways.
  • 1978 — the year Kunitachi College of Music moved to the city of Tachikawa. The “Kunitachi” music college became a Tachikawa music college from then on.

Traveller’s detour quiz

When The Rockers, freshly debuted, were living in a former US military house in Tachikawa, how did work calls from their management office reach them?

  1. By telephone (B) By telegram (C) By carrier pigeon

The answer comes near the end of this article.

初日の汗は、予約した人だけが持ち帰れる。

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Takanori Jinnai and The Rockers: their first home in Tokyo was a US military house in Tachikawa

The actor Takanori Jinnai started out as the vocalist of The Rockers, a rock band from Fukuoka in Kyushu. According to the encyclopaedia, after five years as amateurs the band was scouted in Hakata in 1980 and made its record debut.

The first place the band lived after coming up to Tokyo was Tachikawa.

When Jinnai appeared on the Nippon Broadcasting radio programme Asa Navi in 2018, he told the story himself. As soon as they came up to Tokyo, they lived in a beigun house in Tachikawa, one of the detached houses known by that name because they were built for, or rented to, American base personnel. The management office rented it for them because, being a detached house, they could rehearse there too. “That,” he said, “was the mistake!”

What follows is funnier in his own words, so I will just set out the main points in order.

In Fukuoka they had got along fine for five years as amateurs. But once work and daily life were rolled into one, they started getting angry over how someone had left their shoes or their toothbrush. The phone bill was split equally five ways, yet there was one member who made ridiculously long phone calls. Nobody paid the bills, so the utilities were cut off one after another. The water was once cut off: the main tap had been shut and tied with wire, and someone went out to untie the wire. Their pay was 50,000 yen, nowhere near enough to live on. And yet they still bought stage clothes.

And their call to work came by telegram. “KYO SHIGOTO JIMUSHO KOI”: TODAY WORK OFFICE COME.

“This was the eighties, mind you,” Jinnai stressed. It was the kind of story that made the host, the actress Hitomi Kuroki, wonder out loud whether he was serious. According to the encyclopaedia, the band broke up in 1982. In his own words, they lasted a year and a half, and made three albums in that time.

According to the city’s chronology, the Tachikawa base was fully returned to Japan in 1977. A few years later, five young rockers who had come up from Fukuoka settled into one of those houses still called American military houses, and fought over where the toothbrushes went.

A detached house called by an American name became the stage for the poorest and noisiest period in the life of a Japanese rock band. The house must have been rather taken aback.

Where Yutaka Mizutani grew up, and a singing big brother from the music college

Finally, I want to tell of a man who spent his childhood in Tachikawa, and of people who studied at Tachikawa’s college.

The Kunitachi College of Music campus in Kashiwacho, Tachikawa, photographed in 2020
The Kunitachi College of Music campus in Kashiwacho, Tachikawa, photographed in 2020
Photo: Nyao148 / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The actor Yutaka Mizutani, known for playing Ukyo Sugishita in the police drama Aibo (“Partners”), was born in 1952 in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido. According to a review of Mizutani Yutaka Jiden (The Autobiography of Yutaka Mizutani) published on nippon.com, his family moved to Tachikawa, Tokyo, because of the job of his father, who worked on construction sites. At 12 he joined Gekidan Himawari, a children’s theatre company, and made his debut as a child actor in Magma Taishi (“Ambassador Magma”). The encyclopaedia says that when he was in his second year of primary school his father started a construction business in Tachikawa, and that he grew up in Tachikawa from then on.

A boy whose father worked on building sites grew up in Tachikawa and later became one of the most famous police inspectors in Japan. Of the people walking past Tachikawa Station, probably not many know that Ukyo-san’s boyhood was spent in this town. If they knew, the crowds in front of the station might look a little different.

Back to those who studied here. Kunitachi College of Music (国立音楽大学), near Tamagawa-Josui Station, is, despite its name, in Kashiwacho, Tachikawa. Kunitachi is the name of a different city. According to the college’s official history, in April 1978 the university’s registered location changed to the city of Tachikawa. An evaluation report by the Japan University Accreditation Association also records that the campus moved to Tachikawa in 1978. In other words, everyone who has studied at this college since then has studied in Tachikawa.

Then why “Kunitachi”? Go back through the same official history and you find the answer. Its predecessor, the Tokyo Koto Ongaku Gakuin (Tokyo Higher School of Music), opened in April 1926 in a temporary building in Yotsuya, and in November of the same year it moved into a new building in the university town of Kunitachi. The name is the name of the town where it was born and grew up. After half a century in Kunitachi, it brought the name along, unchanged, to its new home in Tachikawa. In 2008 the college signed an agreement on partnership and cooperation with the city of Tachikawa. Kunitachi by name, Tachikawa by address, on good terms with both.

Among its graduates is a favourite of Japanese children. According to the alumni profiles on the college’s official website, Daisuke Yokoyama is from Chiba Prefecture and graduated from the college’s department of vocal music in 2006. After a spell with the Shiki Theatre Company, in 2008 he became the eleventh uta no oniisan, the “singing big brother” who leads the songs on NHK’s children’s programme Okaasan to Issho (“With Mother”).

There is one more. The tenor Masafumi Akikawa, from Saijo in Ehime Prefecture, also studied vocal music at Kunitachi College of Music and its graduate school. According to the Japan Football Association’s profile of him, with the song “Sen no Kaze ni Natte” (“Becoming a Thousand Winds”) he became the first classical singer in history to reach number one on Japan’s Oricon singles chart.

The singing big brother of children’s television and the tenor of “a thousand winds” both did their vocal exercises in Tachikawa. The sky over Tachikawa, it seems, has had some very fine voices rising into it.

Is Tachikawa a town people only pass through?

Let us go back to the question we started with.

Not one of the people I followed this time was born in Tachikawa. A man born in Kyoto transferred here from Gifu. A man born in Koenji came to school from Hachioji. A man born in Mississippi arrived on Air Force orders. A band from Fukuoka lived in a house its management rented. A boy from Hokkaido moved here because of his father’s work.

In other words, all of them were on their way somewhere. On their way to some point in their lives, they stopped in Tachikawa.

But line them up, and in almost every case something began during that time on the way. Noppo-san went on to the life of a performer after finishing high school in Tachikawa. Masao Yagi went from the stage at the base to film music. Meredith realised in Tachikawa what was wrong with his own country. The Rockers spent the hardest season of their lives, just after their debut, in a detached house in Tachikawa.

Tachikawa has long been a junction where people and goods meet and pass. The railway came through in the Meiji era, an airfield was built in the Taisho era (1912–1926), and after the war it became the gateway to the skies of the Far East. A town that many people pass through is hard to remember. But for every person who passes through, something begins.

The people of Tachikawa do not boast much about this. This is a town that has named only one honorary citizen, even among the people who were born here. It probably does not bother to keep track of everyone who merely stopped by. So I am writing them down instead.

When you change trains at Tachikawa Station, the person walking beside you may also be on the way somewhere. If, a few decades from now, I find that person’s name on a list of “famous people with links to Tachikawa”, I will no longer be surprised.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), by telegram. According to what Takanori Jinnai said on a Nippon Broadcasting programme, the telegram from the management office read “KYO SHIGOTO JIMUSHO KOI”. This was the 1980s. A house that split its phone bill five ways got its work by telegram. Which was cheaper, not even Jinnai has said.

Before you go

  • Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School (都立立川高校): 2-13-5 Nishikicho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. The school from which Noppo-san and Sadao Shoji graduated. It is a place of study for its current students, so please do not go inside; simply walk past the gate. It is in the part of town on the South Exit side of JR Tachikawa Station. Official site: https://www.metro.ed.jp/tachikawa-h/
  • Kunitachi College of Music (国立音楽大学): 5-5-1 Kashiwacho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. According to the college’s access page, it is a 7-minute walk along the Seibu railway tracks from Tamagawa-Josui Station on the Seibu Haijima Line and the Tama Monorail. Check concert schedules and public events on the official site: https://www.kunitachi.ac.jp/access/
  • Showa Kinen Park (国営昭和記念公園): a national government park laid out on part of the site of the former US Tachikawa base. You can walk it while thinking of the base in the days of Meredith and Masao Yagi. Check opening hours, admission and closing days on the official site: https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/access/
  • Getting there: from Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line to Tachikawa Station without changing trains.
  • Combine with: take the Tama Monorail to Tamagawa-Josui Station and walk past Kunitachi College of Music, then ride back to Tachikawa-Kita Station and go on to Showa Kinen Park. Finish by looping round Nishikicho on the South Exit side, and in half a day you can loosely link the footprints of those who studied here and those of the base years.
  • General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains and the monorail, and check opening days and events on the official sites before you go.

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

The lawn on the former base, the path along the tracks by the music college, the school gate in Nishikicho. Follow the footprints on foot and the distance stretches further than you expect. Your head is full of names, but your body has cooled down a little.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, Tokyo, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店). 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 before a morning walk in Showa Kinen Park or after you come back from Nishikicho 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, so 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, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself. She holds Eiken Grade 1 and a perfect TOEIC score, once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and lived in Alaska for three years. If you don’t speak Japanese, just mention it when you book.

  • On the Shore: https://ontheshore.jp/
  • Book a trial lesson: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

Noppo-san said everything with gestures alone. Every now and then, it is not a bad thing to set words aside and spend an hour with nothing but your body.

Cover photo: The main gate of Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School in Nishikicho, where Noppo-san and Sadao Shoji studied (Photo: jullyzip / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

More Tachikawa Walks

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