Tachikawa Farms Guide: Farm Stands, Harvest Days and Tokyo’s Fields

Tachikawa has more farmland than half of central Tokyo, and its biggest crop is not a vegetable. Farm stands, harvest days and the fields behind the station.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Stand at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station and farmland is the last thing on your mind. People stream along the elevated deck, department-store and station-building signs line up in a row, and the monorail glides overhead. It is, I think it is fair to say, the most city-like station square in the whole Tama area — the western half of Tokyo, beyond the 23 central wards, where most visitors never go.

Open the statistics of Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, though, and another face of the city appears. Tachikawa (立川) has 240 hectares of farmland. Add up every field in all 23 wards of central Tokyo and you get 417 hectares, so this one city has comfortably more than half that. Somewhere beyond this station lie fields close to 60 per cent the size of all the farmland in Shinjuku, Setagaya, Nerima and the rest of the wards put together.

And as I read further, I ran into another odd fact. The crop grown over the largest area in Tachikawa, it seemed, was not broccoli, and not the city’s famous Tokyo udo either. Then what was it? The answer turned out to be a little unexpected. I decided to start walking the fields of Tachikawa, Tokyo’s farm town, from the numbers.

How big is farming in Tachikawa? A town with more fields than half of central Tokyo

Let me lay out the figures first. According to the ministry’s “Waga Machi, Waga Mura” (“Our Town, Our Village”) statistics, Tachikawa has 240 hectares of cultivated land, and all of it is upland fields. The area of rice paddy is zero hectares. The city’s total land area is 2,436 hectares, so roughly a tenth of the city is farmland. Tachikawa holds 3.9 per cent of all the cultivated land in Tokyo. Compare the cities of Tokyo in the same statistics and Tachikawa’s fields are the fifth largest of the 26 cities, after Hachioji, Ome, Machida and Akiruno.

In the 2020 Census of Agriculture and Forestry, Tachikawa had 244 farm businesses, and 507 people who worked on the farm for 60 days or more in the year. The estimated agricultural output for 2024 was ¥1.16 billion, of which vegetables accounted for ¥690 million.

Tachikawa also has three products that are number one in Tokyo: Tokyo udo, broccoli, and nursery trees. The city’s free “Tachikawa Agricultural Products Guide Map” presents Tachikawa farming as the complete set: vegetables, fruit trees, nursery stock, flowers and livestock. In the city’s own words, Tachikawa is a pioneer of “urban agriculture,” with some of the highest production volumes in Tokyo.

None of these numbers is easy to picture from the station square. But this is Tachikawa’s other face.

So what grows over the largest area of those 240 hectares? Let me give away the answer to the opening mystery now.

The biggest crop is trees: nursery stock and the “Tachikawa Jirushi” treasures

The “Tachikawa farming in numbers” page of the city’s guide map takes crop-by-crop areas from Tokyo’s “Agricultural Data Book by Region and Municipality” (fiscal 2023) and turns them into pie charts. In the vegetable pie, the biggest slice is broccoli, at 2,024 ares (an are is 100 square metres, so about 20 hectares). Next come spinach at 1,726 ares, cabbage at 1,382 ares and taro at 1,091 ares. So far, very much a vegetable town.

Then I looked at the pie for fruit and “other,” and could hardly believe my eyes. Almost the entire circle was one green slice. Nursery trees: 8,747 ares. More than four times the area of broccoli. The thing grown over the largest area in Tachikawa is something you cannot eat.

The guide map says that both the area and the number of nursery trees grown are number one in Tokyo. The trees are planted not only in the city’s own green spaces, it says, but also in the greening that comes with large developments, helping to shape the urban landscape and make comfortable places to be. A few of the zelkova trees planted in front of some new office building, or the street trees around some plaza, may well have grown up in a Tachikawa field. The city’s greenery is being raised in the city’s fields. Farmers’ Center Minore Tachikawa, the big farm stand, even has a nursery and flower section selling these trees, number one in Tokyo by number grown. It is the kind of shop where someone could go in for vegetables and come out hugging a tree.

The fruit column has its own small puzzle. The guide map says pears are the fruit produced in the greatest quantity in the city, and lists varieties such as Hosui, Kosui and Inagi — these are nashi, the round, crisp Japanese pear. Yet look at the areas, and Japanese pears cover 225 ares, only about half the 443 ares of blueberries. Blueberries take nearly twice the land; pears win on quantity. Considering the size of the fruit, that is only natural. To pick the same weight of blueberries as one pear takes a great deal of patience. There are also 738 ares of chestnuts and 546 ares of persimmons, followed by Japanese apricot (ume) and kiwifruit.

There are livestock figures too: 104 dairy cows, 38 beef cattle, 1,100 pigs, 6,700 laying hens, 400 broiler chickens, and 17 colonies of honeybees. Tachikawa has cows, pigs and chickens. The guide map introduces a brand of pork called Yawaraton (柔豚, roughly “tender pork”), raised on bread as feed so that the fat has a good aroma and the meat is tender, and says that the café at Minore Tachikawa serves udon noodles with this pork. A pig raised on bread becomes a bowl of wheat noodles. The wheat has gone all the way round in a different form.

Tachikawa’s farm produce shares a common mark. In fiscal 2021, the city and the Tachikawa Agricultural Promotion Council — the group of the city’s farming organisations — held nine “strategy meetings” with ten growers representing the farmers of the city, and out of them came a brand for all of Tachikawa farming: Tachikawa Jirushi (立川印), “the Tachikawa mark.” The city’s page records the thought the growers put into it. Look at Tachikawa farming, feel it, taste it. Then you will surely find yourself agreeing that “Tachikawa kurai ga, ichiban ii.”

The phrase is hard to put into English. Ichiban ii means “the best.” Kurai means “about” or “roughly,” the word you use when you do not want to sound too sure of yourself. So: “Somewhere about Tachikawa’s size is the best.” I like this one line better than the title of any article in this series. It claims to be number one, and then, with that little “about,” takes a step back. It captures, in a phrase, the bashful boasting of the people of this city.

The brand message lists the treasures that carry the Tachikawa mark: carefully grown vegetables and fruit; Tachikawa’s speciality, udo; the gift of life received from animals; flowers and trees that refresh the heart; and farm-education projects that connect to the future. Trees, cows and children’s farm experiences all sit under the same mark.

Now, the best-known vegetable among those treasures: broccoli. Its “number one in Tokyo” came with a footnote that made me laugh out loud.

Broccoli: number one in Tokyo, one tonne ahead of Nerima

The city’s page of local specialities introduces broccoli like this: a vegetable of the genus Brassica in the mustard family; Tachikawa is number one in Tokyo for production, and many farmers grow it. It is in season twice a year, from mid-October to February and from May to mid-June.

On the same page is a ranking table, taken from Tokyo’s survey report on crop production. For the 2018 broccoli harvest, first place goes to Tachikawa with 153 tonnes. Second place is Nerima Ward with 152 tonnes. Third is Higashi-Kurume with 98 tonnes.

One tonne.

Tachikawa and Nerima, a ward of north-western central Tokyo, share the summit of Tokyo with one tonne between them. A tonne is a thousand one-kilogram bags. Out of 153 tonnes, a thousand bags decided the title. It is as close as a tug-of-war at a school sports day. Beneath the table, the city has added a note: the ranking is based on harvest volume. By area, Tachikawa’s 2,111 ares are well ahead of Nerima’s 1,542, but by harvest the race is tight. You can understand why the city felt the need to add “based on harvest volume.”

In later figures Tachikawa has held on to the top. Citing the fiscal 2023 data book, the city’s guide map proudly announces that broccoli is number one in Tokyo for both planted area and harvest. The area is 2,024 ares, the largest of any vegetable in Tachikawa.

The other number one in Tokyo, Tokyo udo, is a white vegetable that grows in a pit three metres underground without ever seeing light. I wrote about it in detail in our Tokyo udo article. In winter in Tachikawa, broccoli above ground and udo below come into season at the same time. The winter fields have two storeys.

Tokyo’s farm town in numbers

• 240 — hectares. The cultivated land of Tachikawa. More than half of the 417 hectares of all 23 central wards combined.
• 0 — hectares. Tachikawa’s area of rice paddy. For its rice, the city relies on other people’s paddies.
• 8,747 — ares. The area of nursery trees. More than four times that of broccoli. Tachikawa’s biggest crop is inedible.
• 1 — tonne. The difference in the 2018 broccoli harvest between Tachikawa in first place and Nerima Ward in second.
• 17 — colonies. The honeybees kept in the city. In Japanese, bees here are counted not by the individual but by the colony.
• 84 — people. Volunteer farm helpers active as of March 2026. The number of people from outside farming families who help keep the fields going.

A wayfarer’s quiz

In the 2018 broccoli harvest, how big was the difference between Tachikawa, first in Tokyo, and Nerima Ward, second? (A) 1 tonne (B) 10 tonnes (C) 100 tonnes. The answer is at the end.

Farm-town names born in the Showa era: from Sunagawa to Tachikawa

Where exactly are Tachikawa’s fields? Line up the addresses of the host farms listed on the city’s page for volunteer farm helpers and a map appears: Nishisuna-cho, Ichiban-cho, Kamisuna-cho, Kashiwa-cho, Saiwai-cho, Sakae-cho, Wakaba-cho. All north of the station, and far north at that.

I looked these district names up in the city’s official timeline. 1970: “Sakae-cho starts.” 1971: “Wakaba-cho and Saiwai-cho start.” 1972: “Kashiwa-cho starts.” 1981: “Kamisuna-cho starts”; 1982: “Ichiban-cho starts”; 1983: “Nishisuna-cho starts.” All of them are new names, born in the second half of the Showa era (1926–1989).

Before that, this whole area was the town of Sunagawa. Sunagawa went from village to town in 1954, and merged with Tachikawa in 1963. In 1970 the town’s district names and lot numbers began to be reorganised, and from around then, new names with bright, cheerful sounds — Sakae (“prosperity”), Wakaba (“young leaves”), Saiwai (“happiness”), Kashiwa (“oak”) — were born one after another. Many of the names of the districts where the fields are today date from the late Showa years. The longer story of Sunagawa, opened up as new farmland at the start of the Edo period, I told in our Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa walk.

What did Tachikawa’s fields look like in the Showa era? In Showa Kinen Park, the national government park next to the city centre, the “Komorebi no Sato” (“village of dappled sunlight”) recreates the farming landscape and life of the Musashino plain in the 1955–1964 period, with rice paddies, fields, a farmhouse and its windbreak woodland. The park explains why it chose that era: it was a little before the high-growth years, a time when many good old things still remained, and people who know it from their own experience can still pass it on directly. The late 1950s and early 1960s were also when full-scale udo production began in Tachikawa. After sericulture (silkworm raising) declined in the late 1940s and early 1950s, farmers looking for winter off-season income began to dig holes beneath their fields.

The city’s timeline also preserves some farming events of the Showa era. 1975: “A consumers’ farm is born.” 1981: “The first Agriculture Festival is held.”

Put side by side, it looks like this.

• Then (the late 1970s and early 1980s): a consumers’ farm is born, and in 1981 the first Agriculture Festival is held. Farmers’ addresses move from the old place names of Sunagawa to new district names like Sakae, Wakaba and Kashiwa.
• Now (2026): two city allotment gardens in Shibasaki-cho with 195 plots, and five hands-on farms where the owner teaches you. The Agriculture Festival is held every November together with “Tachikawa Rakuichi” in the Midori no Bunka Zone of Showa Kinen Park, and a takarabune, a “treasure ship” built from Tachikawa produce, is put on display.

For anyone who remembers that first festival in 1981, it must be moving that the festival which began then still decorates a treasure ship every autumn. For younger people, the scene itself — farmers displaying a treasure ship in a park you can walk to from the station — may be the novelty.

Let me add one poem about Tachikawa’s fields. On the “Path of Poetry” along the Negawa Greenway, there is a stone inscribed with “Negi” (“Leeks”), a poem by the sculptor and poet Takamura Kotaro. It sings of leeks sent to him by a friend in Tachikawa and calls them “children of the wind that races across the Santama plain, winter’s elite.” (Santama is the old name for the Tama area.) The leeks that reached the poet from Tachikawa came wrapped in the winter wind.

The Showa farm town holds one more unexpected thing. The place that studies Tokyo’s agriculture itself is in Tachikawa.

Tokyo’s farm research hub is in Tachikawa

The city’s timeline records that in 1920, the agricultural experiment station of Tokyo Prefecture began moving from Nakano to Tachikawa. This was when Tachikawa was still a village and did not even have its airfield.

Today, at 3-8-1 Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa, stands the headquarters of the Tokyo Development Foundation for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, a public-interest foundation that supports farming, forestry and fishing in Tokyo. According to the foundation’s history, in April 2005 the Tokyo agricultural, livestock and forestry experiment stations were merged into the “Tokyo Metropolitan Agriculture and Forestry Research Center,” which took on research work commissioned by the metropolitan government. The centre is also in Fujimi-cho. Tokyo’s vegetables, its cattle and its forests are all studied here.

The research into breeding udo with a lighter dormancy, which I introduced in the Tokyo udo article, is the work of this centre. The brain that thinks about the future of Tokyo’s fields has been placed in a town with 240 hectares of fields. A farm town with a farm research institute. In the city where Tokyo Prefecture’s experiment station arrived over a hundred years ago, the study of Tokyo’s agriculture continues.

There are researchers and there are fields. But fields in a city do not survive if they are left alone. Let me turn to the mechanisms that protect Tachikawa’s farmland.

How the fields are protected: productive green land, disaster farmland and 44 wells

The Ministry of Agriculture defines urban agriculture as “agriculture practised in urban areas and their surroundings,” and says it plays many roles: supplying fresh produce, offering places to experience farming, securing open space against disasters, and providing green space that brings calm and comfort.

The main mechanism that protects fields inside built-up areas is called seisan ryokuchi, “productive green land.” According to the City of Tachikawa, productive green land districts are designated in city planning to create a good urban environment, and building on them or changing the shape of the land requires the mayor’s permission. Originally only farmland of 500 square metres or more qualified, but a 2017 amendment to the law let municipalities lower that by ordinance, and in December of that year Tachikawa passed an ordinance allowing farmland of 300 square metres or more to be added if conditions are met.

The latest list of productive green land districts published by the city has 333 entries, totalling 181.64 hectares. The statistics are from different years, but compared simply with the 240 hectares of cultivated land, about three-quarters of Tachikawa’s fields are productive green land. At the very end of the list are small fields, such as 340 square metres in Sunagawa-cho and 320 square metres in Wakaba-cho. A field only a little bigger than a single tennis court has its own proper name on the city-planning map.

Productive green land also has a deadline problem. Thirty years after designation, the owner can ask the city to buy the land at any time, and the tax concessions are gradually lost. So from April 2018 a new system began: if land is designated “specified productive green land” before the thirty years are up, the date from which a purchase request can be made is pushed back ten years. Tachikawa issued its notice of specified productive green land on 3 March 2025. The fields survive on a promise renewed every ten years.

Tachikawa’s fields have one more face: disaster preparedness. Tachikawa is home to the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base, a national hub for responding to a major earthquake in the capital region, and the preparedness reaches all the way to the fields. According to the city’s guide map, under an agreement between the city and the Tachikawa Agricultural Promotion Council, farmland in the city can be used in an emergency to supply produce and as a temporary evacuation site. Not only fields with a sign on them: all of Tachikawa’s farmland counts as disaster-cooperation farmland. The city also has 44 “dual-use disaster wells,” which normally draw water for farming and in a disaster supply nearby residents with water for laundry and other daily needs.

In a city with a wide-area disaster base, even the fields were part of the safety net. If the worst happens, the broccoli field round the corner becomes a refuge, and water comes out of the well. It is another kind of preparedness, invisible from between the office buildings by the station.