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

Buying at farm stands: Minore Tachikawa’s two-millionth visitor and strawberries gone in 20 minutes

If you want to buy what Tachikawa’s fields produce, start at a farm stand — in Japanese, a chokubaijo, a direct-sales shop where farmers sell their own produce. The biggest is Farmers’ Center Minore Tachikawa (ファーマーズセンターみのーれ立川), at 2-1-5 Sunagawa-cho, on the north side of Showa Kinen Park. According to the city, it opened in 2013 as a hub linking “farming, commerce, industry and tourism,” selling produce grown in the city and specialities recommended by the tourism association, sharing information about Tachikawa and giving residents a place to meet. It is open from 10:00 to 17:00 and closed from 31 December to 4 January. There is parking for about 80 cars. The guide map describes the direct-sales corner as stocking seasonal vegetables, starting with Tachikawa’s own Tokyo udo, fruit such as pears and blueberries, and eggs from ukokkei silkie chickens, among other things.

On 25 March 2026, Minore Tachikawa welcomed its two-millionth customer. According to the city, the two-millionth visitor was a resident of Tachikawa, who was presented with a box of fresh vegetables by the head of JA Tokyo Midori, the local agricultural co-operative, and a bouquet by the head of the city’s Agricultural Promotion Section. The commemorative gift from a farm stand was a box of vegetables. There could be no more fitting present. Two million people in thirteen years is a respectable number of people who came to buy vegetables.

Minore Tachikawa also has the “Minore Cafe,” with a menu using local ingredients, which opened on 24 April 2015. Next to the JA Tokyo Midori head office at 1-14-1 Saiwai-cho there is also the “Minore Tachikawa Saiwai-cho Store,” open from 9:30 to 16:00.

There is a farm stand in the town centre, too: “Nokaru Bazaar” (のーかるバザール), on the ground floor of the Kotorinku (コトリンク) building. According to the city, it has produce grown in Tachikawa, and also local sake and specialities from Omachi in Nagano Prefecture, Tachikawa’s sister city. From April 2026 it is open from 10:30 to 19:30 Monday to Saturday, and until 17:00 on Sundays. You can buy Tachikawa vegetables on your way home from work.

You can even buy vegetables at City Hall. Farm sales are held in the multipurpose plaza on the first floor of Tachikawa City Hall. The remaining dates for fiscal 2026 are 27 October, 19 November, 10 December and 17 December, from 11:00 to 13:30 (planned). Vegetables, fruit, bento lunch boxes made with local vegetables and specialities from Omachi are on sale.

In the record of these sales there is one line I had to read twice. It is a report the city posted in March 2026 about a sale at which a strawberry grower from the city sold fully ripened strawberries in person. The time is given as 11:00 to 11:20, followed in brackets by “Sold out.” Twenty minutes after opening. On the ground floor of City Hall, bright red strawberries vanished in twenty minutes. Anyone who wants to buy Tachikawa strawberries should plan around strawberry time, not City Hall’s opening hours.

The locations of the farm stands and a seasonal sales calendar are collected in the “Tachikawa Agricultural Products Guide Map,” which the city revised in November 2025. It is handed out at City Hall, the tourist information corner, the Central Library, the Children’s Future Center, Minore Tachikawa and Nokaru Bazaar, and can also be read on the city’s website. According to the calendar, broccoli comes twice, autumn to winter and early summer; tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers in summer; pears from late summer into autumn. The vegetables on the shelves change with the seasons.

When buying is no longer enough, it is time to step into the fields.

Getting into the fields: volunteer helpers, allotments and harvest days

Tachikawa’s en’no volunteers — “farm-support volunteers” — are a scheme in which people help, without pay, farmers who are short of hands because there is no successor or because they are getting older. According to the city’s guide map, it began in 2003 when five farmers took volunteers in, and the number of farmers hoping to host them has grown since. As of March 2026, 84 people were active, and that year the mayor presented letters of thanks to two people for twenty years of service, six for fifteen years, four for ten and one for five. Someone has been going to the same farm for twenty years.

To take part, you need to be interested in farming and healthy enough to keep up two or three days a week over a long period. You can take part even if you live outside the city. Transport and work clothes are at your own expense. Once you register with the city, it introduces you to a farm that suits your conditions and wishes, you meet on site, and the work begins. Many people stay with the same farm for a long time, the city says.

For those who cannot manage two or three days a week, there is another door. “Tokyo En’no Volunteer,” run by the Tokyo Development Foundation for Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, recruits farm volunteers who can join casually for as little as half a day, and the City of Tachikawa’s page points to it. The foundation’s headquarters, as mentioned, is in Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa. So the organisation that coordinates farm volunteers across all of Tokyo is based here.

The list of host farms on the city’s page lets you see a year in the fields just by reading it. At a poultry farm in Nishisuna-cho, volunteers collect and wash momiji eggs and silkie eggs and clean the henhouses. As a precaution against bird flu, people who do not go to places where chickens are kept and do not travel abroad often are preferred, and it is even better if you can drive a manual car. A farm in Kamisuna-cho grows udo and broccoli; it is especially busy in autumn and is looking for people interested in working with udo. In Wakaba-cho there is work carrying in and planting potted flowers, flower seedlings and vegetable seedlings. One of the few places in Tokyo where being able to drive a manual car is actually useful.

For people who feel uneasy about turning up at a farm cold, the city also runs a basic course for farm-support volunteers. In fiscal 2026 it starts on 12 September and has six sessions. You learn about soil building, the role of compost, Tachikawa’s agriculture and the Tachikawa Jirushi brand; you go on to plant out onions and prune fruit trees; and at the final session on 27 February there is instruction in, and a test drive of, a tractor and a cultivator. A six-month course that ends with driving a tractor. As graduation exams go, it is hard to imagine a more cheerful one.

If you want a plot of your own, there are city allotments. Tachikawa opened its first city allotment garden on 1 March 2009. There are now two, both in Shibasaki-cho: Shibasaki No. 1 (98 plots) and Shibasaki No. 3 (97 plots). One plot per household, about 10 square metres. The fee is ¥8,000 for one year and eleven months. Applicants must be residents of Tachikawa and, because there is no parking, able to get to the garden without a car. Ten square metres is about six tatami mats: a field the size of one small Japanese room. The city’s page shows photos of the entrance and of summer vegetables growing.

If you want to learn as you grow, there are hands-on farms, where you do everything from sowing to harvest under the technical guidance of the farm owner, who prepares the planting plan, the seeds, the seedlings and the tools. There are five in the city, with plots of 25 to 30 square metres. According to the guide map, the fee is ¥45,000 to ¥48,300 a year, including the cost of buying your harvest.

If you just want to touch a field for one day, there are harvest experiences. The city’s listing for autumn 2026 includes peanut digging at a farm in Nishisuna-cho, ¥500 for one plant or ¥1,000 for three (with one kilogram guaranteed if you take three), and an autumn harvest at another orchard where, for ¥6,000 per group, you pick persimmons, “Tokyo Gold” kiwifruit and Beni Haruka sweet potatoes. Then, on 21 November, the “Tachikawa Jirushi Citizens’ Harvest” is held in the north plaza of Minore Tachikawa. It is open to people registered as residents of Tachikawa: in three sessions of 50 groups each, participants harvest around five kinds of vegetable, such as Chinese cabbage and turnips. The fee is ¥1,000 per group. The headline on the city’s notice reads, roughly: “Grab your local veg! Freshness off the charts!” It has an energy you would not expect from a city hall.

(Some of these programmes are for residents only, and dates and vacancies change every year — check the city’s pages before you plan around them.)

The people who farm, and the fields’ big days

A field is only a field when there are people. According to the city’s guide map, as of the end of March 2025, 84 farm businesses with 112 people — certified farmers who have set five-year goals for efficient farm management and been approved by the mayor, plus certified new farmers who have only recently started — were active in Tachikawa. Growers’ groups line up crop by crop: the nursery tree growers’ association, the agricultural technology society, the fruit growers’ association, the udo growers’ association, the livestock association. There is the “Tachikawa Strawberry Society” of the city’s strawberry growers, and the “Kakaya Marché Tachikawa,” a group of women farmers who mainly sell in person. And the “Tachikawa Noukenkai,” a group of keen young farm successors, runs harvest experiences for parents and children and teaches food and greenery classes at primary schools. The sweetcorn and potatoes that children pull up at the summer parent-and-child harvest were grown by the Noukenkai.

The fields also have their big days. The events column of the guide map lists the year’s produce shows. In late June there is the summer vegetable show for tomatoes, aubergines and the like; in late August, the fruit show for pears and grapes; in early November, the day before the Agriculture Festival, the produce show, which judges not only vegetables and fruit but also nursery trees and flowers. In mid-February comes the Tokyo udo show. The judges are staff from JA and from the metropolitan government’s agricultural departments, and the judging is closed to the public, but afterwards there is a sale where you can buy the produce that was entered. You can take home, there and then, the vegetables that passed the judges’ eyes. A produce show is also a shop for the best-grown vegetables in town.

In spring, the Greening Festival is held in the north plaza of Minore Tachikawa. According to the guide map, it takes place in late April, with free saplings, displays and sales of nursery trees, wild plants and bonsai, and gardening classes and advice corners. It is the tree festival of the town of Tokyo’s number-one nursery trees.

In winter, a citywide event has begun as well. According to the city, “Tachikawa Jirushi Broccoli & Strawberry Week 2027” is a ten-day event in mid-January in which several restaurants in the city serve dishes using freshly picked Tachikawa broccoli or Tachikawa strawberries. Around the same time there will be promotional sales of broccoli and strawberries in front of Tachikawa Station and panel displays at supermarkets and farm stands, and a tour of the growing sites is planned. Among the places where restaurants can source Tachikawa vegetables, Nokaru Bazaar and Minore Tachikawa are listed alongside Granduo Tachikawa, the station building. The station square and the fields are closer than you might think. For ten days one winter, broccoli from the northern fields will appear on the menus of restaurants by the station.

“Somewhere about Tachikawa’s size is the best”

At the start, I asked what crop is grown over the largest area in Tachikawa. The answer was nursery trees. 8,747 ares. Over an area more than four times that of broccoli, Tachikawa’s fields grow greenery you cannot eat.

But having finished my research, what strikes me is not so much the answer as the fact that the answer sounds surprising at all — and that this is very Tachikawa. To anyone who knows only the bustle in front of the station, it will all be a surprise: fields more than half the size of all the fields in the 23 wards, three products that are number one in Tokyo, farmland that serves as a refuge in a disaster. Even people who live in Tachikawa may not know all of it.

The research institute that thinks about the future of Tokyo’s fields, and the foundation that coordinates farm volunteers across Tokyo, are both in this city. A hundred years ago an experiment station came to the village; after the war it became one with Sunagawa; in the late Showa years the names of the farm-town districts were born. Tachikawa’s agriculture took more than a century to reach its present shape.

A city’s pride is not always in front of the station. About twenty minutes north by bus, in the fields, broccoli is fighting Nerima over a single tonne, and the trees in the nursery fields are waiting for the day they will be planted in some plaza somewhere.

Tachikawa kurai ga, ichiban ii. Stand in the middle of a field, and you will probably understand what that little phrase means.

Quiz answer

The answer is (A), 1 tonne. According to the City of Tachikawa, in the 2018 broccoli harvest Tachikawa was first with 153 tonnes and Nerima Ward second with 152 tonnes. The ranking is based on harvest volume.

Before you go

• Farmers’ Center Minore Tachikawa: 2-1-5 Sunagawa-cho, Tachikawa (on the north side of Showa Kinen Park). Open 10:00–17:00; closed 31 December to 4 January (according to the city). From bus stop No. 2 at the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, take a bus bound for “Oyama Danchi Orikaeshijo” (大山団地折返場) or similar, get off at Sunagawa Gosaro (砂川五差路) and walk 2–3 minutes; the bus ride takes about 20 minutes (according to JA Tokyo Midori). Latest information (Japanese): https://ja-tokyomidori.or.jp/minore/
• Minore Tachikawa Saiwai-cho Store: 1-14-1 Saiwai-cho, Tachikawa. Open 9:30–16:00.
• Nokaru Bazaar: ground floor of the Kotorinku building. Monday to Saturday 10:30–19:30, Sunday until 17:00 (from April 2026).
• List of farm stands and seasonal sales calendar: “Tachikawa Agricultural Products Guide Map” (Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/sangyo/nogyo/1004077/1004155.html
• Volunteering, allotments, hands-on farms and harvest days: application details are on the city’s agriculture pages (Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/sangyo/nogyo/index.html . Recruitment periods and vacancies change from year to year, and some programmes are open only to Tachikawa residents.
• Seasons: broccoli from mid-October to February and from May to mid-June; Tokyo udo from mid-December to April (according to the city).
• Getting to Tachikawa: from Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line; Tachikawa is on the line, with no change needed. Check the current timetable before you set off.
• Combine it with: Minore Tachikawa is on the north side of Showa Kinen Park. Enter the park by the Sunagawa Gate and walk through Komorebi no Sato, the recreated farming village of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and you can compare the Showa fields with today’s in a single day. The Sunagawa windbreak woods along the Itsukaichi Kaido road are on the route of our Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa walk.
• Practical tips: carry an IC transport card such as Suica or PASMO; it works on trains and buses alike. The fields are private land and people’s livelihoods: look from the road, and do not step in or pick anything unless you are on an organised harvest experience.

After the fields, the North Exit

Spend a day crouched pulling weeds as a farm volunteer and your back and knees will stiffen more than you expect. Even after only pulling up peanut plants on a harvest day, some part of your back will start to make itself heard the next morning. Farm work is a whole-body workout.

One minute’s walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a hot yoga studio heated by lava-stone plates. Besides lava-stone hot yoga, it offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lesson.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30. Even after the farm stands have closed, there is still time to drop in.

A trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and a yoga mat included in the rental. You can come just as you are, bag of vegetables and all.

Pregnant guests cannot take part in 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.

Studio information: https://ontheshore.jp/ — trial lesson booking: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

At the end of a day with soil on your hands, stretch out slowly once more on the third floor of a building by the station. In Tachikawa, the fields and the station are much closer than you think.

Cover photo: The Tokyo Metropolitan Agriculture and Forestry Research Center in Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa, hub of Tokyo’s farm research. (Photo: Nyao148 / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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