Tachikawa Walk: Fusai-ji Temple’s National Treasure and Suwa Shrine

South of Tachikawa Station: Fusai-ji’s stone pillar, the city’s only National Treasure, and Suwa Shrine, said to date from 811. Highlights and how to get there.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tachikawa’s only National Treasure is a stone about as tall as a person. It stands in a residential neighbourhood south of the station, and it has been standing there for 660 years.

Where is the oldest thing in Tachikawa (立川)? If someone had asked me that, I would have been stuck for an answer. North of the station, department stores line up and the monorail track cuts across the sky. The South Exit has its office blocks too. A new town, everyone thinks.

But trace the map south with your finger and, just before the land drops to the Tama River, you find a district called Shibasaki-cho. There stands a stone carved 660 years ago, and a shrine said to have welcomed its deity from Shinano (today’s Nagano Prefecture) 1,200 years ago. There is even a National Treasure.

Why are Tachikawa’s old things gathered not in front of the station but out on the southern fringe? This walk is a journey after that one mystery. The answer only reveals itself to those who walk to the end.

A Tachikawa history walk starts on the river terrace of Shibasaki-cho

Leave Tachikawa Station by the South Exit and walk south, away from the tracks. Shop signs, apartment-block walkways, bicycles waiting at the lights. Little by little the scenery around the station grows lower. The sky grows wider.

Tachikawa Monogatari, the city’s history newsletter, gives directions to Fusai-ji Temple (普済寺) like this: head south from JR Tachikawa Station, then about 700 metres west of Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail, in 4-chome Shibasaki-cho. The temple sits on a river terrace of the Tama. In spring, it says, you can look down on the row of cherry trees along the Ne River, and on a clear day see mountains in the distance.

A river terrace is a step left behind as a river cuts down through the land. People have lived on the upper step and opened paddies on the lower. Feet used to the flatness around the station feel a slight incline around here. That is the signal that you are entering old time.

Shibasaki is the name of what was, in the Edo period, Shibasaki village. The city’s walking-course guide describes this area as the centre of the former Shibasaki village (later Tachikawa village). New houses stand on top of an old place name.

The city’s guide contains one slightly odd line. In the Edo period, it says, the Nakajima family served as headman of Shibasaki village, alternating year by year with another family. The village’s leader changed every year. Every year was a handover year. I can’t help imagining the paperwork.

The Nakajima residence was visited in 1809 (Bunka 6) by Ota Nanpo, a shogunate official and man of letters. Please remember the name. It will turn up again, in an unexpected place.

What the terrace bluff has held

The edge of the terrace has not held only peaceful history.

According to the city’s guide, at Yamanaka-zaka there was an air-raid shelter dug into the bluff. Before dawn on 4 April 1945 (Showa 20), the air-raid sirens sounded, and elderly people and children from nearby fled into the shelter. A 250-kilogram bomb hit it directly, and 42 people died. Thirty-two of them were children. Today a small Jizo hall stands there (Jizo being the bodhisattva who watches over children), and it is said there are always flowers and incense.

Landforms protect people, and sometimes trap them. In front of the bluff, I stood a little longer than usual. Then I climbed the slope toward the temple.

Fusai-ji Temple and the Tachikawa clan: time asleep beneath a residence

Fusai-ji is a Zen temple of the Kencho-ji branch of the Rinzai school. According to the city’s guide, it was founded in 1353 (Bunna 2), during the period of the Northern and Southern Courts, by the Tachikawa clan, a warrior band powerful in the area, as their family temple. As its founding priest they invited the eminent monk Motsugai Kaju from Kencho-ji in Kamakura.

Who were the Tachikawa clan? The city library’s research guide says they were warriors of a family belonging to the Musashi Shichito, the “Seven Bands of Musashi,” and are thought to have had their residence at Fusai-ji. The city has published several excavation reports under the very name “Site of the Tachikawa Clan Residence.” Each time the temple’s pond or approach was redone, they dug beneath it and investigated.

Reading the abstract of a 2002 report, I was struck by the range of finds. Jomon pottery. Ancient roof tiles. From the medieval layers, ceramics and earthenware, whetstones and stone mills, and itabi, flat stone Buddhist memorial slabs. In the early-modern layers, traces of roads, ponds and ditches, mixed with Hizen and Seto-Mino ware.

Beneath a single temple precinct lie layers from the Jomon period to the Edo period, asleep.

The city’s timeline takes you back further still. At the Mukogo site, straddling Nishiki-cho and Hagoromo-cho, traces of people from the Paleolithic, some 13,000 years ago, have been found. Jomon settlement remains have been confirmed at the Owada site in 4-chome Shibasaki-cho and at the Mukogo site, and Nara- and Heian-period settlements at the Owada and Shimo-Owada sites in Shibasaki-cho. The assumption that Tachikawa is a new town is overturned here in units of ten thousand years.

Some people look for traces of the residence above ground. On a travel-review site, one visitor wrote that there is a raised mound in front of the main hall, and that something like an information board stands there on its own. The residence itself does not survive. Seeing it as it was, it seems, still takes imagination.

Back to the Tachikawa clan’s residence. The clan was just one set of occupants in that long succession. Good views, water close by. Good locations keep being chosen as the eras change. The land calls people to it.

Fusai-ji has another unexpected side. According to the city’s guide, the temple printed and published Buddhist scriptures known as the “Fusai-ji editions,” and was the centre of Buddhist culture in the region at the time. Medieval Tachikawa had a publishing house. It is considerably senior to the big bookstores by the station.

But if you expect a moss-covered ancient temple, you will be disappointed. In 1995 (Heisei 7), a fire of suspicious origin burned down the main hall and other buildings. The seated statue of the founding priest Motsugai, an Important Cultural Property, and a seated Shakyamuni Buddha designated a city cultural property were lost, and the city-designated group of itabi stone slabs was damaged. Today’s buildings are reconstructions.

Burned, and rebuilt on the same spot. Perhaps the age of a place lives not in its buildings but in that will.

The name “Tachikawa,” the first school and the village office

What surprised me most in Fusai-ji’s history was the Meiji part. According to the city’s timeline, in 1870 (Meiji 3) a local school was opened at Fusai-ji. It was the beginning of today’s Tachikawa Municipal Daiichi Elementary School. The school was renamed “Gueigakusha” in 1872 (Meiji 5) and “Shibasaki School” in 1878 (Meiji 11).

Then in 1881 (Meiji 14), Shibasaki village changed its name to Tachikawa village. The school became “Tachikawa School.” The city library’s materials also trace the start of Tachikawa City to this 1881 change from Shibasaki to Tachikawa village. The village called Tachikawa was born here, in Shibasaki.

In 1889 (Meiji 22), with the new town-and-village system, Tachikawa became an independent village. The timeline says it borrowed Fusai-ji and its sub-temple Shingen-an to set up the Tachikawa village office and hold the village assembly. That same year, the Kobu Railway opened and Tachikawa got a station.

Tachikawa’s first school opened at Fusai-ji, and Tachikawa’s first village office was set up in a corner of Fusai-ji too. Do graduates of today’s Daiichi Elementary know their school began at a temple with a National Treasure? If you are looking for Tachikawa’s “1-chome, number 1,” its very first address, it is not in front of the station but here in this temple’s grounds.

So where did the name “Tachikawa” itself come from? According to the city library’s research guide, there are many theories. The local-history book Tachikawa no Chimei (Place Names of Tachikawa) is said to list seven theories in its fourth chapter. Seven. It is rare for a town to have so many stories prepared for a single place name. The library’s guide lists search keywords such as the Tachikawa clan, the Musashi Shichito, the Tama River, Fusai-ji and Suwa Shrine. I will not choose just one here.

So what has come through the fire and still stands here today?

The National Treasure six-sided stone pillar: guardians at human height

What has made Fusai-ji’s name known beyond Tachikawa is a single stone.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs’ National Cultural Properties Database lists it simply as “Sekito.” One item; category, archaeological material; period, Northern and Southern Courts; date, 1361. A note says it is “inscribed in the 7th month of Enbun 6.” It was designated an Important Cultural Property on 14 April 1913 (Taisho 2) and a National Treasure on 14 November 1953 (Showa 28). It is the only National Treasure in Tachikawa City. A National Treasure stands in a town in the middle of Tama. Plenty of Tachikawa residents surely don’t know even that.

What is a sekito? According to Tachikawa Monogatari, a to (幢) is one of the ornaments used to adorn buddhas and bodhisattvas, something like a banner or streamer. Normally it is made of cloth; a sekito is one made of stone. The form came from China, where they were made from the Tang dynasty onward.

Fusai-ji’s sekito is made of six slabs of chlorite schist known as Chichibu blue stone. Each slab is 166 cm tall, 42 cm wide and 9 cm thick. They are assembled on a hexagonal base and topped with a hexagonal cap stone and a sacred jewel. Two faces bear the Nio guardian kings, Agongo and Ungongo, and four faces bear the Four Heavenly Kings: Zochoten, Komokuten, Tamonten and Jikokuten.

166 cm. Almost exactly human height. You neither look up at the guardians nor down; you face them at nearly the same level. It is the distance at which a Nio glares at you head-on. I have no memory of doing anything wrong, yet somehow my back straightens.

Like an itabi, but not an itabi

A sekito resembles an itabi, a stone memorial slab that serves as a Buddhist stupa marker. It differs in two ways. The slabs are assembled into a hexagon. And the slabs are carved with images.

Several chlorite-schist sekito have been confirmed in Saitama Prefecture. But examples that survive with their form intact are rare. Fusai-ji’s six-sided pillar is said to be the only one carved with figures. To see this form combined with these images, you have no choice but to come to Shibasaki-cho in Tachikawa. The stone comes from northern Musashi, around today’s towns of Nagatoro and Ogawa. Easy to split into slabs, this stone was used in Tachikawa as far back as the Jomon period.

Blue stone split from the rock of northern Musashi, carried all the way to a terrace above the Tama River. Before it is any one temple’s treasure, the six-sided pillar is a witness to the reach of the land called Musashi.

The inscription, and the two who carved it

The inscription survives only on the Komokuten face: “施財性了立” “延文六秊辛丑七月六日” “道圓刋”. It is explained as meaning that on the 6th day of the 7th month of Enbun 6 (1361), under the sponsorship of a man named Shoryo, it was carved by Doen.

Who was Shoryo, and what kind of craftsman was Doen? The records say nothing more. All that remains is two names and a summer date. Still, carving one’s name means entrusting one’s work to later generations. Six hundred and sixty years on, there are people reading those names.

Komokuten, guardian of the west, holds a brush and a scroll, as if writing something down. His brow is furrowed and his mouth pressed into a straight line. On his belly is a shigami, a decorative beast’s face. Jikokuten, guardian of the east, wears armour and holds a sword. Across the tops of the six slabs are carved auspicious patterns: plants, animals, shells and the Seven Treasures.

The faces re-read by 3D scanning

But these details are hard to make out with the naked eye. The stone is worn.

In the Edo period, this sekito featured in the antiquarian catalogue Shuko Jisshu and in the illustrated guide Edo Meisho Zue. And Ota Nanpo wrote about it too. Yes: the same man of letters who visited the Shibasaki headman’s residence. Shibasaki village was firmly on the map of Edo’s antiquarians.

Popularity had its price. Antiquarians would have visited Fusai-ji and taken rubbings, writes a member of the city-history committee. Each time washi paper was pressed on and inked, the wear built up. There were periods when it had a thatched roof against the rain, and periods when it stood exposed to wind and rain. Today all six faces are badly worn. Loved so much it wore away. The fate of the popular has not changed in 600 years.

So the city-history project took on 3D measurement, recording the stone’s shape without touching it. They took 1,800 photographs inside the protective shelter. In images emphasising relief, undulations unreadable in rubbings rose like ridgelines. Even the fine lines of tied-up hair became visible, it is said.

Today’s computers re-reading chisel marks from 600 years ago. The stone says nothing. But change the way you ask, and it still begins to talk.

Shibasaki-cho in numbers

• 811 — The year Suwa Shrine is said to have welcomed the god of Shinano. More than a thousand years before the Kobu Railway arrived.
• 1361 — The year in the stone pillar’s inscription. We even know the day: the 6th of the 7th month.
• 166 cm — Height of the stone slabs. Just right for locking eyes with a Nio.
• 1,800 — Photos taken for the 3D scan. As holiday snaps go, rather a lot.
• 8 sho of sake — The thank-you gift to the lion dancers in 1733 (about 14 litres). Exactly the same at both festivals.
• 1 — Year: the term of a Shibasaki village headman. The Nakajima family took turns with another family.

The traveller’s detour quiz

In Edo-period Shibasaki village, which family took turns with the Nakajima family as village headman, a year at a time?

• A　The Tachikawa family
• B　The Suzuki family
• C　The Igarashi family

The answer comes at the end of this walk.

Leaving the stone, I headed back toward the station, still within Shibasaki-cho. The other old place has moved house once in 1,200 years.