Tachikawa Business Guide: Where West Tokyo Works and Starts Up

Tachikawa is busier by day than by night and leads Tama in new businesses. Its head offices, institutes, start-up desks, and the city’s plans for work.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tachikawa (立川) is more crowded by day than by night.

In the 2020 national census, 183,581 people lived in the city of Tachikawa. But the number of people in Tachikawa during the daytime was 207,832. The difference: just over 24,000. Every morning, enough people to fill a small town come into Tachikawa from outside the city, and in the evening they go home again.

In Tama, the long western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, where most towns are commuter suburbs, this is unusual. By the census figures, only two of Tama’s 26 cities have more people by day than by night: Tachikawa and Musashino. What’s more, this town is now giving birth to more new businesses than anywhere else in Tama. What do people come to Tachikawa to do? And where is the town’s next work about to come from? I decided to follow the crowd in front of the station to its destinations, by way of statistics and planning documents.

Why is Tachikawa a town people “come to work in”? First in Tama’s 26 cities for daytime population

First, I want to pin down the opening number.

The figure that shows how many people are present during the day for every 100 who live in a place is called the daytime-to-nighttime population ratio. According to a table in the city’s industrial promotion plan, drawn from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ 2020 census, Tachikawa scores 113.2, first among the 26 cities of Tama. Second is Musashino at 108.0, third Tama city at 99.5, and the average for the 26 cities is only 91.7. Only Tachikawa and Musashino go above 100.

In the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s report on the same census, Tachikawa’s figure is 115.4. The numbers differ because the metropolitan government uses values that fill in unknown answers, and in that version too Tachikawa is first among Tokyo’s cities. First whichever way you count. When you change the statistical ruler and the ranking doesn’t move, that is rather reassuring.

There is also a count of the daytime people who come to work. According to the metropolitan report, the number of people working in Tachikawa, the daytime employed population, is 120,543, fourth among Tokyo’s cities after Hachioji, Machida and Fuchu. Yet Tachikawa’s name does not appear in the top five cities for employed people who live there. It doesn’t make the top ranks by the number of people living in it, but as a place to work it comes fourth. Tachikawa is a town with a strong pull, drawing working people in from outside.

Counted from the side of the workplaces, it looks like this. According to the city’s industrial promotion plan, the 2021 Economic Census found 7,692 private business establishments in the city, employing 115,163 people. The number of establishments has been more or less flat since 2012, while the number of people working in them has grown since 2014.

The plan notes one particular feature of Tachikawa’s business line-up. Compared with neighbouring municipalities, branch offices make up a larger share of all establishments. Companies keep their head office in central Tokyo and put the base that covers Tama in Tachikawa. There are many companies like that. If you do business in Tama, you put up your sign in Tachikawa first. The many “Tama Branch” names on the directory boards of the buildings in front of the station were not my imagination.

The town’s specialities show up in the numbers too. Tachikawa’s specialisation coefficients compared with Tama’s 26 cities, measured by value added, are 2.64 for “finance and insurance”, 2.07 for “real estate and goods rental”, and 1.92 for “services (not elsewhere classified)”. The further above 1.0, the more that industry is concentrated in Tachikawa. Annual sales of goods, retail and wholesale together, come to 810 billion yen, second-largest in Tama’s 26 cities. Add up the sales of the companies in the city and you get 1.6558 trillion yen, in the sixties per cent of Hachioji, Tama’s largest city.

Finance, real estate, commerce, services. Line them up and you can see the “occupation” box on Tachikawa’s form. Moving money, letting land, selling things, sending people out to work. Less a town that makes things than the work of a junction, where people and money from all over Tama pass through.

But it was not always like this. There was a time when this town’s occupation smelled more of engine oil.

Back then: the aircraft factory and the air base were Tachikawa’s workplaces

In 1930 (Showa 5), Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing, then in Tsukishima in Tokyo, moved its factory to Tachikawa. (Showa is the imperial era that ran from 1926 to 1989; Japanese local records count years by era, so I give both.) It later became Tachikawa Aircraft. From 1934 it built the trainer known as the “Red Dragonfly” (Aka-tombo), eventually turning out 2,398 of them. Next to the airfield, many of the town’s workers were building aircraft.

When the war ended, the workplace was turned upside down. According to the city’s local-history booklet Tachikawa Monogatari (Tales of Tachikawa), the US forces who arrived in September 1945 requisitioned the airfield and the factories next to it. The factory workers lost their jobs, and one after another they went back to their home towns.

But work soon came back in a different form. When Tachikawa Air Base became the foremost transport base in the Far East, the same booklet says, it created a great many jobs: mechanics, cooks, housemaids, drivers. In the 1950 statistics, Tachikawa’s population finally passed the 60,000 of 1944, when it had been called a “military city”. From a town that built aircraft to a town that repaired them and cooked the soldiers’ meals. The masters of the workplace changed, but Tachikawa kept drawing people in.

The fishmonger by the station changed with the times too. Inageya (稲毛屋), which began as a fresh-fish dealer in 1900 (Meiji 33; the Meiji era ran from 1868 to 1912), introduced self-service at its Tachikawa North Exit shop in 1956 and started the first supermarket in “Toka”, the part of Tokyo outside the 23 wards. It is today’s Inageya supermarket chain. I wrote this story in detail in this series’ piece on Tachikawa as a shopping town.

After that, Tachikawa went through the return of the base and one more big event. According to the city’s plan, between 2000 and 2001 the value of the city’s manufactured goods shipments fell sharply as a result of the closure of Nissan Motor’s Murayama plant. In 2021 shipments were worth 77.519 billion yen.

Back then, Tachikawa’s workplaces had the sound of factories. Today, most of its workplaces are inside offices and shops. So what will Tachikawa’s workplaces of the future look like? The clue lies in the companies with their head offices here.

The head office is in Tachikawa: a sky company, a fishmonger’s descendant, a game studio by the station

I called it a town of branches, but there are head offices too. And rather individual ones.

The first is a descendant of the sky business. According to Tachihi Holdings’ corporate profile, its head office is in Tachihi Building No. 3 at 6-1 Sakaecho, Tachikawa. The group was founded in November 1924 (Taisho 13) and has 739 employees. The company that began by building aircraft now owns about 980,000 square metres of land, about one twenty-fifth of the city of Tachikawa, and on that land it builds shopping centres, an arena and a sandy beach. A company that used to build aircraft now builds a town.

The second is the fishmonger’s descendant. According to Inageya’s corporate profile, its head office is at 6-1-1 Sakaecho, Tachikawa. It moved its head-office functions to Tachikawa in 1985. Laying the addresses side by side, I laughed a little. The aircraft company and the supermarket company have their head offices on the same block, 6-1 Sakaecho. The history of the sky and the history of the kitchen sit next door to each other on the street map.

The third is a regional financial institution. Tama Shinkin Bank’s head office is at 3-4 Midoricho, Tachikawa. (A shinkin bank is a cooperative regional bank.) In 2020 it moved into a new head-office building, and opened an art museum inside it. You go to the head office of a cooperative bank to look at pictures. It makes Tachikawa’s high specialisation in finance seem rather fitting.

The fourth is the game company by the station. According to Nihon Falcom’s corporate profile, its address is 2-8-18 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, in the Tokyo Tatemono Faret Tachikawa Building. Founded in 1981, it is known for the Ys and Trails (Kiseki) series. In a corner of Faret Tachikawa, where 109 artworks stand about in the form of bollards and benches, adventure stories are written that are also released in North America and Europe. Anime pilgrimage is not the only reason game lovers from overseas might visit the front of Tachikawa Station.

The city’s industrial promotion plan carries a slightly proud column on this subject. Its title: “Is Tachikawa a town of subculture?” Tachikawa, it says, is home to the head office of a hobby manufacturer loved by fans around the world and the head office of a game maker with a long history, and in recent years bases connected with the content industry, such as video production companies working in animation and 3DCG, have also been confirmed. And it ends: perhaps Tachikawa can now be called not only a town of subculture but a base for creation and broadcasting in the Tama area, can it not? A municipal planning document puffing out its chest in the form of a question. I don’t dislike it.

The city has also prepared mechanisms to attract companies. According to the chronology in the plan, in 2010 it passed the “Tachikawa City Ordinance on Attracting Businesses to the Areas along the Urban Axis”. The urban axis is Sun Sun Road, the broad avenue that runs north to south through the former base land. On flat land that was once an airfield, an ordinance was made to bring in companies.

After the head offices, the national institutions. Tachikawa has another kind of “working person” as well.

The institutes and the offices moved in: the national design called a “business core city”

According to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism materials, in the Fourth Basic Plan for the National Capital Region in 1986, the state designated Hachioji and Tachikawa as “business core cities”. In the words of the same materials, Tachikawa became a town meant, as a business core city of the capital region, to gather commerce and business and to provide wide-area urban functions such as culture, research and disaster prevention. In 1995 the “Hachioji-Tachikawa Business Core City Basic Concept” was approved. It says that in Tachikawa it would strengthen business and commercial functions, beginning with the relocation of national government bodies, and bring in functions of culture, information and exchange.

Just as the concept said, national institutions came to the land of the returned base. The Local Autonomy College in 2003, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in 2005, the National Institute of Japanese Literature in 2008, and the Institute of Statistical Mathematics and the National Institute of Polar Research in 2009. The ministry’s materials count 345 staff across the five institutions as of 2011. A joint government building for the courts moved into the same block, and the city hall moved in next door. I walked the institute district in this series’ piece on Antarctica, so here I will only note what it means as a place of work. Every morning, people whose job is the Japanese language, or statistics, or Antarctica, commute to Tachikawa.

The city’s Fourth Tourism Promotion Plan sees another possibility in this corner. Because national research institutes are scattered around the area, it says, more foreign researchers and others will probably visit for inspections and research. On the grounds of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics there is even accommodation for visiting researchers, the Akaike Guest House, named after the Japanese statistician Hirotugu Akaike, a name statisticians around the world know. Research work brings people across borders to Tachikawa.

The public counters that support working people are gathered in Tachikawa too. The city’s industrial promotion plan lists the Tachikawa office of the Tokyo Yorozu (general business) Support Center, the Tokyo Tama Area Business Succession Support Center, TOKYO Startup Station TAMA, Hello Work Tachikawa (the public employment office), Mothers’ Hello Work Tachikawa, the Tokyo Shigoto Center Tama (a Tokyo job centre), and more. In 2022 a joint facility of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the city opened at the South Exit of Tachikawa Station, and the Tokyo Shigoto Center Tama and others moved in. Whether you are looking for a job, starting a company or taking one over, if you want advice, you go to Tachikawa first. The business core city has become a core for advice as well.

Working in Tachikawa, in numbers

• 113.2 — Tachikawa’s daytime-to-nighttime population ratio (2020 census). First among Tama’s 26 cities. 24,000 more people by day than by night.
• 120,543 — people working in Tachikawa in the daytime. Fourth among Tokyo’s cities. As a place to work it ranks higher than as a place to live.
• 7,692 — private business establishments in the city in 2021. Many of them have “Tama Branch” on the sign.
• 2.64 — the specialisation coefficient for finance and insurance (by value added). A fitting number for a town where a cooperative bank’s head office has an art museum.
• 345 — people working in 2011 at the five national institutions that moved onto the former base. Antarctica, statistics and the Japanese language, at almost the same address.
• 6 — the block number in the head-office addresses of Tachihi Holdings and Inageya: both 6-1 Sakaecho. The sky and the kitchen are next-door neighbours.

Traveller’s detour quiz

What is the name of the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s vision for making Tachikawa a place where innovation is born? (A) Innovation Farm TACHIKAWA (B) Innovation Port TACHIKAWA (C) Innovation Station TACHIKAWA. The answer comes at the end.

So far this has been about the work that is in Tachikawa now. Next I want to talk about the work that is about to be born. In fact, more new businesses are being born in this town than anywhere else in Tama.