Tachikawa Business Guide: Where West Tokyo Works and Starts Up

Work being born in Tachikawa: the highest start-up rate in Tama

The city’s industrial promotion plan mentions it in passing, but there is one line residents might like to know. Tachikawa’s business start-up rate has stayed high compared with neighbouring municipalities, and from 2016 to 2021 it was the highest of Tama’s 26 cities. The plan puts this down to the town’s well-developed network of organisations that support new businesses.

Let me trace that support system in order.

It began in 2012, when the “Tachikawa Start-up Support Project” was launched. Today seven organisations have signed a partnership agreement to support people starting a business in Tachikawa and people who have recently started one there: the city of Tachikawa, the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Tama Shinkin Bank, the Tachikawa branch of the Japan Finance Corporation, the Tachikawa Council of Social Welfare, the Tokyo Metropolitan Small and Medium Enterprise Support Center (TOKYO Startup Station TAMA), and Seibu Shinkin Bank. City hall, the chamber of commerce, cooperative banks, a government-affiliated lender and a welfare body all gather round a single entrepreneur. From the founder’s side, whichever door you walk in through, they will connect you to the others.

In 2020 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and its small-business support centre opened TOKYO Startup Station TAMA. It is on the third floor of building E2 of GREEN SPRINGS, the district built on Tachihi’s land. According to its official page, it offers people planning to start a business in Tokyo help drawing up business plans, specialist advice on raising funds and on tax, and support for test marketing, all free of charge. There is even a “hypothesis-testing space” where you can try selling in commercial facilities in Tama. In a glass building on the site of a former airfield, someone’s business plan is being rewritten every day.

The cooperative bank has opened a space too. Tama Shinkin Bank’s “me:rise Tachikawa” is a meeting hub that combines a coworking space with incubation offices, with 22 booth seats, 8 private rooms for one person, and more than 10 private incubation rooms. According to the city’s plan, in October 2025 a cooperative bank headquartered in Tachikawa set up a fund aimed at businesses in Tama in their start-up, growth and succession stages, and began supporting them through investment. Not only lending money, but investing in a business and growing it together. The work of the regional financial institution has stepped forward.

South of the station there is a smaller place for trying things. “Collabo”, the challenge shop in Shibasakicho, is a facility run by the city and the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, first opened by the chamber in 2003. It rents shops at low rent, in principle for up to one year, to people trying to start a business. One of the tenants in fiscal 2026 is said to be a café where you can play board games popular around the world. A shop that is expected to fly the nest within a year. A shopping street with a graduation ceremony.

Places to pitch a business in front of an audience have grown in number too. The Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s innovation committee runs a pitch event, “TACHIKAWA Innovation Match”. The third edition takes place on 10 December 2026, and it is inviting new businesses, products and services that help solve problems in society or in companies. Any field is welcome: manufacturing, tourism, welfare, education, culture and creative work, digital. New ventures within existing companies and sole proprietors are welcome too. Beyond this, the chamber has a vision called “Innovation Farm TACHIKAWA”, aiming at an environment in which everyone connected with Tachikawa, small firms and large, universities, government, freelancers, students and seniors, keeps creating new value. It says it will also work to attract trials of new technology and to ease regulations. I doubt they called it a “farm” because Tachikawa is Tokyo’s top producer of udo, an edible plant prized in Japanese cooking,, but I would like to think so, just a little.

And very recently, a door to the world opened as well. On 30 September 2026, a desk opened in the business support corner on the second floor of Tachikawa Central Library where a specialist adviser from JETRO (the Japan External Trade Organization) gives advice on expanding overseas. Consultations are free, in principle every Wednesday and Thursday. The opening seminar was titled “Trends in the Cross-Border E-Commerce Market and Public Support”. You discuss exports beside the library shelves. For Tachikawa’s small businesses, the story of selling to the world can start while they are borrowing a book.

The future in the city’s industrial promotion plan: a start-up ecosystem, and a building that doesn’t exist yet

In 2026 the city of Tachikawa drew up a new industrial promotion plan. It covers four years, fiscal 2026 to fiscal 2029. Its purpose, it says, is to make use of the town’s diverse concentration of industries, promote the revitalisation of the local economy and the creation of innovation, and support further industrial development.

The plan sets out three basic policies: creating innovation and an attractive environment for starting businesses; creating places where businesses and visitors gather and generate energy; and building the management foundations for sustainable development. There are six measures: promoting innovation, strengthening start-up support, maintaining and developing the concentration of industry, revitalising commerce, strengthening management capability, and creating an environment where diverse people can play an active part.

What catches the eye most is the treatment of start-ups. The plan says it will build a “Tachikawa start-up ecosystem” that uses the network of support organisations from industry, academia and government, to increase the number of start-ups and revitalise the local economy. It means an environment where start-ups, large companies, investors and research institutions such as universities gather and coexist like a natural ecosystem, nurturing advanced industries. And it continues with one line: in the future, it aims to develop a facility that will be the symbol of support for innovation and start-ups.

This is a building that doesn’t exist yet. Where, when and in what form it will be built, the plan does not say. So it is not a fixed schedule. But it is worth remembering that the city put “aims to” in writing. For reference, the plan introduces Tokyo Innovation Base, the start-up support hub the Tokyo Metropolitan Government opened in central Tokyo. What exists in the centre, in the middle of Tama too. That is how it reads.

The plan also names the industries it wants to grow: the entertainment and creative industries centred on the content industry, which the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry expects to grow worldwide. Film, anime, games, publishing, music, fashion, art, design, food, traditional crafts. For Tachikawa, which has a game company by the station, serves as the model for an anime’s Academy City, and has 109 artworks standing in its streets, I think that is a goal that fits its size. The plan also says that knowledge-intensive industries such as information and communications, academic research, and professional and technical services still have room to gather here.

Transport is changing too. According to the plan, the Tama Monorail is due to be extended from Kamikitadai to Hakonegasaki in the 2030s. The plan expects this to change the flow of people in Tama considerably. If the monorail’s northern terminus moves further out, the area from which people commute to Tachikawa will widen.

The ruler for measuring the plan’s results is surprisingly modest. The number of corporations and similar bodies liable to pay municipal corporate tax is to rise from 7,370 in fiscal 2024 to 7,640 in fiscal 2029. 270 more in four years. As a number it is restrained, but it is clear that the plan has put the growth in the number of companies at the centre of its targets. For reference, it will also watch net value added, the daytime-to-nighttime population ratio, the number of establishments and the number of employees.

The weak points the plan wrote down itself

The good thing about this plan is that it writes down its own weaknesses, in numbers.

First, the number of working people is growing slowly. Although the number of establishments is growing faster than the national and Tama averages, the growth in the number of employees, as of 2021, was lower than nationally and in Tama.

Manufacturing is thinning out. In 2021 there were 248 manufacturing establishments employing 5,267 people, and both are on a downward trend. The area of industrial land is less than half what it was 30 years ago. Former factory sites have become housing, and there are now places where factories and homes are mixed together.

Things are changing in front of the station as well. In the commercial districts around Tachikawa Station, Akebonocho, Shibasakicho and Nishikicho, commercial floor space has held up, but land use is gradually shifting towards apartment buildings. The plan writes that in the long run the core commercial functions risk weakening. The retail attraction index, which shows a town’s power to draw shoppers from outside, had stayed above 1.0 ever since 1994, but it fell between 2016 and 2021.

There is distance from the universities and institutes, too. Although there are many universities and research institutions nearby, fewer than one in ten of the city’s businesses said they “rate” the ease of working with universities, while more than three in ten said they “do not rate” it. Even with institutes for Antarctica and statistics next door, they have not yet become someone the town’s companies talk to.

The city’s support measures are not that well known either. Over 40% of businesses knew of the loan-arrangement scheme, but every other measure was below 30%. 36.2% of businesses said they had problems with succession, and in over 60% of those cases the problem was “training a successor”. Even in a town with a high start-up rate, continuing and handing on a business have difficulties of their own.

A plan that lines up its weak points this honestly is one you can trust as you read it. If it says where repairs are needed, that means it intends to make them.

My view: from a town you commute to, to a town where things start

From here on, this is my own view.

Until now Tachikawa has been a town people “commute to”. People come from all over Tama, work in branch offices, shop and go home. First place in the daytime population ratio is the medal for that pulling power.

From now on, I think, the question is whether Tachikawa can become a town where people “start” something. The groundwork is more complete than I expected. The highest start-up rate in Tama’s 26 cities. Seven organisations joining hands at the founders’ counters, the metropolitan start-up hub at GREEN SPRINGS, a cooperative bank setting up a fund, the chamber of commerce providing a pitch stage, and export advice at the library. What is missing, as the city’s plan itself says, is probably the “symbol” that shows all this in one place.

Another card, I think, is the commuters themselves. Every morning just over 24,000 people come from outside Tachikawa. In the institutes there are specialists in Japanese, statistics and Antarctica; in the buildings by the station, people who make games; in the branch offices, salespeople who walk the whole of Tama. If they sit next to each other at the same place at lunchtime and something starts from a chance conversation — the word “ecosystem” probably means increasing the number of chances like that.

And then, eyes that look outward. In the base era, Tachikawa was a town that worked under English signs. Today you can get advice on cross-border e-commerce on the second floor of the library, overseas researchers stay at the institutes, and games born by the station are sold in North America and Europe. In the sense of connecting with the world through work, this town may, unexpectedly, have been an international city for a long time.

A town with more people by day than by night. From among those daytime people, Tachikawa’s next work will be born.

Quiz answer

The answer is (A), Innovation Farm TACHIKAWA. According to the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s “2023 Vision”, as published in the city’s industrial promotion plan, the chamber aims for a fertile ecosystem in which innovation is born one after another across the wide urban area centred on Tachikawa, and named that vision “Innovation Farm TACHIKAWA”.

Before you go

• Tachikawa City Industrial Promotion Plan (fiscal 2026–2029; full and summary versions, in Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/sesaku/1024458/1024465/1026920.html
• The city’s start-up support desks (contacts for the seven organisations of the Tachikawa Start-up Support Project, in Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/sangyo/shokogyo/1003810/1023318.html
• TOKYO Startup Station TAMA “Planning Port”: 3F, GREEN SPRINGS E2, 3-1 Midoricho, Tachikawa. About 4 minutes’ walk from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail and about 8 minutes from JR Tachikawa Station (according to GREEN SPRINGS). It is open only on certain days and hours, so check the official site: https://startup-station.jp/tn/
• Overseas expansion support desk (JETRO): business support corner, 2F, Tachikawa Central Library; in principle every Wednesday and Thursday. Latest details on the city’s page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/sangyo/shokogyo/1003806/1028310.html
• Latest start-up events (pitch events, seminars): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/sangyo/shokogyo/1003810/1003836/index.html
• Getting there: from Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line to Tachikawa Station without changing trains. From Kanagawa, the JR Nambu Line links Kawasaki Station and Tachikawa Station with no change.
• Combine with: GREEN SPRINGS and Faret Tachikawa (you can walk around both on the north side of the station), and the Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum in the Midoricho institute district. Check opening days on the official sites.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains, buses and the monorail, and check opening days on the official sites before you go.

After work, at the station’s North Exit

A working day in Tachikawa usually begins and ends at the station. In the morning you cross the deck at the North Exit; in the evening you come back along the same deck. Your shoulders and neck still carry a whole day of staring at a computer screen.

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 there is time to drop in in the morning before work or at night after overtime.

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. You can come with nothing but your work bag.

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

In a town with more people by day than by night, catch your breath once at the end of the day. Tomorrow, after all, you will be stepping off at this station again, along with 24,000 others.

Cover photo: Palace Hotel Tachikawa in Faret Tachikawa, the business district built on former base land, beside a glass building (Photo: Abasaa / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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