イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

Tachikawa’s Green Future: Zero Carbon, Farmland and Springs Guide

Is the green shrinking? How to read a green-cover rate of 36.5%

Tachikawa’s compass for its green spaces is the “Tachikawa City Green Master Plan”, covering fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2034. The plan sets out its picture of the city’s green in ten years’ time as “Tachikawa, a town where green and people connect and live together”.

Let’s start with the “green-cover rate” (midori-ritsu), which shows the amount of green across the whole city. In fiscal 2023 it was 36.5%. That is up 0.6 points from 35.9% in fiscal 2018. But the plan immediately adds a note. If you take places that could not be identified as green in the fiscal 2018 survey, check them again using aerial photographs and the like, and add back those that can be judged as green, the fiscal 2018 figure becomes 37.4%. In other words, there was actually a fall of 0.9 points.

Read on through the notes and it gets more interesting still. A block of green in Sunagawacho 4-chome was included in the figures for fiscal 2003, 2008 and 2013, excluded in fiscal 2018, and included again in fiscal 2023. The green did not move. The way of counting moved. In the statistics, Tachikawa’s woods sometimes vanish and then reappear. A plan that writes down circumstances like these without hiding them is one you can trust.

After the recount, over five years parks and green spaces grew by about 1 hectare, while woodland, wild land and grassland fell by about 8 hectares and farmland by about 16 hectares. The plan writes that while new green was created with public facilities and the big shopping complexes in the centre of the city, farmland and woodland have been lost, mainly in the north of the city, and the home landscape that carries traces of old Musashino, the traditional name for the plain of western Tokyo, is changing. New green is born by the station, and the fields in the north quietly shrink. The balance: a small deficit.

So the plan’s target for the green-cover rate is to “maintain the current level”. It does not say “increase”. Instead, the targets for each item include some forward-looking numbers. City-built and managed parks and the like, from 64.5 hectares to 67.0 hectares. The area outside the walking catchment of any park, from 969 hectares down to 944 hectares. And protected trees, from 445 to 483. Since the previous plan was drawn up, the number of large designated trees has fallen by 19. The plan is now to add 38.

Then / now: the “red wind” and farmhouse woods

The Green Master Plan includes a photograph of Itsukaichi-kaido Road from around 1955. In the Edo period, after the Tamagawa Aqueduct was dug, the village of Sunagawa stretched out east to west along Itsukaichi-kaido. Along the road there still remain long, narrow strips of farmland, like the paper strips used for poems, and the woods around farmhouses. The plan writes that these farmhouse woods have acted as windbreaks, shielding homes from the akakkaze, the “red wind”, a north wind laden with sand and dust.

The red wind. I imagined the name might come from the colour of the dust, as the north wind whipped the fields’ red soil into the air. Where wind carried earth up into the sky, the zelkova trees caught it. Some of those zelkovas now carry numbers as protected trees, each one receiving a subsidy from the city. We have reached an age when windbreak trees are counted as the town’s assets.

Back then, in the photo from around 1955, the road ran between fields and farmhouse woods. Now, the roadside scenery is also protected by town planning. Tachikawa has two scenic districts, designated to keep natural landscapes within the city: the Tamagawa Aqueduct Scenic District of 11.7 hectares and the Itsukaichi Road Scenic District of 12.0 hectares. A road for water and a road for people, two Edo-period routes, designated just as they are as belts of green. Compare the photo from around 1955 with the road today, and the number of things that have changed and the certainty of the things that have stayed hit you about equally hard.

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Can the farmland be saved? An honest target of “170 hectares or more”

About half of Tachikawa’s land is residential, and farmland makes up about 10% of the city, the Basic Environmental Plan writes. In the fields spreading along Itsukaichi-kaido in the north, all sorts of things are produced: nursery trees, vegetables, fruit, flowers and livestock. But against a background of inheritance, ageing farmers and a lack of successors, farmland is on a downward trend. (Urban farmland protected under town planning is called seisan ryokuchi, “productive green land”.)

The Green Master Plan wrote its farmland target frankly. The previous plan set a target of keeping urban farmland, meaning protected productive green land, at 190 hectares or more. The productive green land that stood at 199.92 hectares in fiscal 2018 had fallen to 186.21 hectares when the plan was revised, missing the target. The new plan’s target is 170 hectares or more in fiscal 2029.

A target set lower than what exists now. When I first read it, I was a little surprised. But think about it, and farmland owners have inheritances to deal with, and lives to lead. The city cannot simply buy up the fields. It reads as though the city has admitted what it cannot defend, and drawn the line where it will stop the loss at 170 hectares. Not a wish, but a line of defence.

The plan also lists the tools for that defence. Farmland patrols, matching tenants and landowners under the law that eases the leasing of urban farmland, moving productive green land onto the new system, and support for facilities that strengthen farmland’s role in disaster prevention. I leave the workings of Tachikawa’s farms and its farm stands to this series’ farming article, but I will add one “future” here. The Basic Environmental Plan names the risk that climate change will cause sunburn and withering in vegetables and fruit trees, and an increase in pests that like high temperatures, and says the city will gather information on growing methods and varieties suited to the heat and pass it on to farmers. Tokyo’s top producer of udo and broccoli is having to prepare for the heat too.

Traveller’s detour quiz

Of the “environmental actions you can take starting today” that Tachikawa’s Third Basic Environmental Plan lists for households, which is said to cut the most carbon dioxide per year?

    1. Eat up all your rice
  • (B) Switch the lights off an hour earlier than usual
  • (C) Get into the bath one after another without a gap, and keep the lid on the tub

The answer comes near the end of this article.

After fields and woods, water. At Tachikawa’s southern edge flows the Tama River.

Protecting the Tama River and its springs: joining up the cliff line across eight cities

The Green Master Plan writes that the views along the river and from the cliff in the old Shibasaki Village, the birthplace of Tachikawa, were recorded in ukiyo-e prints and in the Edo Meisho Zue (an illustrated guide to famous places of Edo) as famous for views of Mount Fuji, pleasure boating, sweetfish (ayu) cuisine and the old Koshu road. On that page it places Katsushika Hokusai’s “Bushu Tamagawa” (The Tama River in Musashi Province), from his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. The pairing of the Tama River and Mount Fuji is a Hokusai subject known overseas as well. In a photograph taken at Showa Kinen Park on the morning of New Year’s Day 2021, too, a white Mount Fuji shows above the blue mountains, beyond the woods and the townscape. For visitors, there is the pleasure of checking their answers against Hokusai’s composition.

The waterside area of Nekawa Ryokudo below the Tachikawa Cliff Line, a wooden boardwalk among grasses and young leaves
The waterside area of Nekawa Ryokudo below the Tachikawa Cliff Line, a wooden boardwalk among grasses and young leaves
Photo: 根川孝太郎 / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The Tama River’s waterside is now a place for sport, lined with baseball grounds, an athletics track and tennis courts, and the Green Master Plan writes that on spring event days thousands of people gather there. When the city surveyed residents to draw up the plan, asking which green spaces they wanted to hand on to the next generation, the green of Showa Kinen Park and neighbourhood parks came first with more than 70%, followed by the Tamagawa Aqueduct and its branch channels at about 50%, and the Tama River waterside at about 45%.

The cliff line runs on past the city limits

The terrace cliff the Tama River carved, the Tachikawa Cliff Line (Tachikawa gaisen), is the backbone of Tachikawa’s green. Woods cling to its slopes, springs rise at its foot, and the Nekawa and Yagawa streams flow there. To mark the enthronement of Emperor Taisho, the people of old Shibasaki Village planted cherry trees every 10 metres along both banks of the Nekawa for 1.3 kilometres. The plan writes that this avenue of cherries carries on into today’s Nekawa Ryokudo green path (see Nekawa and the Tama River).

The cliff does not end at the city boundary. The Green Master Plan says that, through the “Council for Conserving the Green of the Cliff Lines Formed by the Tama River”, the eight cities of Ome, Hamura, Fussa, Akishima, Tachikawa, Kunitachi, Fuchu and Chofu will treat their connected cliff line as a single whole and think together about how to conserve it. Within Tachikawa, the city will designate woodland inside not-yet-built town-planning parks as protected woodland under city management, and also pursue bringing woodland into public ownership using national and Tokyo schemes.

As for springs, the city continues to survey the springs of the Tachikawa Cliff Line and the groundwater across the city. I wrote in detail about the amount of spring water at Yagawa Ryokuchi in this series’ Yagawa article, so I won’t repeat it, but one of the means of protecting the springs is surprisingly close to home. If you fit “rainwater infiltration basins” or “rainwater infiltration pipes”, which let rain soak into the ground, to an existing detached house, the city pays a subsidy. The upper limit is 200,000 yen. If rain falling on roofs soaks underground, the city explains, springs and groundwater become richer, and the load on the sewers lightens. The spring water at the foot of the cliff is connected to roofs all over town.

On underground water, there is one more issue that must be written down, in fairness. Organic fluorine compounds, the so-called PFAS, used in things like firefighting foam because they repel water and oil. According to the city, in June 2025 the Ministry of the Environment set a guideline value for groundwater and the like of 50 nanograms per litre for PFOS and PFOA combined, and from 1 April 2026 the same value became the water-quality standard for tap water. Tachikawa has surveyed nine wells owned by the city and 19 wells owned by businesses and residents in the city, and has published the results. In October 2024, when the national government passed on information that water containing residues of firefighting foam had very probably overflowed from the firefighting-training area of Yokota Air Base, the US military airfield in western Tama, and left the site, the Tokyo government tested nearby rivers, and the city reports that the readings at points on the Zanbori River and elsewhere were below the provisional guideline value of the time. Living in a town of springs means keeping an eye, always, on the water underground that you cannot see.

The shadow of climate change falls across the water too. Among the effects of climate change, the Basic Environmental Plan lists rising water temperatures and changing water quality in the Tama River, the Zanbori River, the Yagawa and others, falling dissolved oxygen and more algae. It also mentions the risk of wild animals such as sika deer spreading their range and coming out into built-up areas. Deer by Tachikawa Station. Hard to picture now, but the plan records the possibility calmly, as one line in a table.

A town learning to live with the heat: the third issue residents named

In the survey the city ran to draw up the Green Master Plan, when asked which social issues matter most for Tachikawa’s future, “child-rearing” and “making the city resilient to disasters” came top, each at about 50%, followed by “measures against heat and the heat-island effect” at 43.3%. In a survey for a plan about green spaces, heat came third. Residents see green not only as something to look at, but as a tool for making shade.

The Basic Environmental Plan makes “adaptation” to climate change one of its pillars, and names the combined effect of the urban heat-island effect and climate change as an impact Tachikawa faces. To prevent heatstroke, opening “Hitosuzumi Spots”, places to cool off for a moment, at city facilities and cooperating businesses is written into the plan’s actions too (more in this series’ summer article). The Green Master Plan, too, names easing the heat as a clear role for green in ten years’ time. And in its study of town-building around the station, the city writes that responses to climate change, such as decarbonisation and heat measures, are what will be asked of the city from now on.

Heat measures are not glamorous projects. Keep one tree. Return the rain that falls on roofs to the ground. Put insulation in the windows. Take your baths one after another. All of it is unspectacular. But there is probably no road to 320,000 tonnes other than piling up unspectacular things like these.

The answer to the mystery: can the foot-bath town climb the mountain?

Can Tachikawa climb the 60% mountain? Honestly, looking only at the plan’s numbers, the path is steep. A town that cut a fifth in eight years has to cut half of what remains in nine. Neither the plan nor the declaration hides that. Keep 170 hectares or more of productive green land; keep the green-cover rate where it is. Every target knows that losses are coming, and fights the rate of loss.

Even so, what I was left with after reading this town’s environmental plans was not pessimism. It heats a foot bath with the heat of rubbish, passes bitter gourd seeds on to the next year, makes electricity on the roof of its velodrome, and is trying to join up the cliff’s green across eight cities. Tachikawa’s environmental future is made not of great inventions but of a great number of small cycles. It is this town’s quiet pride, one that even many residents do not know about.

The foot bath is warm again today, with the incinerator’s surplus heat. On days that are too hot it stops, and when it cools down the water is run again.

Quiz answer

The answer is (C). According to a column in Tachikawa’s Third Basic Environmental Plan, getting into the bath one after another without a gap and keeping the lid on the tub saves 86.9 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. (B), switching the lights off an hour earlier, saves 6.9 kilograms, and (A), eating up all your rice, 1.1 kilograms.

Before you go

  • Tachimuny Hiroba and the foot bath: within 2002 Izumicho, Tachikawa (north of the Tachikawa City Clean Center). About 15 minutes’ walk from JR Higashi-Nakagami Station, about 7 minutes from the Oyama Danchi Orikaeshijo bus stop, about 8 minutes from the Nishi-Musashino bus stop. According to the city, the open space is open 9:00–17:00 and the foot bath 9:30–16:00; the foot bath is closed every Tuesday (the next weekday if Tuesday is a public holiday), on days the open space is closed, and while the incinerator is shut down. On days with a heatstroke alert, the foot bath is switched off. Bring your own towel. Latest information on the city’s page (Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kurashi/gomi/1019923/1019924/1001725/1022731.html
  • Reading the plans (Japanese): Tachikawa City Third Basic Environmental Plan https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/sesaku/1024458/1024463/1025321.html ; Tachikawa City Green Master Plan (there is a summary version for children too) https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/sesaku/1024458/1024464/1026933.html ; Zero Carbon City Declaration https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kurashi/seikatsu/1001871/1024781.html
  • Subsidies: the grants for insulating existing homes (closed for fiscal 2026) and for rainwater infiltration change their conditions and budgets each fiscal year. Rainwater infiltration requires a consultation before installation (Sewerage Management Section): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kurashi/seikatsu/1001871/1001888.html
  • Walking the green and water: Showa Kinen Park (Showa Kinen Park), the Nekawa Ryokudo green path, Yagawa Ryokuchi and the farmhouse woods of Itsukaichi-kaido each have their own article in this series. The cliff line’s green and springs read as one when you walk east from Nekawa Ryokudo to Yagawa Ryokuchi.
  • From central Tokyo and Kanagawa: from Shinjuku, the JR Chuo Line with no change of trains. From Kawasaki in Kanagawa Prefecture, the JR Nambu Line to Tachikawa Station with no change. For Tachimuny, take a bus from Tachikawa Station’s North Exit, or walk from Higashi-Nakagami Station on the Ome Line.
  • General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains and buses, and check opening days on the official sites before you go.

After walking the environmental town, at Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Climb up and down the slopes of the cliff line, walk the farm roads, warm only your feet in the incinerator’s foot bath, and the rest of your body starts asking to be warmed too.

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. Even after the foot bath closes at 16:00, there is plenty of time to drop in.

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. Being able to drop in empty-handed, without a towel, may be even easier than the foot bath.

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

The warmth that started at your feet, carried to the core of your body on the third floor of a building by the station. A day in Tachikawa is made of small handovers of heat.

Cover photo: New Year’s morning at Showa Kinen Park looking west: a white Mount Fuji above the hills beyond woods and town (Photo: Nishifutsu / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

More Tachikawa Walks

All Tachikawa Walks (English)

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