Tachikawa for Foreign Visitors: Haneda Bus, Things to Do, Future

What surprises foreign visitors in Tachikawa: an anime “Academy City”, Antarctica, a National Treasure, and a beach with no sea

Back to the number I asked you to remember. 13.4% of foreigners who visited Tokyo had taken part in anime events or visited places connected with anime. In the same survey, 76.5% of them said they were “very satisfied” with the experience.

Tachikawa is one of those “places connected with anime”. According to the Tachikawa Tourism and Convention Association, Tachikawa is the model for the fictional “Academy City” in the popular anime A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun. In the “88 Anime Spots in Japan You Want to Visit”, chosen by the Anime Tourism Association partly through votes by anime fans in Japan and abroad, Tachikawa has been selected for A Certain Scientific Railgun eight years running since 2018. Around the city there are 21 vending machines wrapped in artwork from the series. The town’s long relationship with the work is the subject of this series’ piece on filming locations. For fans from overseas, Tachikawa is the place where you can check the “Academy City” of the story against the map.

What’s more, in fiction Tachikawa somehow tends to be the place people come to on holiday. The manga Saint Young Men, in which the Buddha and Jesus spend a vacation in Japan, is also set in Tachikawa, and in 2024 an event themed on the days off of the Defense Force members in Kaiju No. 8 put a life-size Kaiju No. 8 out on the town’s streets. Gods and monster-fighters alike spend their holidays in Tachikawa. As holiday destinations go, the town’s standing is rather high.

Beyond anime, too, there are things that make a traveller’s eyes go round.

Antarctic ice, for one. At the Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum of the National Institute of Polar Research in Midoricho, admission is free and you can touch ice from Antarctica. The institute at the centre of Japan’s Antarctic research is in Tachikawa. The word “Antarctica”, translated into any language, quickens the pulse a little.

There is a National Treasure, too. At Fusai-ji Temple (普済寺) stands the six-sided stone pillar called the Rokumen Sekido, inscribed with a date in the Enbun era corresponding to 1361. On its six slabs of green schist are carved the two Nio guardian kings and the Four Heavenly Kings. It is Tachikawa’s one and only National Treasure.

And though there is no sea, there is a sandy beach. TACHIHI BEACH, a minute’s walk from Tachihi Station on the Tama Monorail, calls itself the largest beach barbecue venue in Japan. Even its operators write “in Tachikawa, which isn’t supposed to have a sea”. A traveller who finds a sandy beach in inland Tokyo will probably check their map app twice.

In front of the station, art from around the world is already standing. In Faret Tachikawa, 109 works by 92 artists from 36 countries blend into the street in the form of bollards, benches and ventilation towers. A traveller may well find an artist from their own country by the side of a Tachikawa pavement.

One of Faret Tachikawa’s buildings houses a game company. 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. The company’s history lists one title after another released in North America and Europe. Adventure stories played across the ocean are born in a building by Tachikawa Station. For a traveller who loves games, that alone could be reason for a pilgrimage.

There are experiences, too. On the West Tokyo Wonders site, which sells Tama travel to overseas visitors, an English-language tour called “Ride the Spirit of Keirin”, a behind-the-scenes look at Tachikawa’s keirin velodrome, is listed from 10,000 yen per person. (Keirin is Japanese track cycling, a sport people bet on.) Even watching from the stands is fun; this takes you into the back of the house. A behind-the-scenes keirin tour guided in English is, for a traveller, probably something nowhere else in Tokyo can replace.

An anime Academy City, Antarctic ice, a fourteenth-century National Treasure, an inland beach, art from around the world, games played abroad, the back rooms of keirin. Lined up together, Tachikawa looks less like “a town you drop into on the way” and more like a cast that could make a destination in its own right. So why 2.3%? Let me read the city’s own answer.

Opening Tachikawa further to the world: the future, and the weak points, in the city’s Fourth Tourism Promotion Plan

In Reiwa 7 (2025) the city of Tachikawa drew up its Fourth Tourism Promotion Plan. (Reiwa is the current imperial era, which began in 2019.) It covers five years, from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2029. Its vision for the future is “Tachikawa, a town where, however many times you come, you find the next thing to love”.

Read through a traveller’s eyes, the plan’s numbers are interesting. Based on the metropolitan government’s survey, Tachikawa received about 3.95 million tourist visits in 2022, 0.5% of the total for Tokyo. In a visitor survey the city carried out in 2023, 93.1% of visitors came on day trips and 6.9% stayed overnight. The most common purpose of the visit was “shopping (including eating and drinking)”, at 54.4%. More than 70% of visitors came from within Tokyo, and 88% of those from the 26 cities of Tama. The most common length of stay was two to three hours.

In other words, Tachikawa today is a town where people from nearby come to shop and go home after a few hours. That’s no bad thing. But it’s not a way of visiting that suits someone who has crossed an ocean to get here.

The plan sets three goals: more tourist visits, more purposes per visit, and longer stays. The number of domestic and foreign travellers, counted from mobile-phone data, is to rise from 12.85 million in 2023 to 19.2 million in 2029. The most common length of stay is to be stretched from two-to-three hours to three-to-five. The idea is to give people who came to shop one more reason, or two more, to fall for Tachikawa.

On foreign travellers, the plan writes down concrete measures. Over five years from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2028, it will train inbound tour guides. It will create guided tours for foreign visitors that link the attractions of the city and of Tama, list them on overseas travel booking sites, and take them to travel fairs abroad. Working with hotels, commercial facilities and transport operators, it will take account of diverse cultures and customs, including responding to halal certification. It will work with the city’s volunteer tourist guides. And it will make Tachikawa a “Gate City”, an entrance to the Tama area, building wide-area tourist routes that combine it with the nature of Okutama and Ome.

There is also one sentence in the plan that is very Tachikawa. Because national research institutes are scattered around the area of the Tachikawa Regional Disaster Prevention Base, it says, opportunities for foreign researchers and others to visit for inspections and research are expected to increase. Not tourists: researchers. It is a kind of traveller only a town with institutes for Antarctica, statistics and the Japanese language could write into its plan.

Some of this has already started moving. The Marutama Project council, whose secretariat is run by the Tachikawa Tourism and Convention Association, trains people who live in Tama as interpreter-guides and sells tours for foreign visitors under the name “West Tokyo Wonders”. Its pages describe one job: guiding an American guest staying at a Tachikawa hotel through a day spent feeling the history of Tachikawa Air Base before and after the war. They built the day’s itinerary from materials kept by the city, with help from a museum curator. In the town where American soldiers once strode about, a traveller from America now walks it as history. Back then, and now: the two are joined inside a single tour.

The plan does not hide its weak points either. Until now, it writes, the city had not been able to grasp how many people visit the commercial and visitor facilities around Tachihi Station on the Tama Monorail. Nor had it been able to measure the progress of its measures against concrete numerical targets. If visitors increase, there is also the worry of “overtourism”, where litter and noise at night damage residents’ lives. The plan says it will work to prevent this and will study what pioneering municipalities have done. Bringing in travellers, and protecting the lives of the people who live here: I think it is honest to write both into a single plan.

My view: can Tachikawa become “the west gate of Tokyo”?

From here on, this is my own view.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has set a target of more than 30 million foreign travellers in 2030. The 2025 figure was about 28.65 million. The target is almost within reach, and I think we are entering a stage where the question is less how to increase the number of travellers than where to spread them. While 60% and 50% of people gather in Shibuya and Asakusa, Tachikawa has 2.3%. Turn that gap over, and it is room to grow.

I think Tachikawa holds three cards.

The first is its closeness to the airport. You arrive on one bus from Haneda, and from here the Chuo, Ome and Nambu lines and the monorail take you anywhere in Tama. To Mount Takao, to Okutama, to Showa Kinen Park. A trip where you stay in Tachikawa and head out in a different direction every morning is probably more fun than one where you stay in central Tokyo and ride a packed train west every morning. What the city’s plan calls a “Gate City” becomes, from the traveller’s side, “a base camp for western Tokyo”. At last the word “base” can be used in a cheerful sense here.

The second is its story. Here is the airfield from which Japan’s first scheduled passenger flights flew; there was an age when it was called an international airport, then the age of the US base, and on the land that was returned grew a park, research institutes and a district of art. In a hundred years, from the gateway of the sky to a military town, and on to a town of culture. There are not many towns even in Tokyo that can be told in one unbroken thread like this. For a traveller who wants history, several chapters of a textbook lie buried within walking distance of the station.

The third is that the world already lives here. According to the city’s statistics, there were 6,591 foreign residents on 1 January 2026, 1.7 times the 3,859 of 2017. By nationality, China is the largest group at 2,459 and Vietnam has 810, while Nepal grew from 127 to 539 in nine years. About one resident in 28 holds a foreign nationality. Inside the town that welcomes travellers, there are already neighbours who speak the travellers’ languages.

There are things missing, though. The guidebook is Japanese only, and the city’s plan has not yet managed to count the flow of people around Tachihi. Almost everyone who comes is on a day trip; fewer than one in ten stays the night. How to create reasons to stay over: that is probably the homework for the next five years.

Tachikawa’s nights are surprisingly long. The area around the station stays bright until late, and there are hotels. Touch the Antarctic ice at midday, walk the street corners of Academy City in the evening, stay one more night. When the city can guide travellers through an itinerary like that, in English, in one continuous thread, I suspect that 2.3% will start to move.

Quiz answer

The answer is (C), 10 languages. According to the city’s “useful tourist information” page, the Tachikawa sightseeing digital map supports Japanese, English, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, Spanish, French, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese and Thai. No app download or registration is needed.

Before you go

• From Haneda Airport by bus: the Tachikawa Bus and Keikyu Bus “Haneda Airport Line”. Stop 4 at Terminal 3 (international), stop 9 at Terminal 1, stop 10 at Terminal 2. Adults 2,000 yen; transport IC cards accepted. For buses towards Tachikawa, buy a ticket for a specific departure at the airport’s ticket machines or counter first. Journey time varies with traffic. Check the latest timetable and fares on the official site: https://www.tachikawabus.co.jp/highway/haneda/
• By train: according to GO TOKYO’s English site, 1 hour 25 minutes by train from Haneda Airport and 2 hours 15 minutes by train from Narita Airport (2 hours 45 minutes by Limousine Bus). From Shinjuku Station, 30 minutes on the JR Chuo Line Special Rapid, with no change of trains; from Tokyo Station, 50 minutes. English guide: https://www.gotokyo.org/en/destinations/outlying-area/kunitachi-tachikawa-and-around/index.html
• From Kanagawa: the JR Nambu Line runs from Kawasaki Station to Tachikawa Station without a change.
• Tokyo Tourist Information Center Tama: 3rd floor of ecute Tachikawa, 3-1-1 Shibasakicho, Tachikawa (inside the ticket gates of JR Tachikawa Station). Check opening hours and closing days on the official site: https://www.gotokyo.org/en/plan/tourist-info-center/index.html
• Multilingual maps and guides: the city of Tachikawa’s “useful tourist information” page (digital map in 10 languages; paper tourist guide map in Japanese, English and traditional Chinese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/m-kanko/1003028.html
• Guided tours for foreign visitors (in English): West Tokyo Wonders https://wtw-japan.com/
• Tachikawa’s Fourth Tourism Promotion Plan (fiscal 2025–2029, in Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/sesaku/1024458/1024465/1024966.html
• Combine with: the Antarctic and Arctic Science Museum (about 10 minutes’ walk from Takamatsu Station on the Tama Monorail), Faret Tachikawa (3 minutes’ walk from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station), and Showa Kinen Park. Check opening days and admission on each official site.
• 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.

Partway through a long journey, at the station’s North Exit

On the day you arrive in Tachikawa from the airport, your body is stiffer than you think. Between the aircraft seat and the bus seat, you have spent half a day in much the same position.

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. Whether it is the evening of the day you came in on a late-morning bus from Haneda, or the morning before you set off for Mount Takao, there is 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. You don’t even have to unpack your suitcase: just come as you are.

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 the town of an airfield once called an international airport, sweat out the fatigue of a long journey. Tachikawa has been used to welcoming people who arrive from the sky for a hundred years.

Cover photo: Sun Sun Road in Tachikawa, with a cinema on the left and the Tama Monorail viaduct crossing overhead (Photo: 深鸣 / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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