Showa Kinen Park Guide: The Future of Tachikawa’s Unfinished Park

Towards a “Water and Green Entrance”: a revised plan aiming for the end of fiscal 2030

The briefing materials set out several directions for the revision. All of them are described as the state of discussions as of April 2026, with the caveat that they may change in light of future opinions.

First, the way the area is conceived has changed. Last time it was divided into three: the new Akishima Gate, a “waterside space” on the pool site, and “new recreation” on the reservoir site. In the revised plan, the gate and the pool site are combined into one and renamed the “Water and Green Entrance Area”. The entrance function takes the lead role, while securing a certain amount of water-play within it and inheriting the area’s position as the water zone. The reservoir site has been moved to “STEP 2”, with no date set for its development.

The next line caught my eye. To strengthen its role as an entrance, the government is considering making this area free to enter. The diagram shows a plan to strengthen the flow of people from the Akishima side and from JR Nishi-Tachikawa Station, including a new path from Nishi-Tachikawa Station to the new entrance.

At present, the part of Showa Kinen Park you can enter without paying is mainly the Green Culture Zone that spreads out at Akebono Gate on the Tachikawa Station side. If the revised plan goes ahead as written, the park will have free open spaces at both its eastern and its western front doors. Both ends of the park would gain an engawa, the open veranda of a Japanese house where anyone can drop by and sit.

The division of roles will also change greatly. According to the materials and the Q&A, in the next call the government plans to build most of the park’s basic facilities directly itself, including the gate building, the water-play facilities, the car park and the main paths. The private sector will be asked to provide “visitor-attracting and income-earning facilities” that improve the quality of time spent and experiences in the park. The government’s share of the cost of open spaces and the like is to rise from 80% or less to 90% or less. The government will draw up the area’s basic plan first, showing the layout and scale of facilities, and only then ask for proposals. It is giving up last time’s “leave it to you” and putting out a draft first.

The materials also describe the kind of facilities wanted from the private sector. No particular type of business is specified. But given the park’s tendencies — crowds concentrated in spring and autumn, people staying home in extreme heat, and many visitors who come only a few times a year or less — the government wants services that make people want to come all year round, services that encourage use in quiet seasons, and services that make people want to come as part of daily life. A note says that some of the sample photographs lined up are images made with generative AI. We have reached the age when AI draws the picture of a future park in a government document.

A schedule is given too. Around autumn 2026, the basic plan and a draft call will be published, and a “sounding survey” held to talk with private businesses. The call will open at the end of fiscal 2026, and the facilities are expected to open at the end of fiscal 2030. In other words, a new entrance could open on the pool site as early as spring 2031. This is a schedule from the government’s materials, not a settled matter.

Showa Kinen Park’s future in numbers

• 94 — the percentage of the planned area that is open. In its 42nd year, the park still has “the last 6%”.
• 100 million — total visitors since opening, passed on 8 April 2022. Close to Japan’s population, though with a great deal of repeat custom.
• 2.3 — foreign visitors as a percentage of all visitors in fiscal 2025, about 90,000 people. The share is rising, but the materials themselves say it is “still low”.
• 24 — the number of businesses that attended the on-site briefing in April 2026. Last time no one expressed interest, so at least more people are now coming to listen.
• 3,986 — the usage fee for new income-earning facilities (yen per square metre, fiscal 2025 figure). The bigger the shop, the bigger the bill.
• 0.5 — the “management cooperation fee” the private sector is to be asked for (a proposed amount of at least 0.5% of sales). Part of every coffee sold in the park goes into looking after it.

Traveller’s detour quiz

According to the government’s briefing materials, why are “operations that keep down noise and light” needed on the site of the reservoir next to the old Rainbow Pool?

• A To avoid complaints from the nearby housing estates
• B To protect rare birds of prey
• C Out of consideration for night training at the Self-Defense Forces airfield

The answer comes near the end of this article.

Nights and Tuesdays: new ways of using the park

The park’s future is not only about buildings. The way it is used is itself changing.

One change is the night, as I mentioned. About 330,000 people in 30 days for the Autumn Night Walk; a summer night opening. The briefing materials clearly list as challenges for the park creating attractions for quiet seasons such as the hot months, and doing more outside opening hours. For private facilities in the new entrance area, the conditions say business hours are “unrestricted”, and that a business operating outside the park’s opening hours takes over management such as security and locking up. The materials also say private operation of summer nights is hoped for.

The park at night. To anyone who knew the old Showa Kinen Park, it has a slightly odd ring. The official hours back then were those of a daytime park, its day ending at closing time in the evening. In the future, there may be days when evening is where things begin.

Another change is its use as a place for exercise. The briefing materials show photographs of “Park Fitness”, a regular programme anyone can join casually: tree-climbing (“treeing”) sessions, basketball classes for beginners, and park yoga. Stretching your body on 180 hectares of lawn while breathing the morning air. A way of turning the park’s size straight into room for your body to stretch. This is also the park that hosts the qualifying race for the Hakone Ekiden, Japan’s famous New Year university relay. Runners and slow stretchers share the same lawn.

And one more change, unglamorous but important to visitors, is written in a corner of the materials. In the column on operating conditions for the new area, the park’s closing days from fiscal 2027 onwards are listed as: every Tuesday from June to September and from December to February (the following day if Tuesday is a public holiday), 31 December and 1 January, and the five days from the third Monday of January to the Friday. The current official website lists closing days only as the New Year period and the fourth Monday of January and the day after.

So, if things go as the materials say, from fiscal 2027 the park will close on Tuesdays in summer and winter. As far as I could find, no formal public announcement has been made yet. If you are travelling from afar on a summer or winter Tuesday around that time, be sure to check the closing days on the official website. Showa Kinen Park may be changing from a park that is open all year to one that takes a deep breath once a week.

Where do visitors from abroad stop and linger?

Foreign visitors in fiscal 2025 numbered about 90,000, 2.3% of the total. On the numbers alone, still few. But the government’s redevelopment policy states that, in addition to the families and younger generations who have long enjoyed the park, it should be a park where diverse people can feel safe and enjoy themselves, including new users brought by development in the surrounding area and inbound visitors. It has formally begun counting visitors from abroad as “visitors of the future”.

So where in this park do people from overseas stop? The government’s development and management programme has a one-line hint. It says the Bonsai Garden inside the Japanese Garden displays bonsai of the calibre seen at the Kokufu Bonsai Exhibition, Japan’s most prestigious bonsai show, and that in recent years it has been popular with foreigners and others. The briefing materials introduce the Bonsai Garden as “the first publicly run bonsai display facility”. The Japanese Garden itself is said to be the largest made in the Tokyo region since the war.

Here is a small point of pride that even Tachikawa people are surprisingly unaware of. The place where a Japanese government body first showed bonsai as a public facility is inside a park on the site of an airfield. And the word bonsai needs no translation in English.

There is practical information worth passing on, too. The park’s English name is “Showa Kinen Park”. The language switch on the official website offers automatic translation into English, Simplified Chinese and Korean. According to the project evaluation documents, at Tachikawa Gate, Nishi-Tachikawa Gate and Sunagawa Gate you can enter directly with a transport IC card such as Suica. You can get into the park the same way you go through a station ticket gate, without buying a ticket. And on the third floor of ecute Tachikawa, the shopping zone inside JR Tachikawa Station, there is one of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s official tourist information centres, the Tokyo Tourist Information Center Tama; going by the list on Tokyo’s official tourism website, it is the only one outside the 23 wards.

If anything surprises overseas travellers, it will probably be the size. A single train ride from central Tokyo, dozens of Tokyo Domes’ worth of lawn and woodland spread out, and inside them a bonsai garden, the largest Japanese garden built since the war, and a hamlet recreating a farming landscape. And all of it sits on top of a former military airfield. A one-line guidebook entry cannot convey how these layers overlap.

My reading: the “unfinished 6%” will decide the park’s future

From here on, this is not the documents but my own reading.

I think the “future” of Showa Kinen Park will be decided not by the 94% already finished but by the remaining 6%. The reason lies in the list of problems the documents give. Full car parks, crowding at two gates, the lopsidedness of seasons and places, extreme heat. All of them are different faces of one thing: too many people gathering on the park’s eastern side. If a second front door that you can enter for free opens at the western end, a summer waterside comes back, and a place that is open at night appears, the flow of people will split between east and west. The work on the 6% would change how comfortable the other 94% feels.

Of course, there is no room for complacency. The previous call ended with zero expressions of interest, and neither material prices nor the labour shortage will ease soon. Raising the government’s share also means a debate about how tax money is used is unavoidable. How do you reconcile the quiet the birds of prey need with the bustle of people? Nobody has the answer yet.

Even so, I closed the documents feeling a little brighter. The government wrote the reasons for its last failure in its own words, opened a forum to listen to private businesses, and 24 of them came. At the end of the briefing materials it says it wants to build the park together with people who share its mission of “restoring greenery and enhancing humanity”. A park, it seems, remembers its mission each time it is rebuilt.

There is one more role that must not be forgotten. This park is a wide-area evacuation site for the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima, and a temporary shelter for people unable to get home in Tachikawa. On the night of the Great East Japan Earthquake, 11 March 2011, it took in up to about 1,000 people unable to get home, and about 600 of them stayed until the next morning. For the new entrance, too, the government’s redevelopment policy calls for open spaces designed with its role as a disaster evacuation site in mind. In an emergency, the lively front door becomes a door to run in through.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), to protect rare birds of prey. The government’s briefing materials list, as one of the factors behind the cancellation of the previous call, the need on the reservoir site for operations that keep down noise and light in order to protect rare birds of prey. At the western end of a park you can reach by train from central Tokyo, there are birds that need quiet.

Before you go

• 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. Check times on the official JR East site.
• Gates: Showa Kinen Park straddles the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima in Tokyo. Akebono Gate is about 10 minutes’ walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, and about 8 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail. Nishi-Tachikawa Gate is about 2 minutes from Nishi-Tachikawa Station on the JR Ome Line, and Akishima Gate about 10 minutes from Higashi-Nakagami Station on the JR Ome Line (all according to the official access page). The old Rainbow Pool site, and the area around Akishima Gate that is to be redeveloped, are at the western end of the park.
• The pool site: demolition and removal are under way; the shape of the new entrance is expected to be shown in the basic plan due around autumn 2026 (according to the government’s briefing materials).
• Hours, fees and closing days can change, and the closing days may change from fiscal 2027 (see the section above). Check the latest on the official website: https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/
• Language: the language switch at the top of the official website offers automatic translation into English, Simplified Chinese and Korean (English name: Showa Kinen Park). You can enter at Tachikawa, Nishi-Tachikawa and Sunagawa gates with an IC card such as Suica.
• Tourist information: Tokyo Tourist Information Center Tama, on the third floor of ecute Tachikawa inside JR Tachikawa Station.
• Official information on the redevelopment is collected on the Showa Kinen Park Office page: https://www.ktr.mlit.go.jp/showa/showa_00298.html
• Etiquette: the quiet western end is home to rare birds of prey; keep noise down there.
• Combine with: for a full guide to walking the park, see the Showa Kinen Park instalment of this series; for the pool’s history and the summer waterside, the summer instalment. Right next to the park on the east is GREEN SPRINGS, which you can walk through on the way to or from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO, and check opening days on the official site before you go.

After the walk, back to Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Walk Showa Kinen Park from end to end and its 180 hectares stay with you as heavy legs. By the time you are back at the station, your calves will be thoroughly tight.

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 even after the park’s closing time there is still plenty of time.

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 drop in with nothing but your park backpack.

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 park is still growing, little by little, towards completion in fiscal 2030. Stretch out a body that has walked it, and it too will grow, by just tomorrow’s share.

Cover photo: Minna-no-Harappa, the Open Field of Showa Kinen Park: big trees and strollers on the lawn under a clear autumn sky (Photo: Carles Tomás Martí / CC BY 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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