Tachikawa Station Redevelopment: A Guide to the Future Station Area

How will Tachikawa Station’s surroundings change? A city worried about becoming a bed town, a no-flats zone, an unfinished skywalk and new trains.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

The town around the busiest station in Tama is worried about its own future.

On the City of Tachikawa’s website there is a page updated in September 2026. Its title is “Future Vision for the Tachikawa Station Area (provisional name)”. On it are words of a plainness rare in a municipal document. In recent years, it says, more and more plots of land have been turning into blocks of flats, taking advantage of the convenience of the commercial district and its generous floor-area allowances. If this continues, the area risks losing its role as a hub, and becoming a bed town for central Tokyo.

By JR East’s figures for fiscal 2024, an average of 154,091 people a day board trains at Tachikawa Station. No station in Tama has more. In the Tokyo government’s report on the 2020 census, Tachikawa’s ratio of daytime to night-time population is 115.4, the highest of any city in Tokyo outside the 23 wards. This is the town at the heart of Tama, the place people come into during the day. (Tama is the long western half of Tokyo, beyond the 23 central wards most visitors know: a country of commuter cities, hills and rivers.) So why would such a town write that it “may become a bed town”?

Carrying that question, I decided to stand on the pedestrian deck at the station’s North Exit and leaf through the documents of the city, the Tokyo government and the national government, one after another.

The future of the Tachikawa Station area: the “sense of crisis” and the “hopes” the city wrote down

The quickest way to learn where the Tachikawa Station area is heading is to read the city’s page first. In short, the area around Tachikawa Station is at the stage of “starting to write its next plan”. The city has decided to draw up the “Future Vision for the Tachikawa Station Area (provisional name)”, setting out a picture of the hub’s future that can be shared with the community, together with concrete measures to make it real. It held a symposium on 23 October 2025, set up a preparatory meeting for a working group on 24 June 2026, and the first working group is due to meet on 28 October 2026 in a meeting room of the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The first half of the page looks back on how Tachikawa got this far. In the Fourth Capital Region Basic Plan, set by the national government in 1986, Tachikawa became a “business core city”. In Tokyo’s urban development vision of 2001, a “core city”. The national and Tokyo governments chose Tachikawa and nurtured it to spread out the business and commercial functions that had piled up too heavily in central Tokyo. In Tokyo’s “Grand Design for Urban Development” of 2017, too, the Tachikawa Station area is named a central hub where business, commercial and industrial functions gather, and part of the “Tama Innovation Exchange Zone”.

On top of that, the city writes two things. One is that the town-building that used the wide unused land of the former base has come to a pause. The other is the sense of crisis from the opening. If the land keeps turning into flats, the station area becomes a convenient residential district. That is not bad news for the people who live there, but as a hub for Tama, the reasons for people to gather during the day slowly grow thinner.

The city goes on to say that the times themselves have changed. Society has moved on from expanding quantity in an era of population growth to a mature society that values richness of spirit and quality of life. Preparation for climate change, such as decarbonisation and measures against heat, and a rich urban life centred on people are what is now called for, it says. Planning for an age when you put up a building and people come is, it seems, no longer enough.

Next to the crisis, hopes are written down too. Seen across the whole capital region, Tachikawa sits right halfway between transport hubs that represent the country, such as Tokyo Station and Haneda Airport, and the rich nature and tourist spots of Mount Fuji, Mount Takao and the Okutama area. The city wonders whether, by taking in a “gateway function” that makes use of that position, and by pursuing the happiness of the people connected with the station area, it might find a “new right answer” for building a hub. I never expected to meet the phrase “new right answer” in a government document. It is a little embarrassing, but not a bad phrase.

So who drew the dream of the station front that is now causing such worry, and what did it look like? The answer lay in a single plan from the end of the Showa era (1926–1989).

The Showa-era blueprint for “the heart of Tama”

The commemorative record of the land readjustment project at Tachikawa Station’s North Exit begins its account of the background like this. In November 1976, Tachikawa was positioned as a “core city” in the national Third Capital Region Basic Plan. In November of the following year, the US Air Force’s Tachikawa base, about 570 hectares in the northwest close to the North Exit, was returned in full. In 1979 it was decided that the returned land would go to a national park, a wide-area disaster-response base, and urban development.

According to another of the city’s documents, the outline for disposing of the land decided at that time by a national council divided the roughly 460 hectares of the former Tachikawa Airfield into 219 hectares for use by local governments, about 130 hectares for use by the national government and related bodies, and about 111 hectares of “reserved land”, whose use would not be decided for the time being. I enjoy the fact that “let’s not decide yet, for now” exists as an official category. In 2003 the policy for that reserved land shifted dramatically, from “reserve in principle” to “use in principle, with planned and effective use”, and the land north of the station gradually became town. When the city writes that “the development of unused land has come to a pause”, this long story is the one that is ending.

In response, the record says, Tokyo announced the “Tama Toshin Tachikawa (T・T・T) Plan” in October 1982. Tama Toshin means “the city centre of Tama”. T・T・T. Showa-era officialdom sometimes came up with surprisingly upbeat names. The city produced its “Tachikawa Urban Infrastructure Plan” the same year, and in 1984 announced its implementation plan for the district covering Tachikawa Station’s North Exit and the former base land.

The city has kept photographs of the North Exit station front from those days. In a black-and-white picture, the station plaza is at ground level, and buses and cars circle around it. People cross the plaza on zebra crossings. There is not yet any sign of people walking from shop to shop at first-floor height, as they do now.

The record also describes the North Exit before the readjustment. To the south of Midorikawa-dori, the street running east to west through roughly the middle of the area, was the central commercial district, already well built up. Large commercial buildings faced the station plaza, and behind them small eating places were packed together. Big buildings on the main street, little shops on the back streets. Walk around Tachikawa’s North Exit today, and that double structure still survives somewhere. North of Midorikawa-dori, on the other hand, besides the nurses’ dormitory of the National Tachikawa Hospital and the like, there was state land returned from the base, and urbanisation had been held back. A few minutes’ walk from the station, land that had not yet quite become town spread out.

(A word on “land readjustment”, kukaku seiri, a very Japanese tool of town-making. Landowners in an area each give up part of their plot; the land pooled this way becomes roads and squares, and everyone gets back a smaller but better-shaped, better-served plot. The handing back of the new plots, kanchi shobun, is what formally closes the project.)

For the North Exit station front, the town plan for readjustment was decided in July 1989 and the project approved in January 1990. It was carried out by the City of Tachikawa, over an area of about 5.7 hectares. According to the record, partly because the planned monorail ran north-south straight through it, this district was treated as the “keystone district” for creating the business core city and the heart of Tama. In this readjustment, where landowners contribute land to make roads and plazas, the average reduction across the whole area was about 34%. The new plots were formally assigned by public notice on 1 November 2004, and the project period ran until March 2009.

The South Exit took even longer. The land readjustment project for Tachikawa Station’s South Exit had its town plan decided in August 1964 and the project approved in February 1966. The area was about 28.2 hectares. The day of the public notice of the new plots was 1 October 2014. Forty-eight years from approval. A child born in the year the project began would have been 48 by the time it finally finished.

In the city’s 1990 photograph of the South Exit, low roofs huddle shoulder to shoulder along both sides of a narrow street running straight south from the station. In the 2005 photograph, the monorail track crosses directly above the same street, a deck spans the station front, and tall buildings stand in a row. In fifteen years the view changed this much. Even so, it took another nine years for the project to be closed on paper.

The station front was made like this, over half a century. And now, in one corner of it, a new line is about to be drawn.

6.7 hectares where flats will not be allowed

On 29 September 2026, the City of Tachikawa put on public display the draft town plan for the “Faret Tachikawa Related Area District Plan”. The display runs until 13 October, and written opinions are accepted until 20 October.

It covers about 6.7 hectares of Akebonocho 2-chome, about 200 metres north of Tachikawa Station. These are the blocks where, through the redevelopment of the area linked to the former base land, business and commercial facilities were built as one, in other words Faret Tachikawa, known as a district of public art, and the blocks next to it. The draft’s statement of reasons writes that after Sun Sun Road, the broad avenue on the North Exit side, came into use, this area grew into “the face of Tachikawa Station’s North Exit”, and states its aim: to maintain and protect the urban functions that have gathered here, and so shape a town worthy of a central hub.

Read the contents, and the meaning of that aim becomes clear. The plan divides the district into three parts, the Sun Sun Road frontage area, the Faret central area, and the Higashi-dori and Midorikawa-dori frontage area, and in all three it lays down that detached houses, terraced houses, homes combined with shops or offices, and apartment buildings, dormitories and boarding houses may not be built. Buildings already standing when the plan is decided are exempt, as long as their floor area does not increase. It also sets building walls back from the road boundary by 3 metres, or by 1 metre.

In other words: on prime land 200 metres from the station, no flats. This is one of the city’s concrete answers to the “risk of becoming a bed town” from the opening. The city’s urban planning master plan also says that, around Tachikawa Station, the location and scale of housing will be guided so as not to obstruct business and commercial uses.

The master plan was revised only in March 2026. In its policies for each hub, the main initiatives listed for the Tachikawa Station area are: studying how to guide appropriate land use around the station, town-building in the area east of the North Exit, promoting area management, building the town-planned roads and the main block roads around the station, and burying overhead power lines. For the South Exit, it says the city will protect and create good streetscapes along the South Exit Odori avenue, using its landscape plan and district-plan system. At the North Exit, a line is drawn to protect functions; at the South Exit, a line to protect streetscapes. On the two sides of the station, what is being protected differs a little.

This is still a draft. It will only be decided after the display and written opinions, the city planning council, and so on. Even so, these 6.7 hectares look to me like a statement of intent from a town at the centre of Tama that wants to choose “gathering” over “living”. It is a little cold towards people who want to live there, but the town seems to want to keep at least its prime station-front land as a place where people gather by day.

The Tachikawa Station area in numbers

• 154,091 — the average number of people a day boarding at Tachikawa Station in fiscal 2024 (JR East). The most of any station in Tama.
• 115.4 — Tachikawa’s ratio of daytime to night-time population in the 2020 census. First among Tokyo’s cities outside the 23 wards. Daytime Tachikawa has about 15% more people than night-time Tachikawa.
• 6.7 — hectares. The area of the draft district plan that would bar apartment buildings and the like. About 1.4 times the size of Tokyo Dome, the baseball stadium Japanese use as a unit of area (my own calculation). If the draft goes through as written, the number of people who can live there will not grow.
• 48 — years from approval to the formal handing back of plots in the South Exit readjustment project. If there were a prize for patient work, Tachikawa Station’s South Exit would be a strong contender.
• About 34% — the average land reduction in the North Exit readjustment. The landowners pooled about a third of their land to make today’s station plaza and roads.
• 155 — attendees at the Tachikawa Station area town-building symposium in October 2025. It was held on a weekday evening, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Traveller’s detour quiz

How many years did the land readjustment project at Tachikawa Station’s South Exit take, from project approval to the public notice of the new plots that closed it?

1. 8 years (B) 28 years (C) 48 years

The answer comes near the end of this article.

The station front at ground level was rearranged over half a century. So is the walkway in the air stretched above it finished? Read the city’s documents and you get an unexpected answer.