Tachikawa GREEN SPRINGS Guide: Goats, a Rooftop River, Things to Do

GREEN SPRINGS, an 8-minute walk from Tachikawa Station: goats, a prize-winning rooftop biotope, a 120-metre cascade, and the airfield history behind it all.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

For three years, on a prime plot eight minutes’ walk from Tachikawa Station, goats were eating the grass.

It sounds like a joke. It is in the official record kept by the company that developed the land. Ask a Tokyoite what comes to mind when they hear “Tachikawa” (立川) and you will get a transfer station on the JR Chuo Line, a big station building, a department store or two, and then a pause. Even people who live here seem faintly embarrassed to boast about their town. Had they known about the goats, they would have had at least one thing to boast about.

Tachikawa lies west of central Tokyo, in what Japanese call the Tama area: the western half of Tokyo Metropolis, the part that is not the 23 wards you see on postcards. Step out of the North Exit of Tachikawa Station and the first thing you notice is the sky. It is wide. A raised pedestrian deck covers the plaza in front of the station, and above it, on concrete stilts, glides the track of the Tama Toshi Monorail. If you drift out of the crowd and head north, about eight minutes from the station you reach a district called GREEN SPRINGS.

From the name alone, you would assume it is one more new shopping complex. I assumed so too. My brain files any building near a Japanese station with an English name under “shopping,” without asking.

But when I began reading the documents, one number snagged. This plot uses less than a third of the floor space it is allowed to build. Eight minutes from the station. Prime land. The normal thing would be to put up something tall, stack the floors, and lease out every square metre you can. Nobody did that. What went in instead was lawn, trees, and a 120-metre run of falling water.

Why? Who gave up that money, and for what? I walk north to find out.

GREEN SPRINGS begins with the history of Tachikawa’s sky

It would be easy to list the sights of GREEN SPRINGS in order: lawn, water, museum. Do that, and you miss half of what makes the place interesting. Before solving the mystery, I want to trace where this land came from. The shape of this district cannot be separated from the sky of a hundred years ago.

According to “The History of Tachikawa Airfield,” a summary published by Tachikawa City, the decision to build an airfield here came in the autumn of 1921. Four reasons were given: it was close to the capital; there was wide, flat land with few houses; a railway ran through it; and the weather was favourable. Construction began in March 1922, and in November the Imperial Army’s 5th Air Battalion moved to Tachikawa.

The airfield was used by civilians, too. In July 1929, the first scheduled civilian passenger service in Japan began, between Tachikawa and Osaka. This country’s scheduled passenger flights took off from a runway in Tachikawa. Back then the sky over this neighbourhood was full of propeller noise. Under the same sky today, what you hear is water running across a rooftop. Of all the people sprinting through Haneda Airport looking for their gate, almost none will recall that it all started in Tachikawa. Civil aviation itself moved to Haneda in 1933, and the Tachikawa airfield took on an increasingly military character.

In September 1945, after Japan’s defeat, the US military moved in. In 1955 the Sunagawa Struggle began, a long local protest against the expansion of the base. The Tachikawa base was fully returned to Japan in November 1977. Its former grounds became Showa Kinen Park (the national Showa Memorial Park), a regional disaster-response base, and ordinary city.

Showa Kinen Park first opened in October 1983, with a planned area of 180 hectares. Its theme is “the restoration of greenery and the enhancement of humanity.” You only use the word “restoration” about something that was once lost.

GREEN SPRINGS stands between that park and the monorail line, as the announcement by its builder, the construction company Obayashi, puts it. Between the park on the old airfield and the city by the station. But what was here before the district was built? The answer was not what I expected.

There were goats on the prime land

According to “GREEN SPRINGS STORY,” a series on the official website, this was national land on the north side of JR Tachikawa Station, known as the “Midori district” (midori means green). On 27 January 2015, Tachihi Holdings won it at a government tender. Earlier tenders had failed to find a buyer.

While the land belonged to the state, the only thing done with it was weeding, twice a year. Masamichi Murayama, president of Tachihi Holdings, recalls this in the series. A plot eight minutes from the station lay asleep, waking only to be mown twice a year.

For the three years between winning the tender and breaking ground, Tachihi put goats on the land. Weeding twice a year was not much fun, the series explains, and they wanted to give local people something to enjoy. Being close to the station, the goats were a hit.

There is an anecdote that shows just how popular they were. Kenji Furusawa of Yamashita Sekkei, the architectural firm in charge of the design, went to the city’s building guidance office to consult about the project. When he explained that development was being planned on the site, the official in charge looked sad and asked: so the goats will be leaving? At a planning meeting with the authorities, the first concern raised was the future of the goats. Mr Furusawa says the goats did a great deal to raise awareness of the site.

I know of no other urban development file in which goats are treated with such respect. The first to win local hearts in Tachikawa’s redevelopment was neither an architect nor a company president. It was a goat.

The land came with conditions. No housing could be built. A cultural facility of about 10,000 square metres was required. And construction had to begin within three years of the tender. These are the conditions reported in the series. The goats’ tenure, in other words, had been fixed at three years from the start.

The goats left. So why did no tall building rise in their place?

Why not pack the plot with buildings?

From the station deck, head towards the monorail’s Tachikawa-Kita Station, pass along the walkway beneath the monorail, and descend onto Sun Sun Road, a broad pedestrian avenue. Keep walking straight, and a cluster of low buildings appears on your left. The first thing you notice is how short they are.

One reason is in the sky. Nearby are the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force’s Tachikawa Airfield and the US Forces’ Yokota Air Base, and under Japan’s aviation law that means a height limit. The airfields still decide how tall this land may grow. It wants to stretch and cannot. As someone who has worried about his own height for most of his life, I feel a certain kinship.

But a height limit alone does not explain so little floor space. There is a 2025 document submitted to a panel at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism by Tachihi Strategy Lab, the company that led the development. It says that the permitted floor-area ratio here is 500 per cent, and that the actual ratio was held to about 150 per cent. That is a figure I would like to read aloud to my bookshelf, which has been filled to the very last centimetre.

The same document is blunt. From a private-sector viewpoint, it says, leaving floor area unused is not allowed, and greenery and water features that bring in no direct income are best avoided. Having said so, it goes on: this district was given generous greenery and water anyway.

The landowner’s history is in the documents too. Tachihi Holdings was founded in 1924 as an aircraft manufacturer and turned to real estate after the war. It owns land equal to 4 per cent of the area of Tachikawa City. In the series, President Murayama describes this as social capital: one twenty-fifth of the city. When you own a twenty-fifth of a city, it pays to think about the value of the whole town rather than the profit on one building. The document says as much: the development aims not at the profitability of a single property but at raising the value of the area.

Work began in February 2018 and finished in February 2020, according to the record of the Japan Institute of Architects’ selection of outstanding architecture. The site is about 38,900 square metres, roughly 4 hectares. The design was by a joint venture of Yamashita Sekkei and Obayashi. The district opened in 2020.

GREEN SPRINGS by the numbers

• 500 → 150: the floor-area ratio allowed, and the ratio actually used (per cent). The remaining 350 was handed over to sky and lawn.
• Twice a year: how often the weeds were cut while it was state land. The job was later taken over by goats.
• 1/25: the share of Tachikawa City that Tachihi owns. Walk 25 steps across town and, arithmetically, one of them is on Tachihi land.
• About 1 hectare: the plaza on the artificial ground at second-floor level. Under the lawn, there is a car park.
• 120 metres: the length of the cascade. Short, if it is meant to be a runway; long, if it is meant to be a canal.
• 350-plus: plant species in the district. The ones I can name do not reach a tenth of that.

So much for the numbers. But who built a district like this, and how fast? There, too, the figures are a little startling.

Ground broken in three years, built by a thousand people

One of the tender conditions was that construction start three years after the sale. The official series says that procedures which normally take 10 to 15 years before ground is broken had to be pushed through in three. Taku Shimizu, who appears in the series, joined the project in February 2016.

According to Kenichi Kubo, who handled project management for the whole development, in 2015 nobody had even decided what to build. Until 2017, the work was mostly discussion of what to make and how. Construction began in early 2018. Counting everyone who worked on site, more than 1,000 people had a hand in the district.

At first there were just a few of us, recalls Tomoyuki Yokoyama of Tachihi Strategy Lab. Building the organisation began with setting up the company Tachihi Strategy Lab itself. Mr Yokoyama ranks this development among the largest investments in the not-quite-100-year history of the Tachihi group. Because the group would run its own hotel, hall, bar and restaurant, it had to decide everything itself: interiors, furniture, running costs, even menu development.

Episode six of the series even includes a restaurant tasting session, with a half-joking exchange about who was the most obsessive about the hamburger. People from a company that once built aeroplanes and then spent decades looking after land, earnestly debating how a burger should be cooked. The picture is a little funny, and a little reassuring.

The interviews for the series took place in July 2019, the year before the opening. At the time, President Murayama reckoned it would take four or five years before the district became widely known. Count from the 2020 opening and we are right in the period for checking his answer. Few developers near a station would say “four or five years” out loud. For a company that has lived nearly a century, five years is not long.

So the plan was settled in three years and the district built by more than a thousand people. How did the designers use that leftover 350 per cent of empty space?

A veranda, and two paths that cross on a slant

Inside the district, the buildings form a ring around a central plaza. The official website calls the architectural concept “the town’s engawa.” An engawa is the wooden veranda that runs along the edge of a traditional Japanese house, half inside and half out. Here the eaves project deeply, creating that half-outdoor space beneath them, and even inside the glass-walled buildings you are meant to feel what is happening outside.

What you do on an engawa has been settled for centuries. Nothing. People here do not go into a shop, and do not go home either. They just sit.

The roofs mean something too. In the series, Taku Shimizu says the pitch of the roofs echoes the rhythm of the mountains you can see to the west of the Tama area. A good deal of timber from Tama was used in the buildings. Tatsuya Hiraga, who designed the landscape, recalls that his team chose the trees for the district one by one. The ridgelines of roofs by a station trace the distant mountains of Okutama, Tokyo’s far-western highlands. Hardly anyone will notice. Noticed or not, the mountains are there.

Two streets cut diagonally across the plaza and cross in the middle. The official website explains this as an expression of a place where Tachikawa’s past and future intersect. According to Mr Hiraga, the axes were inspired by the airfield’s approach surface, the angle at which aircraft took off and landed. The angle of the path under your feet copies the angle at which planes once came down out of the sky.

And the ground is not ground. Regulations required a car park, so the ground floor became parking and an artificial deck was built on top of it. According to Obayashi, this second-level artificial ground holds a plaza of about one hectare surrounded by greenery and water.

In other words, the place where we tread the grass and rest in the shade of trees is the roof of a building. More precisely, the roof of a car park. The soles of my feet, which had just begun to sigh about how good it is to stand on real earth, have been thoroughly fooled. Since it was built to make you feel exactly that, the blame lies with the designers’ skill.

Wayfarer’s detour quiz

Before development began, who ate the grass on this land and delighted the neighbours?

• A. Goats
• B. Sheep
• C. Professional grass-cutters, and no one else

The answer is near the end of this article.

The rooftop plaza holds one more thing that has no business being on a roof. A river.

A river on the roof: the Tama River and the Tamagawa Aqueduct

From one corner of the plaza comes the sound of water. It is the cascade, a stepped stream of falling water.

According to Obayashi, the cascade runs for 120 metres and recreates the murmur of the Tamagawa Aqueduct (Tamagawa Josui, the historic canal that carried water to Edo, old Tokyo) and the glitter of light on a river’s surface. The official website, meanwhile, says the cascade takes as its motif the runway of the airfield that once stood here, and that it links the streets to the roof of the multipurpose hall. The shape of a runway, carrying the flow of a canal. Two memories laid over one design.

Climb the steps and the view opens. The official website says there is a sky deck overlooking Showa Kinen Park. The ministry document describes this place as midway between the city’s economic zone and the natural zone of the park. From the bustle of the station to the green of the park, the roof of a building becomes a gentle slope that leads you along.

In the middle of the plaza is a biotope. According to Obayashi, it recreates the environment of a wando on the Tama River and conserves endangered aquatic plants. A wando is a backwater beside the main channel of a river, where the current slows almost to a standstill. A river’s edge, in other words, transplanted to the roof of a car park. For this work, GREEN SPRINGS received the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Award in the rooftop greening category of the 21st Rooftop and Wall Greening Technology Competition.

The plant pages of the official website list the biotope’s residents. Kakitsubata, a water iris, blooms as the blue-purple flower no waterside should be without. Asaza, the yellow floating heart, is a water plant with heart-shaped leaves and yellow flowers, and its flowers can be seen only during the day. It will not meet night owls. As someone who is bad at mornings, I take that personally. Around the biotope grow mountain hydrangea, misohagi (a purple loosestrife), and komurasaki-shikibu (a beautyberry), along with choji-so, an amsonia that likes wetlands.

Once you know the plants’ names, the next things to learn are the calendar and the clock. This district becomes a different place depending on when you come. At night, works of art that slept through the day begin to glow.