Tachikawa History Walk: How a Mulberry Village Became Tama’s Hub

1922: Tachikawa becomes the “Capital of the Sky”

In the autumn of 1921 (Taisho 10), it was decided to build an airfield in Tachikawa.

Why Tachikawa? “The History of Tachikawa Airfield,” a booklet the city compiled for children, lists four reasons. It was close to the capital, Tokyo. There was wide, flat land with no houses. There was a railway. And the weather was favourable.

This is where the flatness from the beginning pays off. The flatness of a plateau left as open plain because no one could live there, and a railway that had arrived some thirty years earlier: those two things summoned the airfield. Ironically, the very fact that people had been unable to live here for lack of water was what satisfied the condition of “wide land with no houses.”

Construction began in March 1922 (Taisho 11). On 10 November the airfield opened, and the Army’s 5th Air Battalion moved in from Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture. A Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications document says that this was the trigger for the northern Tama area, Tachikawa included, to become a “military city.”

The next year, 1923, was a dizzying one for Tachikawa. In June, the Japan Flying School opened at the airfield. In September, the Great Kanto Earthquake struck. According to the city’s airfield history, civilian aircraft played an active part in news gathering and in carrying manuscripts, and the Asahi Shimbun’s East–West Regular Air Service moved to Tachikawa. When the roads on the ground were cut, Tachikawa had already made its name as a place where the road through the sky still worked. Please keep this line in mind. We will come back to it near the end.

And on 1 December, Tachikawa village became Tachikawa town. The following year, to celebrate the change, an automobile race was held at the airfield. To mark the town’s birthday on an airfield runway, they raced cars rather than planes. I find that twist rather endearing.

The town swelled. In 1925 (Taisho 14), Tachikawa Girls’ School opened, along with Tachikawa’s first cinema, the Tachikawa Kinema. In 1926 (Taisho 15), the Hino Bridge was built across the Tama River. In 1929 (Showa 4), the Chuo Line was electrified as far as Tachikawa, and in 1930 (Showa 5), Tachikawa Station got its South Exit.

The airfield was not only for the military. In September 1927 (Showa 2), a Soviet aircraft flew in, the first foreign aircraft to visit Tachikawa. Foreign planes followed one after another, and the city’s timeline says Tachikawa Airfield became an “international airport.” In July 1929 (Showa 4), Japan’s first scheduled passenger flight took off from here. Where it was headed, I will turn into a quiz.

The traveller’s detour quiz

In July 1929 (Showa 4), Japan’s first scheduled passenger flight took off from Tachikawa Airfield. Where was it bound?

• A　Fukuoka
• B　Osaka
• C　Sapporo

The answer is revealed on the last page of this article, just before “Before you go.”

In 1930 (Showa 5), the Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing Company moved its factory from Tsukishima in Tokyo to Tachikawa. It later became Tachikawa Aircraft. A song written that same year, “Tachikawa Kouta,” packed its lyrics with scenes of the town of the day and was sung with dancing at banquet parties, according to the city’s history newsletter. The town must have been lively enough to make people want to sing about it.

In April 1937 (Showa 12), the Asahi Shimbun’s aircraft Kamikaze-go took off from Tachikawa and flew to London, setting, according to the city’s timeline, a world record for flight time. The nickname “Capital of the Sky” probably never rang prouder than in those years.

Sora no Miyako Tachikawa: “Tachikawa, Capital of the Sky.” The city still writes that Tachikawa earned that name because the Army’s 5th Air Regiment was once based here. But the capital of the sky gradually changed colour. Civil aviation moved to Haneda in September 1933 (Showa 8), and in March 1934 (Showa 9) the Army Air Arsenal moved in from Tokorozawa. In 1939 (Showa 14), the Army Aviation Technical School was set up. The ministry’s document lists one military facility after another: the Army Air Arsenal, the Army Aviation Technical Research Institute, the Army Aviation Examination Headquarters, a branch of the Army Meteorological Department. According to the company history, Tachikawa Aircraft had more than 42,000 people on its rolls at the end of the war.

On 1 December 1940 (Showa 15), Tachikawa town became a city. Tachikawa City was born. Eighteen years after the airfield opened. It is fair to call it a town that shortened its journey from village to city at the speed of an aeroplane. In 1942 (Showa 17), the names of the districts Fujimi-cho, Shibasaki-cho, Nishiki-cho, Hagoromo-cho, Akebono-cho, Takamatsu-cho and Midori-cho were fixed. The familiar neighbourhood names around the station were born in the middle of a war.

Tachikawa’s hundred years in numbers

• 1929 — The year Japan’s first scheduled passenger flight left from Tachikawa. Before Haneda, the gateway to the sky was here.
• 5 — The number of theories the city lists for the origin of the name “Tachikawa.” The right answer: even city hall doesn’t know.
• 124.7 and 64.9 — The highest and lowest points in the city, in metres above sea level. Even a flat town has its 60 metres of drama.
• 37.5 — Kilometres from Tokyo Station to Tachikawa Station. Forty minutes by Special Rapid. Probably closer than it feels to people who call it far.
• 118 — The area, in hectares, of the Tachikawa Disaster Prevention Base: the size of the place the capital will lean on, should the worst day come.
• 186,076 — The population on 1 April 2024. A Meiji-era villager from Shibasaki would redo the sum three times.

1945: the Capital of the Sky is targeted from the sky

A town full of military facilities and munitions factories became a target.

The preparations had begun earlier. The Air Defence Act took effect in 1937 (Showa 12), and air-raid drills and blackouts changed daily life. In July 1944 (Showa 19), districts around Tachikawa Station were designated for “building evacuation,” the demolition of houses to create firebreaks against air raids. More than 400 homes were affected. The demolition was finished by 9 September, with the help of mobilised students, according to the ministry’s document.

The same document says Tachikawa suffered 13 air raids from 16 February 1945 onward. The confirmed dead, across the city’s districts and at Tachikawa Aircraft, numbered 340 in total. The number of people killed inside military facilities such as the airfield is unknown.

The raid of 4 April caused particularly heavy damage, centred on Fujimi-cho. At Yamanaka-zaka, a slope in Fujimi-cho, there was a tunnel shelter cut into the bluff. It had originally been dug to store important city-hall documents, and neighbours used it as an air-raid shelter. A 250-kilogram bomb hit it directly, and the 42 people inside were killed. The city’s records note that 32 of them were children. On the site, the bereaved families erected a memorial statue of Jizo, the bodhisattva who protects children. In 1995 (Heisei 7), a stone monument inscribed with “Yamanaka-zaka Hika,” an elegy for the tragedy, was added.

The ministry’s document also contains a line that almost no one walking through the city knows. Today’s North Exit station plaza and North Exit main street were developed on the land cleared by that wartime building evacuation. The plaza where so many people pass, meet friends and wait for buses every day has that history beneath its feet.

The war ended. In September 1945, US forces entered Tachikawa and the airfield became an American base. The ministry’s document says Tachikawa took its first postwar step as a “base town.” A black market sprang up by the North Exit, and shops hung signs in English. When the Korean War began in 1950 (Showa 25), the town boomed on business with American servicemen. At the same time, aircraft noise and incidents threatened daily life.

Stalls and tented black-market booths. Shops catering to American soldiers, with English signs. For those who knew the North Exit in the Showa era, that was the everyday scene in front of the station. Tell a young person waiting for a friend on today’s North Exit deck that English signs once dominated this square, and it will sound like the plot of an old film. The same station front changed its face this completely in less than eighty years.

Postwar Tachikawa set out with two faces: the face of a base town, and the face of the centre of everyday life in Tama. In 1947 (Showa 22), Tachikawa Senmon Gakko, a vocational college, was founded just south of today’s Municipal Second Junior High School; its first principal, a local man, is said to have opened it with his own money. In 1951 (Showa 26), a city-run keirin (bicycle racing) track opened, and the city began its own water-supply service. In 1959 (Showa 34), Tachikawa became a sister city of San Bernardino, California. The base town was not forever quarrelling with America.

But a few years earlier, in Sunagawa, just to the north, news had arrived that shook the town.

Sunagawa: a name written into Japan’s constitutional history

In May 1955 (Showa 30), the town of Sunagawa, Tachikawa’s northern neighbour, was notified of a plan to expand Tachikawa Air Base. The land needed to lengthen the runway was Sunagawa farmers’ fields. The town council passed a resolution opposing the plan, and over the surveying of the land, police and local people clashed violently in September of that year and in October the following year. A research case record from the National Diet Library summarises that the government afterwards announced it would halt the surveying.

On 8 July 1957 (Showa 32), some of those protesting the survey crossed the base’s boundary fence, and students and workers were prosecuted. This was the Sunagawa Incident. On 30 March 1959 (Showa 34), the Tokyo District Court acquitted them, ruling that the stationing of US forces violated the Constitution. This is known as the Date ruling. The government skipped the appeal court and went straight to the Supreme Court, and on 16 December the same year, the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court overturned the ruling and sent the case back to the district court. A book review published in the journal of the Japan Society for Archival Science records that the defendants were eventually convicted, with fines of 2,000 yen. The “Sunagawa” of the Sunagawa Incident, a name that comes up again and again in the history of trials over Japan’s constitution and national security, is the name of this town. From 2008 onward, documents found in US archives and elsewhere indicated that the then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had shared his outlook on the ruling with the American side, and written questions were submitted in the Diet. The Tachikawa City Library’s research guide even notes that in 2014–2015, the Sunagawa ruling was cited as grounds in the debate over allowing Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defence.

I will not make jokes here. The weight of years in which the town was split in two is not something an outsider passing through should handle lightly. The Tachikawa City Library holds a reproduction of a collection of essays written by Sunagawa junior high school students of the time, and the library describes it as conveying the atmosphere of a town divided between those for and against the base expansion, and the everyday roar of aircraft. Tachikawa Central Library keeps its materials on the Tachikawa base and airfield together as a special collection. This city keeps the record of its own pain properly on the shelf.

In 1960 (Showa 35), the Tachikawa city council proposed a merger to the Sunagawa town council. And on 1 May 1963 (Showa 38), the town of Sunagawa was incorporated into Tachikawa City. That is the shape of Tachikawa today, and it is why the question “When was Tachikawa City founded?” has two dates. Seven years after the merger, in 1970 (Showa 45), Sunagawa’s addresses were reorganised. The old neighbourhood names, the First Group through the Tenth Group, gave way to new ones such as Ichiban-cho, Wakaba-cho, Saiwai-cho and Kashiwa-cho. Even so, the name Sunagawa-cho survives today as a district name.

Five years after the merger, in December 1968 (Showa 43), the commander of the US Air Force announced that the plan to extend the Tachikawa runway was cancelled. In October 1969 (Showa 44), the US military announced that it would stop flying from Tachikawa. Thirteen years had passed since the expansion notice. In December 1972 (Showa 47), Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force moved into Tachikawa Base. Over that move, the city council passed a written opinion, withdrew it, and then passed another one opposing it. Between the lines of the timeline you can hear the breathing of a city that kept swaying.

The base returns, and the city takes charge of the capital’s worst day

On 30 November 1977 (Showa 52), Tachikawa Base was returned in full. According to the Cabinet Office, the state-owned land returned came to 466 hectares in total. Fifty-five years after the airfield opened in 1922, the land of the Capital of the Sky came back to the town.

How should the returned land be used? The state chose two pillars: a large park and a regional disaster-prevention base. In November 1979 (Showa 54), the National Property Central Council recommended setting up the disaster base. In May 1983 (Showa 58), the national Central Disaster Management Council decided to push ahead with building the Tachikawa Disaster Prevention Base, and on 26 October that year, the national government’s Showa Kinen Park opened its first phase, 70 hectares. Built to commemorate the 50th year of Emperor Showa’s reign, the national park now covers 180 hectares.

Hardly anyone outside the city knows about the disaster-prevention base. It sits in Midori-cho, Tachikawa, and covers about 118 hectares. Lined up there are the Tokyo Fire Department, the Metropolitan Police Department, the Japan Coast Guard, the Ground Self-Defense Force, a disaster medical centre, and the Cabinet Office’s backup facility for the disaster headquarters. The Cabinet Office material contains a startling sentence. If a great disaster strikes the capital, central Tokyo is devastated or communications are severed, and the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defense’s central command post cannot be used, the national emergency disaster headquarters will move to the backup facility in Tachikawa. That is set out in a Cabinet understanding of 21 November 2003 (Heisei 15).

Why Tachikawa? The Cabinet Office gives its reasons. It is about 30 kilometres from central Tokyo, a reasonable distance at which both are unlikely to be hit at once. It sits on a plateau with relatively firm ground. And it has room to spare.

I sat in front of that document in silence for a while. Relatively firm ground on a plateau. Room to spare. That says almost exactly what the people who chose the airfield site in 1921 said: “wide, flat land with no houses.” And in the year of the Great Kanto Earthquake, when the roads were cut, it was this Tachikawa airfield that carried reporters’ manuscripts through the air. A role the town once played a century ago, it now holds again, in the name of the nation.

On the subject of earthquakes, there is one more funny story. Many people believe Tachikawa has a fault line called the “Tachikawa Fault.” Yet the city’s timeline records that in 2015 (Heisei 27), at a lecture by the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, it was reported that the fault does not exist within the city. It lends the city its name, but the fault itself is not at home.

On the returned land, a new town kept building up. In 1982 (Showa 57), a new Tachikawa Station building, a station shopping complex and a north–south free passage were completed. For anyone who remembers crossing between the north and south sides of the station through an underground passage, today’s station is practically a different station. In the same year, a new runway went into use on part of the returned land; the city’s timeline calls it “New Tachikawa Airfield.” In 1994 (Heisei 6), Faret Tachikawa opened on the former base land, placing 109 works of art around its streets. In 1995 (Heisei 7), the state approved a basic plan making Hachioji and Tachikawa “business core cities.” The city now introduces Tachikawa as a town designated by the state as a “business core city” of the Greater Tokyo area.

In 1998 (Heisei 10), the northern section of the Tama Toshi Monorail opened, and in 2000 (Heisei 12) the whole line. In 2003 (Heisei 15), an “urban axis” boulevard opened across the former base land and the following year was nicknamed Sunsun Road. In 2008–2009 (Heisei 20–21), the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the National Institute of Polar Research moved to Tachikawa, and branches of the Tokyo District Court and Family Court moved onto the former base land too. In 2010 (Heisei 22), city hall itself built its new offices on former base land in Izumi-cho. In 2015 (Heisei 27), LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi opened on land that had once been an aircraft factory, and in 2020 (Reiwa 2), GREEN SPRINGS opened on what had been state land north of the station.

While I’m at it, one more line to be proud of. In 1961 (Showa 36), the Tachikawa city council elected Japan’s first female council chair. The city’s timeline gives it a single, offhand line. The important things in this town are usually dispatched in a single, offhand line of the timeline.

There are people who still check those lines on foot, one by one. A local education-promotion association holds a “Tachikawa History Walk” almost every year; one edition, billed as “Sunagawa started here,” walked the birthplace of Sunagawa Shinden. A Tama local-news site runs a series called “Was that Showa? Tachikawa back then,” and its 1986 instalment looks back on it as the year clear water returned to the Tamagawa Aqueduct. A line in a timeline connects to someone’s memory of daily life. That history is told here not as a tourist signboard but as neighbourhood talk is, to me, a sign of the town’s real strength.

Why Tachikawa became the centre of Tama in a hundred years

How did a village of fields and mulberry become the centre of Tama in a single century?

Having walked the timeline to the end, my own answer settled into one. In every era, Tachikawa offered the nation a reason to put something here. And it was almost always the same reason: flat, wide, neither too near nor too far from central Tokyo, and a place where railways meet.

The Edo aqueduct let people live on a flat, waterless plateau. The Meiji railway laid its tracks across that plateau. The Taisho-era army saw flat land without houses, plus a railway, and built an airfield. The postwar US military turned the airfield into a base. After its return, the state placed on that same land a park, a disaster base that holds the capital’s worst-case day, courts and research institutes. You could say Tachikawa’s century is the story of one flat plateau that era after era came to borrow.

That is why Tachikawa has stood witness, again and again, at the turning points of Japan’s modern history. The sky above the Great Kanto Earthquake. The day Japan’s first scheduled passenger flight took off. The morning Kamikaze-go set out for London. The nights of the air raids. The years when the town split over the base expansion. A ruling that remains in constitutional history. The return of the land after 55 years. And the capital’s day of emergency that has not yet come. Each of these is on record together with the name of this town.

“On the Chuo Line, somewhere out west.” When someone says that, just show them this timeline without a word. But don’t look too pleased with yourself. After all, nobody yet knows where the name Tachikawa comes from.