Tachikawa Airfield History: The 2:12 a.m. Flight to London, 1937

From the Asahi hangar to ANA: what became of the man who directed the Kamikaze-go

Remember Masaichi Midoro, the name I asked you to keep in mind in the first half of this article?

According to the encyclopaedia, near the end of the Pacific War Midoro resigned as managing director of the Asahi Shimbun, went home to Tsuyama in Okayama Prefecture, and took up farming. After the defeat, together with Katsuyoshi Nakano, former deputy head of the Asahi’s aviation department, he set up Kominsha, an organisation to help aviation people who had lost their jobs, and became its chairman. In occupied Japan, every kind of work connected with aircraft was banned.

In 1952, when domestic civil aviation resumed, Midoro founded Japan Helicopter and Aeroplane Transport and became its president. In December 1957, when that company merged with Far East Airlines to form All Nippon Airways (ANA), Midoro became its first president. The encyclopaedia’s entry on the East-West Scheduled Air Association says that Midoro and Nakano, from the Asahi’s aviation department, founded Kominsha, which became the parent body of Japan Helicopter and Aeroplane Transport, which later became All Nippon Airways.

To put it plainly: the Asahi Shimbun’s aviation department kept a hangar at Tachikawa Airfield. The man who headed that department and directed the Kamikaze-go’s flight to Europe, which left from Tachikawa, became the first president of ANA after the war. When you board one of its blue-tailed airliners at Haneda or Narita today, the lineage of people who once looked up at aircraft in a Tachikawa hangar flows into that company’s beginnings. Tachikawa’s airport signboard moved east, but the human connections did not move house so easily.

The Asahi had a record of flying to Europe even before the Kamikaze-go. According to the Teikyo University paper, in 1925 the newspaper named two Breguet 19 aircraft bought from France “Hatsukaze” and “Kochi” and sent them off from Japan in July. The two planes crossed Siberia, toured European cities, and reached Rome in October. There the aircraft were dismantled, and they came home by steamship the following January along with the four pilots and engineers. The return trip was by sea. Twelve years later, the Kamikaze-go flew home as well. That is the progress of Japan’s skies in those twelve years.

What became of the two men, and of the Kamikaze-go

The Kamikaze-go’s journey home retraced the outbound route in reverse. It left London on 14 May 1937 and, via Osaka, arrived at Haneda on the 21st. The Teikyo University paper says it was raining at Haneda that day. According to the encyclopaedia, crews on long-distance flights like this often came home by ship, but this time Asahi executives had decided the plane would fly both ways, so the two men, tired and unenthusiastic, flew it home themselves. A hero’s homecoming may have felt a little like commuting to work in the rain.

What happened to the two men afterwards cannot be separated from the war.

Iinuma died on 11 December 1941 in Phnom Penh, in French Indochina, three days after the start of the Pacific War. According to the encyclopaedia, he was killed when caught up in an accident involving a friendly aircraft at the airfield, but in Japan a different cause of death, “an honourable death in battle,” was reported. He was 29. In April 1989, the Iinuma Aviator Memorial Museum opened in his birthplace, Toyoshina-Hosogaya in Azumino. The list of material providers in issue 11 of Tachikawa City’s history newsletter “Tachikawa Monogatari” includes this museum. Tachikawa’s city history and the museum in Azumino are still connected.

Tsukagoshi took off from Singapore on 7 July 1943 aboard the Ki-77, a long-distance aircraft of the Asahi Shimbun and the army, bound for Germany, and vanished over the Indian Ocean. According to the encyclopaedia, what happened to the plane and crew is still unknown.

The Kamikaze-go itself has a long epilogue. According to the encyclopaedia, after returning home it served as the Asahi’s communications plane, and in October 1939 it made a forced landing off Taiwan. It was recovered, repaired, and in 1940 displayed at the “Kamikaze Memorial Hall” on Mount Ikoma in Nara. After the war it was reportedly burned by the US military, but a fragment of duralumin painted with the Asahi company flag survived. In 2021 the family of the person who had kept it contacted Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and donated it, and since March 2024 it has been on permanent display at the company’s Oe Clock Tower Aviation History Archive. A piece of the plane that left Tachikawa in the middle of the night has, more than eighty years later, come back to where people can see it.

The day the civilian sky vanished, and what stayed in Tachikawa

In 1945 the war ended. According to the Teikyo University paper, on 18 November that year the Allied General Headquarters ordered that every government office, company and organisation connected with Japanese aviation be dissolved by 31 December. Japan’s civilian sky disappeared, for a time.

That same autumn, the aircraft flying were the occupation forces’. According to the paper, on 11 October GHQ announced that the US Far East Air Forces would run liaison flights. The American unit in charge flew from Tachikawa Airfield, which it had already requisitioned, with twelve aircraft including C-47s and C-46s, while Dai Nippon Airways was ordered to continue handling passengers and mail across Japan. When Japan’s civilian sky was banned, Japan’s air service was once again flying from Tachikawa.

The base gate and 3.5 tonnes of candy: in front of Showa-era Tachikawa Airfield

According to issue 20 of “Tachikawa Monogatari,” the US forces who entered Tachikawa on 3 September 1945 requisitioned the airfield and the neighbouring factories, and set up Tachikawa Base on 5 September. The munitions factories were forbidden to produce, and many workers who lost their jobs went back to their home towns. In their place, goods flowing out of the base filled the black markets around Tachikawa Station, and American servicemen working at the base became valued customers of the shotengai, the local shopping streets, around the gates and in Akebonocho, Takamatsucho and Fujimicho. As Tachikawa Base became the leading transport base in the Far East, jobs appeared inside and outside it: mechanics, cooks, housemaids, drivers. In 1950, the newsletter says, Tachikawa’s population hit a new record, surpassing the 60,000 of 1944, when it had been called a “military city.”

Issue 15 of the newsletter prints several photographs from those days. The Christmas decorations at Tachikawa Station in 1950 showed Santa Claus alongside a transport plane. A picture of the station taken from around today’s south exit of the West Underpass shows a souvenir shop for foreigners, its sign reading “Souvenir Store.” Shops like it spread not only around the North Exit but across the tracks to the South Exit. Around 1952, the crossroads in Akebonocho 2-chome, which the base’s main gate faced, was lined with English signs aimed at US servicemen.

The liveliest photographs are records of children. In 1953, the Christmas party for children held in the East Area of the base was in its fifth year, and, as the year before, more than 20,000 children were expected. A military band played; a choir of students from the Metropolitan Tachikawa High School sang hymns; children from the city’s Third Primary School and local kindergartens danced; the American primary school attended by servicemen’s children put on a play; professional acrobats performed. With money from charity events on the base, a mountain of candy weighing 3.5 tonnes was prepared, and at the end Santa Claus appeared and handed it out to the children. Anyone who was a child in Tachikawa in the early 1950s might just remember a single sweet from that mountain.

The sound of aircraft was part of the town, too. According to the encyclopaedia, at the base’s peak in the 1950s and 1960s there were about 2,300 take-offs and landings a month and about 20,000 people flown in and out each month. In a different sense from before the war, Tachikawa’s sky had become a “capital of the sky” once more.

That sky grew quieter, bit by bit. In October 1969 the US military announced the end of flying at Tachikawa; in 1972 part of the base was returned and the railway spur that had carried supplies was abolished. On 30 November 1977 the base was returned in full.

Let me set then and now side by side.

• Then: the block where the airfield’s main gate, and later the US base’s main gate, stood. Now: “Ikoi no Ba,” a small public square laid out for the city’s 50th anniversary, which serves as a kind of front entrance to Faret Tachikawa, the public-art district (“Tachikawa Monogatari” no. 15).
• Then: a drainage channel dug during the war to carry rainwater overflowing from the airfield into the Tama River, which first carried water in 1947 and was named “Midorikawa” in 1949. Now: covered over from 1960, it has become car parks, bicycle parking, a park and roads.
• Then: a railway spur from the Chuo Line to the east side of the airfield, which carried supplies for aircraft factories before the war and for the US military after it. Now: its route has become Sakae Ryokuchi, a green strip.
• Then: open grassland so dark at night that even locals needed courage to approach. Now: the Tama Monorail glides above Sun Sun Road.

The city’s document “The History of Tachikawa Airfield” includes a photograph of shops along the Midorikawa with English signs. For young people, the very idea of English signs lining the streets by Tachikawa Station will be new. Some older people may remember even the colours of the letters. For both, the place is now under, or just beside, a road they walk every day.

Here I want to recall that sentence from the newsletter. Very dark at night; a place even locals needed courage to approach. On that dark grassland, from the end of the Taisho era into the early Showa years (the 1920s and early 1930s), a newspaper built its hangar, young people gathered at flying schools, and curious passengers came to fly to Osaka at five times the train fare. Foreign aviators landed, and the town wrote a song. And in the spring of 1937, at two in the morning while it was still dark, a Japanese-built aircraft left for London.

Tachikawa is sometimes called a “town with nothing.” But trace back the history of this country’s passenger aircraft, and at the front door of its first few years you find a field in Tachikawa. Trace back the story of ANA’s first president and you arrive at the night the Kamikaze-go took off. When Tachikawa people hurry to a boarding gate at Haneda, they are entitled to stand a little taller. The oldest memory of that journey through the sky lies just beyond the North Exit of their own station.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), Haneda Airfield. According to Azumino City’s profile, the Kamikaze-go returned to Haneda Airfield on 21 May 1937. The Teikyo University paper says it left London on the 14th and, on the 21st, arrived via Osaka at a rainy Haneda in the afternoon. Civil aviation had moved from Tachikawa to Haneda in 1933, so Tokyo’s front door to the sky was already Haneda.

Before you go

• Getting to Tachikawa: from Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line to Tachikawa Station with no change. Check timetables and journey times on the JR East website. An IC card such as Suica or PASMO covers JR and the Tama Monorail.
• Walking the old airfield: the central part of the former Tachikawa Airfield is now Showa Kinen Park (the national Showa Memorial Park). The Akebono Gate is about 10 minutes’ walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, or about 8 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Toshi Monorail (according to the park’s official access page). The “Midori no Bunka Zone” just inside the Akebono Gate is a free area. Check admission, opening hours and closing days on the official site: https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/
• Where the main gate stood: according to “Tachikawa Monogatari” no. 15, the airfield’s main gate was about 300 metres north of Tachikawa Station. Walk north from the North Exit and you can feel for yourself where, in today’s streets, the grassland nobody dared approach at night once lay.
• To see the records: Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore (3-12-34 Fujimicho, Tachikawa). Check opening days, hours and exhibitions on the city’s facility page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisetsu/1008065/1008098.html
• The city’s document “The History of Tachikawa Airfield” (PDF in Japanese, with a chronology and the photo of Miss Veedol): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/_res/projects/default_project/page/001/004/905/7tatikawahikoujou.pdf
• To combine: a walk in Showa Kinen Park, plus the subjects of this series’ articles on Tachihi, GREEN SPRINGS and the Tachikawa disaster-prevention base, all lie on the grounds of the old airfield. A small shrine said to have been born beside the airfield is covered in the article on Koku Jinja.
• Further afield: on the site of Masaaki Iinuma’s birthplace stands the Iinuma Aviator Memorial Museum in Toyoshina, Azumino, Nagano Prefecture (Azumino City’s profile: https://www.city.azumino.nagano.jp/site/yukari/2333.html ). Check opening days through Azumino City.

A deep breath at the North Exit of the capital of the sky

Walk through Showa Kinen Park, pass near where the airfield’s main gate once stood, and head back to the station, and you merge into the crowds of the North Exit. A hundred years ago the entrance to a field nobody approached at night; today one of the busiest places in Tachikawa.

A minute’s walk from that North Exit, on the 3rd 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), a lava-stone hot yoga studio. There are also room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lessons alone.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30, so you can drop in in the evening after a lap of the park or before a morning walk. It is not, however, open at 2 a.m., so you cannot copy the Kamikaze-go.

The trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and mat rental included, so you can come with nothing but yourself. 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, who holds Japan’s top English qualification (Eiken Grade 1) and a perfect TOEIC score and once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and who lived in Alaska for three years, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself (visitors from abroad have even left Google reviews about the care they received in English); if you would like an English-friendly lesson, just say so when you book.

• On the Shore: https://ontheshore.jp/
• Book a trial lesson: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

Thinking of the white aircraft that rose from a dark field, look up once at the sky over the North Exit, then climb the stairs.

Cover photo: The Kamikaze-go being readied in the dark on 6 April 1937, KAMIKAZE lettered on its side. (Photo: 作者不明 / Public domain / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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