Tachikawa Childhood History: Candy Shops, a Base Christmas, Showa Kids

Growing up in Showa-era Tachikawa: kimono uniforms, a school inside the US base, 3.5 tonnes of Christmas candy, a sweet shop called “Demo-ya”, and kids today.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

At the end of 1953, a Christmas party for children was held on the base in Tachikawa. More than 20,000 guests were expected, and 3.5 tonnes of candy had been prepared.

Three and a half tonnes. I read the figure several times. It probably would not fit on a small truck in one trip. A mountain of sweets. And Santa Claus, it is said, handed it out to the children. The newsletter published by Tachikawa City’s history-compilation office found the programme for that day among old documents donated by residents.

People who spent their childhood in Tachikawa (立川) — a city in the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards — sometimes tell stories that people from other towns don’t get. English signs on the other side of a fence. Ginza-dori on a Sunday. A sweet shop with a strange name. As I checked those stories one by one against the documents, I came up against a question.

In 1961, Tachikawa had an elementary school attended by more than 2,000 children. Yet when you go through the openings of schools in order in the city’s chronology, that school’s name never appears. Where was it, and where did it go? Let me trace the Showa-era childhood of Tachikawa, taking a slightly roundabout route.

Tachikawa’s children’s history begins with a kimono uniform: Sunagawa’s “School of Crows”

The roundabout route begins in the Meiji era.

In Sunagawa, the northern half of Tachikawa, three places of learning opened in 1872. According to the city’s history newsletter, one was a private school in a house in Goban-gumi (the fifth district of the village), one was a “shared schoolhouse”, and the third was a school opened in the grounds of Ryusen-ji Temple; they are regarded as the forerunners of today’s Daihachi (No. 8) and Daikyu (No. 9) elementary schools. Temple grounds and the tatami rooms of private houses were the first classrooms.

Sunagawa is a long, thin village running east to west. The same newsletter says that until a branch school opened in the grounds of Rinsen-ji Temple in 1882, children from the west end of the village had to walk to the school in Sanban-gumi, a distance of 40 cho, about 4.36 kilometres. Nearly 9 kilometres there and back. Tell that to a child today and they would probably think you were describing a school hike.

From the end of the Meiji era, Sunagawa’s elementary school had a uniform — and a kimono uniform at that.

A local historian born and raised in Sunagawa left an account in the local magazine Ecutbien. For about forty years, from around 1910 to around 1943, the children of Sunagawa village’s elementary school went to school in dark navy cotton kimono — a tough cloth also used for work clothes, which did not show dirt, could be sewn at home, and cost little. The headmaster who came up with the idea, according to the centenary book of Daikyu Elementary School, wanted children from rich and poor families alike to come to school without worrying about the difference in their wealth.

Children in dark navy kimono, walking in flocks along the paths between the fields. Because they looked like a flock of crows, the people around called the place “the School of Crows”.

Children wearing a uniform at a village elementary school: that alone, the historian writes, must have been rare at the time. He himself started school in 1937 and went to school in this kimono for six years. As the war spread, more children transferred in and Western clothes became noticeable. In the 1943 graduation photograph, almost everyone wears dark navy kimono, with only a few in Western clothes. In the next year’s photograph, all the boys are in Western clothes, and only the girls are in kimono. And once the war ended, not one child went to school in kimono.

After the crows had gone from Sunagawa, the sound of aircraft came instead.

Tachikawa’s other elementary school, inside the base

To talk about Tachikawa’s children after the war, you cannot avoid the fence. After the Second World War, the old Japanese army airfield in Tachikawa became a US air base, which was not fully returned until 1977. (See our base-history article.)

According to the records of an organisation that collects the history of America’s overseas schools, there was an elementary school inside the Tachikawa base for the children of people working there. A school board was formed in 1946, and the school opened in 1947. In the first year there were 44 pupils. There was one teacher, who taught children of different ages together, and the first acting principal was an Air Force sergeant.

But the school grew rapidly. By 1961 it had more than 2,000 pupils — about 45 times as many in fourteen years. The same history of the school has a line saying the children came by school bus, watched over on the way there and back by a single military policeman. A military policeman as crossing guard: Tachikawa’s school routes had an era like that.

An American boy who came to the base with his family in 1958 later wrote about life there. Two schools from kindergarten through junior high, two cinemas, three swimming pools, eight baseball fields. The base buses ran every 15 minutes, in loops in opposite directions. North of the station there was a “town” with eight baseball fields. Tachikawa’s Little League kids would have been green with envy.

Children outside the fence knew that town’s presence through its English signs. A man who grew up by Tachikawa’s South Exit and later took over the family printing business looked back in a magazine series. In front of Nishi-Tachikawa Station there were lots of English signs. Once, while he was gazing at plastic model kits in a toy shop inside a department store by the station, a white father and son came in. The boy pointed at a shelf and said to his father, “Gatcha, Gatcha.” At the end of his finger was a model of the aircraft from Gatchaman, an anime broadcast on Sunday evenings. In the end the box was not bought, and went back on the shelf.

And the one who bought it, he says, was him.

Inside and outside the fence, there were children who watched the same programme and stood in front of the same shelf. Only the fate of the model kit they both wanted was a little different. I read this story as the smallest record of Japan–US relations in the base era.

Christmas 1953: 3.5 tonnes of candy

Let us return to the Christmas at the start.

According to issue 15 of Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the city’s history newsletter, the cover of the programme reads “Tachikawa Boys’ and Girls’ Christmas Celebration”. The venue was the eastern section of the Tachikawa base, then known as the “Fincam” (FEAMCOM) base. A newspaper for the Japanese employees of the base also reported on the party. According to it, the base-hosted Christmas party was in its fifth year, and with the Korean War armistice that summer, it was to be held on a grand scale; as the year before, more than 20,000 children were expected. It was also covered in the city bulletin of the time, and seems to have become a major year-end tradition.

The line-up of acts is wonderful. Volunteers from a military band played. A choir of students from Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School sang hymns, conducted by a soldier with a reputation on base as a fine singer. Children from Tachikawa City Daisan (No. 3) Elementary School and kindergartens in the city danced, and children from the “Tachikawa American Elementary School” inside the base put on a play. There was even acrobatics by a professional tumbler. Finally, Santa Claus appeared and handed out the mountain of 3.5 tonnes of candy to the children. The candy was paid for with the proceeds of charity events on the base.

Divide 3.5 tonnes among 20,000 and it comes to 175 grams each. In fact more than 20,000 came, so a little less. Still, in boiled sweets that is enough to spill out of two cupped hands. Eight years after the end of the war. That was 175 grams at a time when sweet things were still a luxury.

Another issue of the same newsletter has a more modest record of sweet things. For the lion dance at Suwa Shrine in Shibasaki-cho, the shopping for the meals served at the rehearsal lodging was kept in a notebook. Before the war it was mostly tofu, konnyaku, fried tofu and soy sauce. Soon after the war, bread, soda, juice, caramels and chewing gum were added. What went into children’s mouths was changing, bit by bit, on the pages of a notebook.

Tachikawa’s Showa childhood by the numbers

• 40 cho — the distance children from the west of Meiji-era Sunagawa walked to school. About 4.36 km. One way.
• 44 — pupils in the first year, 1947, of the elementary school inside the base. Fourteen years later there were more than 2,000.
• 3.5 — tonnes of candy handed out at the base Christmas in 1953. One worries for Santa’s back.
• 5 — yen: the price of one monster photo card at a Showa-era sweet shop.
• 998 — cards: the number that a boy who kept collecting them finally parted with. Two short of a thousand.
• 23 — dining spots on Tachikawa City’s current “Children’s Cafeteria Map”.

The wanderer’s quiz

In Showa-era Shibasaki-cho, Tachikawa, there was a sweet shop the children called “Demo-ya”. Where did the name come from? (A) Because a demonstration (demo) marched past the shop; (B) because it was short for “Nandemo-ya”, the shop that sells everything; (C) because the owner liked demonstrations. The answer comes at the end.

The mystery of one sweet shop’s name is solved just ahead, along with 998 photo cards.

Shibasaki-cho’s sweet shop “Demo-ya”, and 998 monster photo cards

Let me tell you about after-school life for the children outside the fence.

The man who grew up by the South Exit devoted an entire instalment of his magazine series to a single dagashi-ya — a cheap sweet shop, the kind of tiny corner store, crammed with penny sweets and small toys, that every Japanese neighbourhood once had. It stood on the plot in Shibasaki-cho where Shinnyo-en’s Eto-in building stands today. Perhaps it had once been a fishing-tackle shop: a sign reading “Tsuri” (fishing) hung outside. When a classmate asked the old man who ran it what the shop was called, he answered, “I sell everything, so it’s Nandemo-ya” — the Everything Shop. From then on the children called it Nandemo-ya. The children of Fujimi-cho shortened it to “Demo-ya”, while the local Shibasaki-cho children called it by the owner’s surname.

One shop, a different name in each neighbourhood. Children’s worlds have children’s place names.

Demo-ya, he writes, was not an ordinary sweet shop even in its appearance. It had the eeriness of the haunted house that came to the Suwa Shrine festival, and all kinds of cheap toys were lined up in wooden boxes that had apparently once held fishing tackle. The children were drawn in by that eeriness. He calls it “the King of Sweet Shops”.

What he collected was monster photo cards. Five yen each. You pulled one out — snap — from the sorted stacks, and out came a photograph in a rough paper bag. In the middle years of elementary school his mother told him, “Throw those away, for goodness’ sake,” and he fed them into the incinerator in the garden one, two at a time. Counting them like the ghost in Bancho Sarayashiki — the Japanese ghost story in which the maid Okiku counts plates in a well, “one… two…” and weeps when she reaches nine — he found there were 998. Okiku wept at the ninth; he wept at the 998th.

His father disliked him buying from sweet shops, so he always posted his younger brother as a lookout. One day, having got home safely, he was sucking a cinnamon sweet when his brother shouted, “Big brother, Dad’s home!” He hurriedly bit down on the sweet to hide it; it stuck to a silver crown at the back, and when he pulled it free by force, the crown came out with the sweet. Showa-era sweet-shop memories nearly always contain one bittersweet thing. In this case, the bitterness was physical.

The magazine’s editor added a note to that instalment. In the days before convenience stores, children would buy snacks at the sweet shop after school: ramune soda, sweets, vinegared kelp. They loved the prize lotteries, the atemono, though the editor does not remember ever winning. Perhaps they just wanted to draw a ticket.

Drawing a ticket that never wins, and drawing again anyway. The sweet shop was also the first classroom where children learned probability with their bodies.

Children who graduated from the sweet shop next aimed for the height of the sky above the station: the department-store rooftop.