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

Department-store rooftops, and Roller Game on Ginza-dori

As children got a little older, their playground spread to the station area.

According to the same man’s series, Showa-era Tachikawa’s North Exit had a row of department stores — Isetan, Takashimaya, the Daiichi Department Store, Chubu Department Store and Marui — and in those days department stores normally had rides on the roof. Chubu had teacups, and some department store or other had go-karts on its roof. Partway up the stairs to the roof there was a counter like a pet shop, selling mice and insects. Not splendid ones like rhinoceros beetles or stag beetles, though, he writes; grasshoppers, at best. A department store selling grasshoppers. Tell a child today and they probably won’t believe you.

On a landing of Chubu Department Store’s stairs there was a vending machine in which orange juice spouted like a fountain under a clear dome. Ten yen a cup. It tasted much like the powdered juice from the sweet shop. It came in a cone-shaped paper cup, so unless you drank it in one go, there was nowhere to put it down. From the windows of Marui’s restaurant, he says, you could see the whole Tachikawa base spreading to the west. Play on the roof, gaze at the base from the restaurant: above Tachikawa’s department stores was a view no other town had.

On Sundays, Ginza-dori outside the North Exit became a pedestrian street. From 1972 to 1975, Tokyo Channel 12 broadcast a show called Japan vs USA Roller Game, and roller skating became a craze — the skates of the time strapped onto your shoes with belts and could be extended. Every Sunday, he writes, he went on an “expedition” to Ginza-dori with his friends to play Roller Game, and when they got bored, ate yakisoba in the basement of Takashimaya. When he was in junior high, he would eat a 150-yen large plate and then another 100-yen regular one. On the way home a friend told him, “You’ve got seaweed flakes on your teeth.”

The children had given one of the yakisoba men a nickname after a character on television. One day, when the boy went to a public bathhouse in Fujimi-cho, that very man was soaking in the bath and called out, “Hey, thanks for coming, son.” He had gone so often that his face was remembered. The lady at the sweet shop, too, would greet him if they met in the street, so this boy’s face seems to have been fairly well known about town.

There is a story of a scolding, too. West of Fusai-ji Temple there used to be a level crossing over the Chuo Line from Shibasaki-cho to Fujimi-cho, with a hollow underneath that, for some reason, you could crawl into. In fourth grade he went in and was watching trains pass over his head when something dirty came raining down from above. It was a limited express, and the train toilets of the day emptied straight onto the tracks. When he let it slip at home he was given a terrible scolding and shut in the storehouse as punishment. That day was the day Ultraman was on, and he had been looking forward to it. There were no video recorders in those days.

Children’s playgrounds were also in rivers and channels. The cover of issue 14 of Tachikawa Monogatari shows a photograph from around 1961 held by the Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore: “Children playing in the Sunagawa branch channel”. A channel drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct was the swimming pool for the children of Kashiwa-cho.

Then: children pulled photo cards out of the sweet shop’s wooden boxes, spun the teacups on department-store roofs and splashed in the channels. Now: no rides are to be seen on the roofs of the department stores by the station. But children’s places have not disappeared. They have changed shape and scattered across the town.

Eleven elementary schools in fourteen years: a town overflowing with children

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Tachikawa overflowed with children.

Count the school entries in the city’s chronology and it is plain to see. Daiju (No. 10) Elementary in 1965, Keyakidai Elementary in 1966, Nishisuna and Minami-Fujimi elementaries in 1967, Minamisuna in 1970, Wakaba, Saiwai and Matsunaka in 1971, Oyama in 1972, Kashiwa in 1977, Tamagawa in 1978. In the fourteen years from 1965 to 1978, eleven city elementary schools opened. Housing estates went up, families moved in, and every time, there were not enough classrooms.

A little earlier, in 1960, the chronology has the line “Soundproof school building of City Daiichi (No. 1) Elementary School completed”. The sky was one where classrooms had to be protected from the noise of aircraft. In 1951, full school lunches had begun at the city’s elementary schools.

There are also records of children taking action for the town themselves. According to issue 10 of Tachikawa Monogatari, the June 1971 issue of the city bulletin Koho Tachikawa covered the Minami-Sakae children’s association making posters to promote the prevention of infectious diseases. It was an age when rubbish was collected by tipping it straight into plastic bins; in summer, dysentery and Japanese encephalitis broke out, and mosquitoes and flies were a social problem. The poster-making was then in its seventh year. The bulletin reported that the children had studied hard what caused infection and what worked against it. The Showa-era children’s association did not only play; it even took on the town’s hygiene.

In 1972, the city’s first children’s centre opened in Fujimi-cho. I wrote about it in the feature’s article on Oni Park.

Where Tachikawa’s children are now: children’s centres, children’s cafeterias, and the council chamber

So where are Tachikawa’s children after school today?

According to Tachikawa City, there are 8 public children’s centres (jidokan) in the city, plus the Nishi-Tachikawa Children’s Hall run by a social-welfare corporation. They are for ages 0 to 18 and free to use. The public centres are open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.; elementary pupils can play until 6, junior-high pupils until 7, and those of high-school age until 8. A children’s centre where high-schoolers are welcome might be hard for Showa-era children to imagine.

For after school at elementary schools, there is “Kurupure”. According to the city, the after-school children’s classes previously run by local committees have been switched, from fiscal 2022, to “Kurupure”, run by private operators every weekday, and by fiscal 2026 it had been introduced at every elementary school in the city.

Children’s cafeterias (kodomo shokudo, community kitchens serving cheap or free meals to children) have increased too. The city’s “Children’s Cafeteria Map in Tachikawa”, issued in November 2025, lists 23. One cooks in the study room of a community hall in Nishisuna, and after the meal children can play games or listen to a wind band. At another, seasonal vegetables from Sunagawa’s fields are on the table. The city notes that children’s cafeterias are voluntary activities by local citizens’ groups and others, not run or licensed by the city. In other words, most of the 23 are places that someone in town started by saying, “Let’s do it.” As the Showa children’s association drew hygiene posters, today adults serve children warm meals.

Local children’s associations carry on, too. According to the city’s guide, they exist in 12 districts of the city, holding day camps, dodgeball tournaments, mochi-pounding events and so on.

And Tachikawa has days when children stand in the council chamber.

“Children and Adults Talk Together in the City Council Chamber” is an event at which children in the city, from fourth grade to age 18, propose events they want to hold or things they want, in the city council chamber, on the theme “Wouldn’t it be nice to have this; wouldn’t it be nice to do that.” The conditions are that it benefits everyone, and that if they propose it, they make it happen themselves. If the proposal passes the review, the money needed comes from the “Udora Dream Tachikawa Fund”. This fund is a citizens’ group that backs Tachikawa children turning their dreams into reality with money, and it signed an agreement with the city in 2018. Udora is the monster born from white udo, the local vegetable, who appeared in the feature’s article on Tokyo udo. A fund named after a monster that never quite made it to official mascot is giving official backing to children’s dreams. Tachikawa is fun like that.

At the eighth event, on 7 September 2025, three groups made new proposals and were chosen for support. One was called “Spin Round the Town, Udoland: Tachikawa Riddle-Solving × Experience Rally”. The year before, a “Tachikawa South Exit Shopping Street Riddle Event” had also passed. As Showa-era children explored back alleys and pioneered short cuts to the station, the children of today are trying to turn the town itself into a stage for solving riddles.

There is also a “Children’s Committee” recruited by open call. According to the city, children from fourth grade to 18 research things in town that bother them and tell adults their views. So far, they have proposed street lights for a safer town, and two have been installed. In response to the voice “We want a place where junior-high and high-school students can dance and play in bands,” they have also held events. On a road the children called “dark”, a light came on.

The adults have a slightly funny, warm story, too. The organising committee of the summer Grand Sumo Tachikawa Tachihi tournament sent a donation to the city. The board of education spent it on equipment to run school events safely, buying 105 items requested by 19 city elementary schools and 9 junior high schools. The most numerous were pop-up tents for sports days — 36 of the large size alone. The heat of the wrestlers’ training clashes now provides shade on sports day.

The answer to the mystery: where did the school behind the fence go?

Back to the question at the start. Where did the school attended by more than 2,000 children in 1961 go?

The answer: it was the elementary school inside the base. According to the records of America’s overseas schools, the Tachikawa base elementary school began with 44 pupils in 1947 and passed 2,000 in 1961. After that, the numbers fell. A kindergarten was added in 1968, but in the 1972 school year there were 670 pupils. In 1973 the junior high school on base closed, and seventh- and eighth-graders came to the elementary school. In its last year it had 340 pupils. And in August 1977, the school closed.

In the same year, 1977, the city’s chronology has the line “Tachikawa base fully returned”. In the year the fence vanished, the school inside the fence vanished too. Its name is missing from the city’s chronology because it was not a city school. But there too, without doubt, were children who spent their childhood in Tachikawa: the children of the “Tachikawa American Elementary School” who put on a play at Christmas 1953.

On the site of the base now spreads the national Showa Kinen Park (Showa Memorial Park). In the park is the “Children’s Forest”, whose story I told in the feature’s article on Showa Kinen Park. Somewhere on land where a school once began with 44 pupils, other children now lie on a rainbow hammock said to be the biggest in Japan.

Tachikawa’s Showa childhood was far more international, and far sweeter, than I had thought. Three and a half tonnes of candy and five-yen photo cards. Crow-coloured kimono and a Gatchaman model kit. To today’s children, they are probably all equally distant old tales. But a town where children run about in flocks and adults watch over them — that has not changed, from the school paths of Meiji-era Sunagawa to the council chamber of today.

Some weekend, take a child by the hand and walk around Tachikawa. On the site of the old city hall south of the station, children are lost in manga; in the park to the north, on the site of the base, children sway in a hammock. Beneath their feet lie layer upon layer of footprints of Showa-era children you never knew.

Answer to the quiz

The answer is (B). The sweet shop in Showa-era Shibasaki-cho was called “Nandemo-ya” because the old man who ran it answered, “I sell everything, so it’s Nandemo-ya,” and the children of Fujimi-cho shortened that to “Demo-ya”. The Shibasaki-cho children, meanwhile, called the same shop by its owner’s surname.

Before you go

• To see Tachikawa’s childhood past: the Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore (3-12-34 Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa). Admission free. Back issues of the history newsletter Tachikawa Monogatari (Japanese) can be read on the city’s history-compilation page and in the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties’ “Comprehensive Database of Archaeological Site Reports in Japan”. Check opening hours and closing days on the city’s page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004849/1004905.html — see also our museum article.
• Materials from the base era: the Tachikawa City Central Library gathers material on the Tachikawa base and airfield as a special collection on the shelf numbered W-3-10 (according to the city library’s research guide). See our libraries guide.
• Where children go today: for the locations and hours of the children’s centres (8 public centres and the Nishi-Tachikawa Children’s Hall, free for ages 0 to 18): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kosodate/m-kosodate/1004941/1004990/1005011.html — the list of children’s cafeterias: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kosodate/m-kosodate/1004941/1022498.html . Days, times and booking differ for each cafeteria, so always check with the group first.
• Putting it together: the Children’s Future Center (3-2-26 Nishiki-cho, Tachikawa, on the site of the old city hall) and Manga Park (our Manga Park article), and Oni Park in Nishiki-cho (our Oni Park article). Heading north, the Children’s Forest in Showa Kinen Park.
• From central Tokyo: take the JR Chuo Line from Shinjuku without changing. From Kanagawa, the Nambu Line comes to Tachikawa without changing. Carry an IC transport card such as Suica or PASMO.

After your walk through a children’s town, at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station

Follow children’s footprints back and forth between the South and North Exits and you will walk further than you think. Your neck, after all that looking up for department-store rooftops, may be a little stiff, too.

One minute’s walk from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a hot yoga studio heated by lava-stone plates. As well as lava-stone hot yoga, it offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lesson.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30, the same hours whatever the day — in the morning after you have seen the children off, and at night after you have put them to bed.

A trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and a yoga mat included in the rental. You can come with nothing but yourself.

Pregnant guests cannot take part in 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 Eiken Grade 1, Japan’s top English qualification, and a perfect TOEIC score, worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and lived in Alaska for three years — often helps guests from the US bases in English herself. Overseas guests have praised the English support in their Google reviews. If you would like help in English, just mention it when you book.

Studio information: https://ontheshore.jp/ — prices: https://ontheshore.jp/price/ — trial lesson booking: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

The child who once dithered in front of the sweet shop’s wooden boxes is a grown-up somewhere now. On a third floor at Tachikawa’s North Exit, that grown-up is slowly breathing out.

Cover photo: The Children’s Forest in Showa Kinen Park: a boardwalk leading to a grassy hollow ringed by trees. (Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France / CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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