Tachikawa Aviation Shrine History: The First ‘Tokyo Airfield’ Walk

When Tachikawa was “Tokyo Airfield”

Another episode of this series follows the history of the Tachikawa airfield in detail. Here I want to look at just one point that concerns the sky shrine. In the early Showa years, this airfield did not belong to the army alone.

The Japanese Wikipedia article on Tachikawa Airfield says that on 1 April 1929, when Japan Air Transport began scheduled flights, this airfield became “Tokyo Airfield.” The source it cites is a notice from the Ministry of Communications published in the official gazette that day. And when an airfield opened at Haneda on 24 August 1931, the name “Tokyo Airfield” moved to Haneda along with Japan Air Transport.

In other words, the first place in Japan to call itself “Tokyo Airfield” was Tachikawa.

Today Haneda Airport’s official name is Tokyo International Airport, but that “Tokyo” sign originally hung in Tachikawa. Haneda borrowed its name from Tachikawa. Tachikawa people are entitled to stand a little taller every time they walk to a departure gate at Haneda. There is no need to ask for it back. If it were returned, they would probably not know where to put it.

According to Tachikawa City’s timeline, in July of that year Japan’s first scheduled civilian passenger service began between Tachikawa and Osaka. Civilian aircraft were flying passengers out of an army airfield.

It was not only the name that moved to Haneda. The god of the sky later crossed to Haneda, too. According to the Wikipedia article on Haneda Aviation Shrine, the occasion was the expansion of the airport terminal ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. On 11 July 1963, a branch of the spirit was received from the Japan Aeronautic Association’s Aviation Shrine, the one in Shinbashi, and Haneda Aviation Shrine was founded. It is now inside Terminal 1 and, because aeroplanes “don’t fall,” is popular with exam candidates. The name “Tokyo Airfield” that Tachikawa had used moved to Haneda, and a share of the sky god on the Shinbashi rooftop went to Haneda too. The gateway to the sky moved east little by little, name and god alike.

There was also a school that trained civilian pilots. According to Wikipedia’s article on the Japan Flying School, this school, founded at Haneda, closed for a time, was re-established, and in 1923 opened a flight training ground, with permission, on vacant land on the west side of the army’s Tachikawa airfield. For about ten years, until it moved to Haneda at the end of 1933, it trained aviators in Tachikawa. During the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, it is said, the school flew emergency liaison flights between Tachikawa and Yoyogi.

The article quotes the fees from the school’s 1928 prospectus. Admission was 5 yen, tuition 20 yen for two months. And flight training cost 120 yen an hour. Exactly six times two months’ tuition, paid to the sky in a single hour. The classroom was cheap, the sky was expensive. In every age, the real thing costs more.

It was an age when flying was far more dangerous than now. At the army airfield, soldiers flew, civilians flew, and accidents happened. Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine is said to have been born next to that sky.

A long-running series by a local historian is said to quote a passage from Tachikawa-shi to Shashin Meikan, a 1941 book on Tachikawa’s history with photographs. In 1930, it says, some volunteers from the Honcho district of Tachikawa town, together with the authorities of the 5th Air Regiment, asked to enshrine the victims of the sky alongside the god, and the request was gladly accepted; at the ceremony of moving the shrine, eleven aviation victims from both the civilian side of Tachikawa town and the army side were enshrined together. I have not been able to see this original text for myself. And there is a gap of one year between the record that dates the shrine’s founding to 1929 and the record that dates the request to 1930. But if it is true, the people enshrined at Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine were not only soldiers. Among the civilians, there may have been young people who learned at the Japan Flying School, or pilots who flew the scheduled service.

The Shinbashi shrine enshrined the aviation dead of the whole country, in the association’s name. The Tokorozawa shrine enshrined the dead of the army’s flying school. Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine, perhaps, was a shrine where the townspeople and the army together enshrined those who fell in the town’s own sky. The smallest of them all. But the closest.

The sky shrines in numbers

• 325 — Aviation personnel first enshrined at the Shinbashi Aviation Shrine in 1931. A heavy load for a rooftop shrine.
• 6,367 — The current total in its register of spirits. The register has not yet been closed.
• 4,956 — Aviators killed on duty and in war enshrined at the Tokorozawa Aviation Shrine. After many moves, they came home in 2024.
• 1915 — The year Ninomiya Chuhachi built Hiko Jinja in Yawata, Kyoto. Just 12 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight.
• 120 — The Japan Flying School’s flight-training fee in 1928. The unit: yen per hour.
• 11 — The number of civilian and army victims of the sky said to have been enshrined at Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine in 1930. The original source is not yet in my hands.

So what became of the shrine after the war? Where did the word “Aviation” go?

Renamed Taiyo Jinja: postwar Tachikawa and its sky

In September 1945, US forces moved into the Tachikawa airfield. The Tokorozawa Aviation Shrine had fled to Kitano Tenjinja to avoid seizure by the occupation forces only days earlier, on 3 September.

How Tachikawa’s Aviation Shrine came to be the Sun Shrine, I could not find any primary source to tell me. The record-keeping site says only that after the war it was renamed Taiyo Jinja. Given what happened in Tokorozawa, one can guess. It would have been hard to keep displaying a name tied to a military airfield under occupation. Instead of fleeing somewhere, Tachikawa’s shrine changed its nameplate. From aviation to the sun. It swapped the name of one thing in the sky for something one level higher. It did not run away. It stayed in the sky and kept its head down. At least, that is how I read it.

The same site says the Sun Shrine seems to have been used as a wedding hall for a while. In front of a shrine to those who died in the sky, someone in postwar Tachikawa was making vows to begin a new life. The content of the prayers turned upside down, from mourning to new beginnings. Back then, it seems, weddings were held there. Now, what stand in rows there are cars.

Postwar Tachikawa’s sky became an American sky. The Wikipedia article on the airfield records an accident on 18 June 1953. A Globemaster, a large US military transport plane, took off from Tachikawa Air Base, lost engine power just after take-off, and crashed into a wheat field in Kodaira town, now Kodaira City. All 129 people on board died, including soldiers who had come to Japan on leave from the Korean War. It was, the article says, the worst air accident in history at that time. Near the crash site, a “Peace Monument” now stands in a park.

In Tachikawa, the phrase “safety in the sky” was not just a slogan. Tachikawa City’s walking-course guide also tells of the Hosshin Jizo, a small statue of Jizo, the bodhisattva who protects travellers and children, set up beside a railway crossing near a factory that made spark plugs for aeroplanes until around 1945, because so many people were killed in accidents there. In a town that revolved around aeroplanes, the prayers gathered around aeroplanes too.

US flights from the base stopped in 1969, and the base was returned to Japan in 1977. Until the middle of the Showa era, what passed over this town’s head was the shadow of big transport planes from across the ocean. All that time, the little shrine in the corner of the car park stood outside the south end of the runway, looking up at that shadow.

A detour quiz for travellers

From April 1929 until an airfield opened at Haneda a little over two years later, what name did the government give the Tachikawa airfield?

• A — Musashino Airfield
• B — Tokyo Airfield
• C — Tama Airfield

The answer is near the end of this article.

So, once the airfield was returned, did it stop being a sky? Look up over Tachikawa and you will know at once.

Helicopters still fly from Tachikawa

The Tachikawa airfield is still an airfield. According to Wikipedia, today’s Tachikawa Airfield began operating in March 1982. Its runway is 900 metres long. It is part of the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Tachikawa, and at the same time part of the Tachikawa Regional Disaster Prevention Base, and it houses the Tokyo Fire Department Air Corps’ Tama Aviation Center and the Metropolitan Police Department Aviation Unit’s Tachikawa Flight Center. The fire and police helicopters that fly over Tokyo have their eastern base at a heliport on Tokyo Bay and their western base here in Tachikawa. One in the east of Tokyo, one in the west. The western one is Tachikawa.

When someone is lost in the mountains, when someone is swept away in one of Tama’s rivers, when a big earthquake comes, helicopters rise from Tachikawa’s runway. The airfield has gone from a military sky to a sky that goes to the rescue.

The Wikipedia article on the police aviation unit has a slightly strange line too. From March 1989 to March 1994, the Metropolitan Police had an airship, and land east of the Tachikawa Flight Center, part of the old Tachikawa base, was used as its mooring site. That land is now the site of the National Institute of Japanese Literature and other institutions. On ground where a police airship was once tethered, researchers now turn the pages of old Japanese books. Tachikawa’s land changes careers with a wide range.

Once a year, this sky opens to the public: the anniversary event at Camp Tachikawa, known as the air show. According to a document published by Higashiyamato City, Camp Tachikawa gave notice that its 53rd anniversary event would be held on 19 April 2026, including formation flights. The document is a letter of request sent to the camp, the police aviation unit and the fire department air corps by the Liaison Council of Municipalities around Tachikawa Airfield, made up of the mayors of eight cities: Tachikawa, Akishima, Kodaira, Hino, Kokubunji, Kunitachi, Higashiyamato and Musashimurayama. The airfield is in the middle of a built-up area, it says, and many complaints about aircraft noise and requests about safety are received. So please keep flights to the minimum needed, assuming disaster-relief activity, and take thorough safety measures at the venue and around it.

These are not the words of a prayer. They are the words of local government. But what they say is not so far from what was prayed for at a Tenjin shrine in the early Showa years. May the things that fly not fall. May the people who live beneath them be safe. Back then, that wish rang the bell of a small shrine. Now, the same wish is stamped onto an official document under the joint names of eight mayors.

This runway became famous once more, in a different way: as the venue for the qualifying race of the Hakone Ekiden, the university relay race between Tokyo and Hakone that Japan watches on television every New Year. According to Wikipedia, the qualifier is a half marathon that loops around the runway inside Camp Tachikawa, passes through the streets of Tachikawa, and finishes inside Showa Kinen Park. A photo published by the Ministry of Defense shows runners setting off all at once along the Tachikawa runway on 16 October 2010.

People running on a runway built for aeroplanes. Hundreds of them at once, aiming for Hakone at New Year. On a road made for taking off, young people launch themselves not on wings but on their own legs.

The starting line of the road to Hakone at New Year is drawn every autumn on Tachikawa’s working runway. When the family gathers in front of the TV to watch the Ekiden at New Year, Tachikawa people are entitled to mention that.

The story of the sky shrines comes full circle here. But the first question still has not been answered.