Showa Kinen Park Guide: Komorebi Village, Japanese Garden and Bonsai

On a former airfield in Tachikawa stands a 250-year-old village headman’s house moved from Komae, among rice fields dug by volunteers. Here is how it got there.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Among Tachikawa’s designated cultural properties is a house that was born in Komae.

When I heard the name Tachikawa (立川), a city in western Tokyo, what came to mind were the crowds in front of the station and the monorail. Not rice paddies, and not a thatched gate. So when I first came across this fact, I thought it must be a mistake.

The house is thought to have been built in the middle of the Edo period (1603–1868), in the second half of the 18th century. It stood on the lower reaches of the Tama River, in what is now the city of Komae, south-east of here. That house, with its main building, gatehouse and storehouse all present, now stands in Tachikawa, on land that was once an army airfield. Around it are rice paddies, a wheat field, a charcoal-burning hut, and a turning waterwheel.

On the park map, it is a corner at the northern edge of Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park, a vast national government park), near the Sunagawa entrance. Come in by the gate on the Tachikawa Station side, cross the huge lawn called Minna no Harappa, “Everyone’s Meadow,” and you still have a long way to walk. It is at the back of the park, and then further back still.

Why did a 250-year-old village headman’s house move onto land where aircraft once landed? And why does this corner choose to recreate the decade from 1955 to 1964, what the Japanese call “the Showa 30s,” which looks like a rather arbitrary era? With those two questions, I start walking into the depths of the park. On the way there is another detour: a Japanese garden around a pond, and some fifty small trees placed within it.

Deep inside Showa Kinen Park, to Komorebi Village

I leave the general story of the park to another piece in this series. Only one fact is needed here: this park was built on the site of Tachikawa Airfield. Flat land, wide land, empty land. In the northern corner of that flat land, the national government created Komorebi Village (こもれびの里, Komorebi no Sato), named after komorebi, the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees.

The official website explains it like this. It recreates the farming landscape and way of life of the Musashino area in the Showa 30s, with paddy fields, vegetable fields, a farmhouse and the woodland that sheltered it. (Musashino is the name of the broad plateau on which western Tokyo stands.) Its theme is “Showa, Musashino, Farming.” It opened in 2007 with the aim not just of showing an old landscape, but of passing on the wisdom of nature and daily life through experiences such as farm work and seasonal festivals.

The opening date was 13 October 2007. I have seen this date before. Faret Tachikawa, the district of public art at the station’s North Exit, also opened on 13 October, in 1994. It is surely a coincidence. But the town of Tachikawa does seem to have a habit of wanting to open things on 13 October.

It covers 2.4 hectares, according to a document in which Iwate Prefecture studied other parks’ initiatives and gave an outline of Komorebi Village. Its main features are a farmhouse, rice paddies, fields and coppice woodland. Seen against a park of 180 hectares, it is only a small corner. But the soil of that corner has been dug over by human hands more than anywhere else in the park. I learned this when I found a chronology called “The Village’s Pioneering Years,” tucked deep inside the official website.

Volunteers broke ground on empty land

The chronology begins in fiscal 2000. The first two years were for planning and surveys: defining the role of Komorebi Village, studying what residents wanted, and looking for people who could act as instructors.

In fiscal 2002, members were recruited from the general public through press announcements and the like. According to material from the Kanto Regional Development Bureau, 60 people were chosen by lottery from the applicants. So on 14 September, the opening ceremony of the volunteer group “Komorebi Village Club” was held. The next line of the chronology reads: “Breaking ground for fields. First sowing of wheat.”

The phrase “breaking ground” made me flinch a little. In 21st-century Tokyo, citizens are breaking new ground for fields. And the soil they were digging once caught landing aircraft.

Let me wind the clock back a little here. In the Showa 30s that Komorebi Village recreates, what lay to the north of this park was not the city of Tachikawa but the town of Sunagawa. According to Tachikawa City’s chronology, Sunagawa village became a town in 1954, and Tachikawa City and Sunagawa Town merged in 1963. City statistics give Sunagawa’s population in 1954 as 12,599. The Musashino farming villages of the Showa 30s were not a tale of some distant mountain hamlet. The real thing lay just beyond the village gate.

That said, the real Showa 30s were no peaceful picture postcard. Under 1955, the city’s chronology reads: “Struggle against the expansion of Tachikawa Base unfolds in Sunagawa Town.” It was the resistance of the people of Sunagawa, who were being asked to give up land so the airfield’s runway could be extended. According to Tachikawa City, the US Air Force commander announced the cancellation of the runway extension plan in December 1968. In October 1969, the US military announced it would stop flying at Tachikawa. The same chronology has a line saying that in 1958 a public water-supply service began in Sunagawa Town. The water that young people today take for granted when they turn a tap was, in this town, something new that arrived in the late 1950s.

Back then, American transport planes landed on the far side of the wire fence, and on this side lay the fields of Sunagawa. Today, on the site of that airfield, citizens harvest wheat. Only the fence has vanished somewhere.

The following year, fiscal 2003, they broke ground for an experimental paddy, finished clearing the fields, and completed six vegetable plots. They were given seedlings, and planted and harvested non-glutinous rice. Donations of potatoes and sweet potatoes began that year and have continued annually. In fiscal 2004 the club grew to 99 members and held a ground-purification ceremony (a Shinto rite before building) for a work shed. In the fields: wheat, potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts, upland rice, buckwheat, watermelon, pumpkin, Japanese leeks, daikon radish and carrots. They grew loofahs and even made loofah water (a traditional homemade skin lotion). The chronology begins to read like the price list at a greengrocer’s.

In fiscal 2005 work began on the foundations of the main paddy, and in fiscal 2006 the main paddy was completed, growing both ordinary rice and the glutinous rice used for mochi rice cakes. The same year they built a charcoal kiln, and worked on the pond’s sluice gate, a landing stage and a waterwheel. In fiscal 2007 the club reached 106 members, grew foxtail millet for the first time, and dug a well. Then, on 13 October, the village opened.

This way of doing things has a name. The Kanto Regional Development Bureau’s material describes citizens taking part in planning, construction, management and operation, as a practice of partnership from the planning stage, and calls it a first for a national government park. In other words, Komorebi Village was not a finished product the state prepared and then showed to citizens. It is closer to the truth to say that citizens took hoes to the land, turned it into fields and paddies over five years, and the state put up a gate afterwards.

And then, a house arrived.

The former Ishii family house, an estimated 250 years old, moves in

At the heart of Komorebi Village is the “Farmhouse Area.” It has five buildings. Three of them, the main house, the nagaya-mon (a gatehouse with rooms on either side of the gateway) and the inner storehouse, were moved from Komae, Tokyo, and are designated as a Tachikawa City Tangible Cultural Property, the “Former Ishii Family Residence.” The outer storehouse was moved from Akiruno, Tokyo; it was the storehouse of the former Okano family residence.

A press release from the Showa Kinen Park Office in March 2013 says that this farmhouse, which had stood in Komae, was donated and moved over four years from fiscal 2009. Four years. When people move house, they pack the boxes and it is over in a day. When a house itself moves, it takes as long as a university degree.

A provisional opening began on 13 April 2013, and the full opening followed on 24 August. At the ceremony that day, letters of thanks were presented to the people who had donated the buildings. In the main house, an exhibition recreates life in the Showa 30s, and on ordinary days visitors can go only as far as the doma, the earth-floored entrance area. But several times a year there is an event called “Let’s step up from the doma,” when you can go up into the tatami rooms. On those days you can walk in your socks on the floors of a 250-year-old house.

How did they work out the age of the main house? The answer is in an attachment to the press release. A prayer tablet had been nailed to a post standing between two rooms, the hiroma and the nakanoma. From that tablet, the building is thought to date from the second half of the 18th century. One wooden tablet nailed to a post revealed the house’s birth date 250 years later. The house had been carrying its own business card.

The floor plan has a history too. Dismantling surveys and excavation showed that when it was first built, the house had the doma plus three rooms: the hiroma, the zashiki (formal room) and the nando (storeroom). Later renovations turned it into a “six-room plan.” The house had added rooms little by little to suit the lives of the people living in it.

What the gatehouse and inner storehouse say about a village headman’s work

The gatehouse is thought to have been built in the early 19th century. In the central passage is a gate that opens inwards, with a small side door for people on foot. And the room on the east side was a granary holding the village’s tax rice. The room on the west side is thought to have been a storeroom for public notice boards, property shared by the village, and farm tools.

In other words, this gate was both the entrance to a house and the storehouse of the village office. Beside his own front door, the owner kept the whole village’s tax rice. The villagers bringing their tax rice probably straightened their backs in front of this gate. Or perhaps it was the master of the gate, with a whole village’s rice beside his front door, who was far more anxious at night.

The inner storehouse adjoining the main house is thought to date from the early Meiji era (which began in 1868). It is a two-storey building two bays deep and three bays wide, with a separate thatched roof set over it and its entrance on the gable end. Because it held celebratory tableware, clothing, the chests and wardrobes brought by brides, and the records of the village headman, it is also called a bunko-gura, a “library storehouse.” A travel information site also describes the house as the residence of the village headman of Izumi village in Tama District.

The outer storehouse was used to store grain and other harvested crops. Today it displays panels on the history of Komorebi Village and its farming calendar, along with old farming and household tools.

So why did this house come from Komae to Tachikawa? The press release says it briefly: it was donated, and moved. Public documents say nothing about the circumstances of those who gave up the house. What we know is that, thanks to the donation, the house survived, and was placed in the middle of fields that citizens had spent five years clearing. A house that spent 250 years on the lower Tama River moved up to the plateau upstream, and became a Tachikawa cultural property.

Komorebi Village’s year turns on a farming calendar

The official website includes Komorebi Village’s farming calendar, laid out month by month. It turns out to be surprisingly good reading.

January: treading the young wheat, and mayudama decorations (rice-dumpling “cocoons” hung on branches). February: making rice-husk charcoal, repairing the waterways, and decorations for Hatsuuma, a festival of the god of harvests. In March, the Girls’ Day dolls are put away and potatoes are planted. In late April, the paddies are ploughed and roughly flooded. The pole for the carp streamers goes up, ready for Boys’ Day. In May the barley is cut, and in early June the rice is planted. In the same month the wheat is cut and threshed, and there is kama-arai, “washing the sickles.” July brings Tanabata (the star festival) and Obon (the summer festival of the dead) decorations. In August, buckwheat is sown. After the harvest moon in September, the rice is cut in the latter half of the month. October: threshing, hulling, the jūsan’ya moon, and okama no dango, “dumplings for the kitchen god.” In November the buckwheat is cut and dried in the sun, wheat is sown, and there is Ebisu-kō. December ends with preparations for the New Year decorations.

The item with the strangest presence in the table is “dumplings for the kitchen god.” The official events page explains it properly. The god of fire, Kōjin-sama, also called Okama-sama (the god of the kitchen stove), goes on a trip to Izumo Taisha shrine in the tenth month of the old calendar, the “month without gods,” when Japan’s gods are said to gather there. So dumplings are offered to send him on his way. Packing a lunch for a god going away on business. The friendliness of it kept me laughing for a while.

Other autumn events follow. The September harvest moon, jūgoya, is also called the “mid-autumn full moon” or the “potato moon”; potatoes and dumplings are set out to pray for a good harvest as the harvest season begins. Jūsan’ya, a month later, is the “chestnut moon,” when chestnuts and dumplings are displayed. At November’s Ebisu-kō, people honour Ebisu, the god of good fortune, give thanks for a safe year, and pray for an abundant harvest of the five grains. In the farmhouse’s tatami room, the decorations change with each festival. Before looking at the moon, first get the potatoes and chestnuts ready. The refinement of people in the old days usually starts in the stomach.

Looking over the table, you notice one thing. This year has no end. In December you prepare the New Year decorations, in January you take them down, and you tread the wheat again. Cut the rice, and from that grain you take next year’s seed. The September column clearly says “seed collection.” Komorebi Village is not a place that shows a finished landscape. It is a place that remakes its landscape each time by repeating the same work every year.

The weekly handwork recorded in the “Village News”

On the official website there is a corner called the “Volunteer Blog,” where records of the work at Komorebi Village are posted almost weekly as “Village News.” The writers are the people working up a sweat in the village. The entries are plain bullet points, yet once you start reading you can’t stop.

In June 2026 they threshed wheat in the work yard. They used a power thresher, separated grain from chaff with a tōmi (a hand-cranked winnowing machine), and beat the wheat heads with a kururi-bō, a flail, to knock the grain loose. Machines and old tools side by side in the same yard. In early July they made torches for the Obon altar from wheat grown in the village. In late September they cut the rice, bundled it, hung it on drying racks, and draped bird netting over it. Gourds are soaked in water, with the water changed again and again, so that their insides rot and can be removed. Grass-cutting, they write again and again, goes on while sharpening sickles.

My favourite is the record from August. In the midsummer work column it says: making shide paper streamers for the “New Year decorations,” and making five-coloured flags for “Hatsuuma.” In August, they are getting ready for New Year. This is not impatience. The farming calendar’s year simply doesn’t turn unless you plan that far ahead. For someone like me, who had nearly forgotten New Year existed in the heat, it stings a little.

Autumn in the village is especially lively. According to the notice for the 2026 “Komorebi Village Exhibition,” the farmhouse’s main building and outer storehouse display panels on how the old house came to be moved to the park, sketches of the wild birds that visit the village, straw crafts, lotus-seed decorations, and shakuhachi bamboo flutes made by the volunteers. Old farming and household tools are placed in the gatehouse. There are also guided tours of the inner storehouse and main house, which are not usually open.

On weekends during that period, an ō-nobori, a great festival banner, is raised beside the path next to the paddy. It flies from a pole 16 metres high. Inside the gatehouse, the clamping timbers of a great banner from about 150 years ago, with the carving on them, are displayed. The Kanto Regional Development Bureau’s material calls this “the revival of the great banners that survive locally.” Sixteen metres is about the height of a five-storey building. In a sky where aircraft once came in low, an autumn banner now flies high.

At the “Village Harvest Festival” in November, mochi is pounded from new rice grown in the village, the village’s wheat is ground in a stone hand-mill and sifted, and rope is twisted on an old rope-making machine. A treasure ship is displayed, and taiko drums sound. Those who join in pounding the mochi receive rice cakes coated in kinako (roasted soybean flour) and sesame, along with a “treasure share” of the village’s harvest. Every item you receive comes with an auspicious name.

The Numbers: Komorebi Village and the Japanese Garden

• 250 — the estimated age of the main house, in years. When it was built, there were no plans of any kind for aircraft to fly in Japan’s skies.
• 1958 — the year a water-supply service began in Sunagawa Town. Recreate a village of the Showa 30s, and the tap is still brand new.
• 4 — the number of years it took to move the house, from fiscal 2009 to 2012. Packing, it seems, is the hardest part for people and houses alike.
• 60 — club members who began breaking ground in 2002, chosen by lottery from public applicants. The prize for winning the lottery was the right to clear land.
• 2.4 — the size of Komorebi Village, in hectares. Into it fit paddies, a wheat field, a charcoal hut and a waterwheel.
• 16 — the height of the pole for the great autumn banner, in metres. Perhaps the tallest thing, the closest to the sky, on the old airfield.
• 7 — the drop of the Japanese Garden’s waterfall, in metres. Water that springs from the northern woods falls over the rocks into the pond.
• About 80 — the number of bonsai owned by the Bonsai Garden. About 50 are on display at any time; the rest are reserves on the bench.

I leave the village and walk south. Next comes a completely different “old days,” inside the same park.