イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

イタリア産天然溶岩石を使った溶岩ホットヨガスタジオ「オンザショア」

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

The Japanese Garden and Kanpūtei: the craft of the sukiya style

In another piece in this series I wrote about the beauty of the Japanese Garden’s autumn colours. Opened in April 1997, it is a stroll garden of about 6 hectares around a pond, the largest built in the Tokyo area since the war. Here I want to look at the buildings and devices placed within it.

Autumn in Showa Kinen Park's Japanese Garden, with red and gold trees reflected in the pond
Autumn in Showa Kinen Park’s Japanese Garden, with red and gold trees reflected in the pond
Photo: Kakidai / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

According to the official site, the north side of the garden has stonework called nozura-zumi, built of rough, unworked stones, and at the foot of a wooden bridge there is a tsukubai, a low stone basin for rinsing your hands. In winter the pines get yukitsuri, rope supports that protect their branches from the weight of snow. Bamboo fences, a tea-garden path, stepping stones, and a stone-paved walk. The traditional techniques of Japanese gardening are laid out in one garden like a book of samples.

On the western shore of the pond stands Kanpūtei (歓楓亭, “Pavilion of Delight in Maples”). It is a single-storey wooden building in the sukiya style, the refined, rustic style of tea-house architecture, with a copper roof. It has an 11-mat main room with a tokonoma alcove, an 8-mat second room, a 6-mat waiting room, a small 4.5-mat tea room, a ryūrei room for tea served at tables, and a mizuya preparation area. The official site lists the building materials one by one: polished cedar logs from Kitayama, sabi-maruta logs from Yoshino, cypress boards from Kiso. The roof is thatched with cypress bark, and the joints between posts and beams use techniques handed down by sukiya carpenters and other craftsmen, of whom few now remain in Japan.

Read the details, and it gets even more enjoyable. The second room has sliding doors decorated with maple leaves and a transom of openwork paulownia. In the waiting room’s transom, the knots of smoke-darkened bamboo trace the line of the mountains seen from the northern woods. The small tea room is called “Hōshun” (萌春, “Budding Spring”), with an alcove post of camellia with the bark left on, an alcove frame of chestnut with its bark, and a ceiling of cattail leaves. In honour of the pavilion’s name, the transom of the preparation room has openwork carvings of maple leaves and the maple’s winged seeds.

And the table-style tea room is named “Kōsai” (紅彩, “Crimson Hues”). It has a floor of traditional roof tiles, and you can enjoy the tea ceremony without taking your shoes off. For someone like me, with no confidence in kneeling Japanese-style, no sentence could be more welcome. A building that is the very essence of sukiya craftsmanship has, in the end, spared a thought even for the pins and needles in your legs.

South of Kanpūtei is Seichiken (清池軒), a rest pavilion that juts out over the pond. Seen from the opposite bank, it seems to float on the water. From the arbour called Shōyō (昌陽), the official site says, the scenery of the northern hills is reflected in the pond, like a picture set in a frame. Beside Ryōbotei (涼暮亭), the arbour for viewing the waterfall, water springing from the northern woods falls 7 metres over the rockwork, becomes a stream, and pours into the pond.

The garden’s flower calendar is on the official site too. Early spring: plum, Japanese narcissus, Japanese cornel. Spring: cherry blossom, tree peony, azalea, roof iris, fringed iris. Early summer: hydrangea and Japanese iris. Summer: water lilies, balloon flowers, day lilies. Autumn: toad lilies, the berries of Japanese beautyberry, leopard plant, and the autumn leaves. Winter: the berries of coralberry, winter camellia and sasanqua. Whenever you come, something is blooming, bearing fruit or changing colour.

At Kanpūtei, besides tea service of matcha with a seasonal jōnamagashi (a delicate handmade sweet), there is an event called “My First Tea Room” on the third Sunday of every month. There is also a tray-style tea experience in which you whisk your own tea and enjoy it with a view of the garden. Even if you know nothing of tea-ceremony etiquette, there is a way in.

The Kanto Regional Development Bureau’s 2017 project evaluation notes that the Japanese Garden’s wooden bridges and its zigzag plank bridge were replaced, to prevent accidents and keep the scenery fine. A garden starts to age from the day it is completed. So bridges are replaced, pines are roped against the snow, stones are reset. Like the paddies in the village, the garden stays a garden only because hands keep tending it.

Wanderer’s Quiz

According to the Bonsai Garden’s explanation, there is a certain “rule” when shaping a bonsai. Seen from the side, what should the top of the tree be doing?

  • A. Bowing slightly
  • B. Pointing straight up
  • C. Leaning slightly backwards

The answer comes near the end of this article.

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The five-needle pine in the Bonsai Garden is never finished

Inside the Japanese Garden there is another garden. It is the Bonsai Garden, opened on 3 November 2004, Culture Day. According to the official site, it was Japan’s first national government facility for displaying bonsai.

The Bonsai Garden inside the Japanese Garden, with potted bonsai lined up on outdoor shelves
The Bonsai Garden inside the Japanese Garden, with potted bonsai lined up on outdoor shelves
Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France / CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons

The Bonsai Garden has about 80 bonsai, and about 50 are on display at any one time, changed with the seasons. The resident staff are bonsai specialists who explain their maintenance work and the points to look for while they tend the trees. In the Sanjutei (讃樹亭) pavilion you can also see indoor displays such as alcove arrangements. The Kanto Regional Development Bureau’s project evaluation describes it as a facility showing bonsai of Kokufu Bonsai Exhibition standard, the level of Japan’s national bonsai show.

The tree the official site picks as its “recommended bonsai” is a Japanese five-needle pine. Its estimated age is more than 150 years. Its style is moyōgi, informal upright, and it is about 62 centimetres tall. In appreciating bonsai, three things are said to matter: the spread of the roots, the natural rise of the trunk, and the arrangement of the branches. This five-needle pine has especially fine roots, and its height has been deliberately kept down to emphasise the thickness of its trunk and give the impression of a great tree.

A hundred and fifty years. By my reckoning, when this pine sprouted, the main house in Komorebi Village was already about a hundred years old. And the pine is only 62 centimetres tall. In 150 years it has grown to just above my knee. It isn’t that it failed to grow. It is that it was not allowed to.

The official site also explains the shapes of bonsai carefully. The basic form is a scalene triangle. The tree is planted slightly to the left or right of the centre of the pot. Every bonsai has a front and a back; at the front, about a third of the tree’s height is left as open space from the base, so that the curve of the trunk, its bark and the way it rises from the soil can be seen to advantage. The back is made busy.

The list of style names is fun to look through too. Kabudachi, clump style, where five or more trunks rise from the base. Chokkan, formal upright, with a straight trunk. Yose-ue, group planting, where several trees are planted together to suggest a forest or wood. Moyōgi, where trunk and branches bend yet stay in balance. Kengai, cascade style, copying a tree leaning out from a cliff. Ishitsuki, where a tree is attached to a rock to create a natural scene. And bunjingi, literati style, with a slender trunk full of variety. The pot matters too: there are unglazed pots and pots glazed blue or white, and just changing the pot transforms the impression a bonsai makes. People change their look with their clothes, so a tree can hardly complain about changing with its pot.

And then this: bonsai are called a “living art” with no completion, enjoyed as the plant grows.

No completion. Reading those words, I thought of the village’s farming calendar.

Why the Showa 30s, on an old airfield?

Let us return to the first question. Why the Showa 30s?

The official site gives the reason briefly. The Showa 30s, just before Japan’s era of high-speed economic growth, are the years that link the past directly to the present, when many good old things still remained. And today, it is still possible to hear about them directly from people who know them from their own experience.

I see, I think. Recreate life in the Edo period, and no one alive has experienced it. But for rice planting in the Showa 30s, people who remember the ache in their backs can still hold a hoe. Komorebi Village chose the very last era whose knowledge could be handed from person to person, rather than through documents. That is precisely why citizens broke the ground here from the planning stage. The people passing knowledge on and the people receiving it needed to stand in the same field.

The official site adds short explanations of the theme’s other two words. Musashino means the old province of Musashi, which had varied forms: villages on the plateau, villages in the valleys of the hills, villages among the mountains. Farming, as work, is not nature itself; in it is the wisdom of a life in which people were sustained by nature, made use of nature, and lived by joining forces with one another. That must be why the village tries to preserve not only the landscape, but the work that goes into it.

Then why a Komae village headman’s house on an old airfield? Half of the answer is in the press release. It was donated and moved over four years. A village that set out to recreate a Musashino farming community of the Showa 30s needed a real farmhouse at its centre. The house needed somewhere to survive. The two needs met in this northern corner.

Tachikawa is sometimes called a plain town. I half thought so myself. But Japan’s first national bonsai display facility is in a park in this town. The first village in a national government park built with citizens taking part from the planning stage is in this town, too. There cannot be many towns where a whole 250-year-old village headman’s house has moved in, and where, around it, citizens tread the wheat and plant the rice every year.

The other half is my own reading. An airfield is a place for going far, fast. Komorebi Village, the Japanese Garden and the Bonsai Garden are the exact opposite. The same place, the same work, repeated every year. A pine that has grown only 62 centimetres in 150 years, tended by someone every day. Flat land made for going far away has become a place to learn how to go nowhere. Perhaps that reading is just a traveller’s liberty. The rest of the answer, each of us can work out standing on the earth floor of the main house.

One straight ride on the Chuo Line from Shinjuku, or on the Nambu Line from Kawasaki, then 13 minutes by bus from Tachikawa Station. You don’t need a passport to visit the 1950s for the weekend.

Quiz answer

The answer is A: bowing slightly. According to the Bonsai Garden’s official explanation, there is a rule that, seen from the side, the top of the tree is shaped as if bowing slightly, perhaps out of a Japanese sense of modesty. Even a pine that has lived 150 years never forgets to give its visitors a little nod.

Before you go

  • Where: the northern part of Showa Kinen Park. Komorebi Village is about 5 minutes on foot from the Sunagawa Gate, the Japanese Garden about 15 minutes, and the Bonsai Garden about 17 minutes (per the official facilities guide). From the Tachikawa Gate, it takes about 38 minutes on foot to reach Komorebi Village.
  • From Tachikawa Station: take a Tachikawa Bus from stop No. 2 at the JR Tachikawa Station North Exit bus terminal to “Shōwa Kinen Kōen Sunagawa-guchi,” about 13 minutes, then walk about 2 minutes to the gate (per the official access guide). Or walk about 20 minutes to the Sunagawa Gate from Musashi-Sunagawa Station on the Seibu Haijima Line. By car, the Sunagawa-guchi car park is closest.
  • From Shinjuku: take the JR Chuo Line (Rapid) to Tachikawa with no change of trains, a ride of thirty-something minutes. From Kanagawa Prefecture, the JR Nambu Line runs from Kawasaki to Tachikawa without a change (about an hour). Then take the bus from the North Exit to Sunagawa-guchi.
  • Hours and closures: the official site says Komorebi Village and the Farmhouse Area have opening hours that vary by season, and close on Mondays (the following weekday if Monday is a holiday). The Japanese Garden and Bonsai Garden are open from 9:30 until 30 minutes before the park closes. Check the official site for the latest admission fee, opening hours and closing days.
  • Time to allow: entering by the Sunagawa Gate and walking between the village, the Japanese Garden and the Bonsai Garden takes about 20 minutes of walking each way. If you want to see inside the farmhouse or the tea house, allow half a day.
  • Tea and etiquette: Kanpūtei serves tea (matcha with a seasonal sweet) for a fee. The official site asks visitors not to touch the bonsai, and tripods are not allowed for photography. The farmhouse and fields are tended by volunteers; stay on the paths.
  • Combine with: for the park as a whole and its history, see this series’ piece on Showa Kinen Park. North of the Sunagawa entrance lie the Tamagawa Aqueduct and the old village of Sunagawa, which you can walk together with this series’ piece on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa.
  • Official sites: Komorebi Village https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/facility/facility-385/ ; Japanese Garden https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/facility/facility-824/ ; Bonsai Garden https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/facility/facility-382/ ; Access https://www.showakinen-koen.jp/access/
  • General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains and buses, and wear comfortable shoes; the park is large and the walk is longer than it looks on the map.

After the village, over to Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Going round Komorebi Village, the Japanese Garden and the Bonsai Garden involves more walking than you expect, because you go deep into the back of the park and then come all the way out again. When you get back to Tachikawa Station, a one-minute walk from the North Exit brings you to On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), on the third floor of the Etoile Building, 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, Tokyo.

It is a hot yoga studio with heated lava-stone floors. It also offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lessons.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30, the same hours whatever the day, so you can still make it after the park has closed.

For first-timers there is a trial yoga lesson for ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and mat rental included.

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

In the Bonsai Garden, the five-needle pine bows its head just slightly, as it does every day, waiting to be tended for the next 150 years.

Cover photo: The Farmhouse Area of Komorebi Village in Showa Kinen Park, with a thatched main house and white-walled storehouse (Photo: Guilhem Vellut from Annecy, France / CC BY 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

More Tachikawa Walks

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