Tachikawa Live Music Guide: Basement Venues and Where TM Meant Tama

A walk through Tachikawa’s music: basement venues by the South Exit, a former cabaret stage, an air force band’s 65 years, and the night “TM” meant Tama.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In 1983, a trio that included two young men who had grown up in Tachikawa (立川) was close to settling on a name for itself. TAMA NETWORK.

Then one of them spoke up. Isn’t “Tama” a bit uncool? The person who wanted the name of their home district in the band’s name was from Tama; so was the person who vetoed it. And so “TAMA” was squeezed down to two letters, and TM NETWORK was born. Officially, TM was said to stand for “Time Machine.”

(Tama, for the record, is the broad swathe of western Tokyo beyond the 23 city wards: commuter towns, hills, river terraces, and the city of Tachikawa at its heart. To a Tokyoite of the early 1980s the word did not exactly scream glamour. Hence the veto.)

Ask whether Tachikawa is a music town and probably not many people will nod. Plenty of towns along the JR Chuo Line, the railway that runs west out of central Tokyo, proudly call themselves music towns. I have never heard of Tachikawa claiming the title.

And yet, the more I dug, the more traces of music turned up: underground, inside the fence of a former military base, on the lawns of a vast park. Tachikawa, it seems, has been making music all along while never putting its own name to it. Why? With that question in my pocket, I decided to go down into the basements of the South Exit.

Where are Tachikawa’s live music venues? Three twenty-year veterans under the South Exit

If you are looking for live music in Tachikawa, start at the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station. Within a few minutes’ walk on the south side of the station there are three “live houses” (the Japanese term for small music clubs with a stage, a bar and a standing crowd) that have been running for around twenty years. And all three are below ground.

The first is A.A.COMPANY, in Shibasakicho 3-chome. Locals shorten it to AA or AAC. According to a 2007 article in Tachikawa Keizai Shimbun, a local business news site, the venue opened in 2001. It has put every kind of act on its stage: not only jazz and rock but oldies, disco, Hawaiian music and even comedy. The room measures about 30 tsubo, roughly 100 square metres. Its official website says it is a five-minute walk from the South Exit.

The second is Heart Beat, in Nishikicho. According to its official website, it opened in 2005, and several bands and singers who formed there or played there have gone on to make their way in the major-label world. It is three minutes’ walk from the South Exit, on the first basement floor of a building that also houses an unstaffed rehearsal studio. Besides booking acts, the venue can be rented for self-organised shows and parties, and the website says first-timers who have never played a stage are welcome. Musicians who went on to the majors and someone stepping up to a microphone for the very first time tonight tread the same boards underground.

The third, also about three minutes from the South Exit, is BABEL, officially BABEL The Rock Tower. According to its official website it opened in 2008, with a hall that holds more than 300 people and a stage 8 metres wide and 5 metres deep. A Tower of Babel, underground. I spent a little while wondering what made someone take the name of a tower that tried and failed to reach heaven and deliberately put it beneath the earth. I could not work it out. I couldn’t work it out, but I rather like it.

Some of the bands who played these basements later became well known. One rock band, formed in 2010 by four members of a high school light-music club (the Japanese school club for pop and rock bands), began its career based in Tachikawa’s live houses, an encyclopedia records. That story belongs to another article in this series, on the people connected with Tachikawa.

That all three are underground is probably no coincidence. Loud sound is most peaceably contained beneath the ground. People walking through the crowds in front of the station have no idea that, right under their feet, a guitar may be ringing at this very moment. In Tachikawa, the music plays underground first.

Then why did underground stages survive in this particular corner of the South Exit? The clue lay in the shape of the first venue’s stage.

A fan-shaped stage from a cabaret: A.A.COMPANY and the nights of a base town

A 2020 feature on a website that profiles live music venues carries an interview with the manager of A.A.COMPANY. According to it, the premises were originally a show pub, in other words a cabaret. The fan-shaped stage and parts of the interior are what remain of it. The venue’s own website introduces itself as a “musician-like space” that makes use of a place that was once a cabaret.

On a cabaret stage, rock now plays. The fan shape was presumably designed so that dancers and singers could be seen from three sides of the audience. On that same fan, these days, stand high school bands and blues singers with a guitar.

Why was there a cabaret stage in front of Tachikawa Station? The answer lies in the town’s past. According to “Kono Machi Archives,” a town-history record published by the real-estate firm Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, after the war Tachikawa Airfield was requisitioned by the US military and Tachikawa became a base town. A photograph of the North Exit from the late 1950s to the 1960s shows a shopping-street association along the road running north-west from the base’s main gate, with a caption explaining that there were many bars and cabarets there for American servicemen. From the late 1950s onward, the same record says, the base’s economic influence gradually shrank as the number of troops fell and employment was cut back.

The nights of a base town needed music. The Japanese encyclopedia entry on “occupation forces clubs” (the clubs for US personnel in post-war Japan) cites the music historian Koichi Uchida, who wrote that Japanese bands performed at US facilities in many places besides Tokyo and Yokohama, including Yokosuka, Tachikawa, Fuchu and Yokota. According to the same entry, more than 100 Japanese jazz musicians played the clubs on the Yokosuka base every day. I wrote a little about the bandsmen who stood on the stages of the Tachikawa base in another article in this series, on the culture of the base town. What I want to think about here is where the sound of those nights went.

In the interview, the manager says something interesting. On the venue’s disco nights, there is a regular in his seventies who has been coming since the event began. The wide age range of the customers, the manager suggests, may be partly because Tachikawa was a US base town.

He doesn’t claim it as fact. But I understand the urge to say it. According to the Tachikawa Keizai Shimbun article, around 2007 the venue’s “Disco Night,” on the first Friday of every month, drew 60 to 70 people every time, overwhelmingly in their forties and fifties. The room of about 30 tsubo was always packed. Do the arithmetic and that is two people per tsubo, a space about the size of two tatami mats. Rather tight for dancing. People came anyway.

The same article mentions people coming from further afield. Live shows where the crowd danced to dangdut, a rhythm from Indonesia, had drawn 70 to 80 people on each of the four occasions so far, including some from Saitama, the prefecture to the north. Someone at the venue said that participatory shows, where you can sing and dance yourself rather than just listen, were the popular ones. In a basement in Tachikawa, people from Saitama dance to an Indonesian rhythm. The nights of the base town have been handed down, without anyone quite noticing, in a thoroughly multinational form.

Back then, on a fan-shaped cabaret stage, someone sang for American soldiers. Now, in front of a stage of the same shape, the people dancing are Tachikawa regulars who have reached their seventies. The faces in the audience have changed. Only the shape of the stage remains.

An old personal homepage written by a local resident describes, with disarming honesty, the bewilderment of visiting this place. By day a lunch sign is out, and an Indian cook bakes naan in a tandoor. Curry with salad and naan or rice for 700 yen. Normally it’s a curry restaurant, the writer explains, but it’s actually a pretty famous live house. Then they sum it up in one line: a completely incomprehensible establishment.

I agree. I know of no other place where a naan oven and a drum kit share the same basement. Still, the manager says the venue’s motto is “smash the walls between genres.” The wall between curry and rock is, apparently, among them.

If there is a venue that inherited a cabaret stage, there must also be music that the base itself left behind. When I looked, I found it in an unexpected form: musicians in uniform.

1958: a band of the skies comes to Tachikawa, and stays 65 years

In the summer of 1958, a band arrived in Tachikawa.

According to the history of the Japan Air Self-Defense Force Central Band (航空中央音楽隊, Koku Chuo Ongakutai), in January of that year an 18-member band was provisionally formed at Hamamatsu Air Base in Shizuoka. On 25 July it was permitted to move to the capital, and it relocated to the Air Self-Defense Force’s Tachikawa Sub-Base (立川分屯基地, Tachikawa Bunton Kichi), a small station in the city (not to be confused with the US Tachikawa Air Base of the same era). In 1961 it became the “Air Band,” reporting directly to the Director General of the Defense Agency, and the following February it held its first regular concert at the Kosei Nenkin Kaikan hall in Shinjuku.

In 1958, Tachikawa still had a US military base. It was the era when, on the other side of the fence, Japanese bands played jazz in the American clubs. Right next door, a Japanese air unit began practising for a wind band. The music of the base town was not only dance music for American servicemen.

Read on through the band’s history, and the years it spent in Tachikawa line up neatly with the timeline of Japanese wind-band music. At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it played at the opening and closing ceremonies, among other events. In 1972 it performed on albums such as “Brass Band Plays Brass Rock,” arranged by Naohiro Iwai. The encyclopedia calls this a pioneer of Japanese wind-band pops. Many people in Japan will remember playing pop arrangements in their school brass band; one of the sources of that tradition, then, was ringing out of a practice room at the Tachikawa Sub-Base.

In 1982 the band was renamed the Air Self-Defense Force Central Band, with a strength of 70 including its commander. In 1992 it became the first band from Asia to receive an award that the Sousa Foundation in the United States gives to outstanding military bands around the world. In 1996, a new band building was completed in Tachikawa.

During its Tachikawa years the band also travelled overseas. In 1999 it became the first Self-Defense Forces band to take part in an international military music festival in Halifax, Canada. The same year, in Washington, D.C., it performed together with the United States Air Force Band. A band from a former base town crossing the Pacific to share a stage with the air force band of the very country whose base it had once lived beside. Seen from Tachikawa, it was a reunion by a very roundabout route.

In 2015 it even appeared at the music festival of a huge event run by a video-streaming site (Niconico, whose videos are overlaid with viewers’ scrolling comments). The band that plays the national anthem at state ceremonies was playing wind-band music amid streams of on-screen comments. The range of these uniformed musicians is far wider than I had imagined.

An air unit that never flies. On the ground, it raises its instruments. The gap between the name and the job is a little comical. But its mission, it is said, is to support with music the ceremonies and the morale of the people who do fly.

Then in the spring of 2023, the band moved to a new building at Fuchu Air Base. It came from Hamamatsu, and stayed in Tachikawa for 65 years. It left only three years ago. Most people walking past the station have no idea that, for more than half a century, Japan’s air force band lived in this town. I didn’t know either, until I looked it up.

Back then, American transport planes flew in Tachikawa’s skies, and on the ground, Japanese and American bands each made their own music. Now the sky over the sub-base is quiet, and the band’s rehearsals are heard from Fuchu. A town’s music moves house from time to time. But the place where it first rang out does not move.

Tachikawa’s music in numbers

• 2001 — The year A.A.COMPANY opened. Its fan-shaped cabaret stage is older still.
• 8 × 5 — The width and depth of BABEL’s stage, in metres. Quite a spacious tower for a basement.
• 65 — Years the Air Self-Defense Force Central Band spent at the Tachikawa Sub-Base (1958–2023). Long enough for a baby born the year it arrived to reach retirement age.
• 2 — How many of TM NETWORK’s three members grew up in Tachikawa. The one who vetoed the name “Tama” is among them.
• 62,200 — The number of people who gathered for a concert at Showa Kinen Park in the summer of 1998 (according to an encyclopedia’s summary).
• About 220 — Groups performing at the Tachikawa Ittai Music Festival. There must be venues where, at some point, the performers outnumber the audience.

A traveller’s quiz

How many years did the Air Self-Defense Force Central Band spend at the Tachikawa Sub-Base?

1. About 15 years
2. About 40 years
3. About 65 years

The answer comes near the end of this article.

But in the story of Tachikawa’s music, the sound that travelled furthest came from neither the uniformed band nor the basement venues. It spread across the whole country with its name in disguise.