Tachikawa Manga Park Guide: 40,000 Manga in a Former City Hall

Tachikawa’s old city hall is now a tatami-floored manga house with 40,000 volumes and closets to crawl into. How did a town office end up like this?

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Have you ever taken your shoes off at city hall? I haven’t. On the day you go for a residence certificate, or to argue about your taxes, you keep your shoes on, clutch a numbered ticket and wait for your turn at the counter. That is how city halls work, everywhere.

Tachikawa (立川), a city in western Tokyo, has a building where this rule is reversed. On the second floor of what used to be the city hall, you take off your shoes, step up onto tatami mats, crawl into a closet and read manga. The place is called Tachikawa Manga Park (立川まんがぱーく, Tachikawa Mangapāku). It sits inside the Tachikawa City Children’s Future Center in the Nishikicho district, a 13-minute walk from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station.

You put your shoes in a coin locker at the entrance. According to the official website, the coin you drop into that shoe locker is your admission fee. There is no ticket window and no one to take your money. The moment your shoes are locked away, you are a customer. It is a place that does not waste words.

How did a city hall become a manga house? Who decided, and how, to carry 40,000 volumes of comics and a floor of tatami into it? A local government office is, as a rule, the place most likely to stop exactly this kind of idea. I should confess that I had always thought of Tachikawa as a town you pass through on your way to a train connection. With that question in hand, I set off from the South Exit toward Nishikicho.

What Tachikawa Manga Park is: 40,000 manga on tatami, upstairs in the old city hall

According to the official website, almost the entire floor is covered in tatami (the woven straw mats of a traditional Japanese room). There are low tables, floor cushions called zabuton, and spaces that look like the oshiire, the built-in closets of a Japanese house where futons are stored during the day. The site says that among the tatami and wooden interiors, modelled on an old Japanese farmhouse, you may lose yourself in manga all day long, or simply use the place to meet a friend. The collection stands at about 40,000 manga. The picture-book corner holds about 2,500 picture books, with tiered benches, like a little set of bleachers, where parents and children can sit side by side. Because the floor is tatami, babies can crawl around safely, the site says.

You cannot borrow the books. You read them inside, or on a terrace reserved for visitors. You cannot leave and come back in, either; but if you change into the special slippers provided, you may go out to the toilets, the terrace and the plaza of the Children’s Future Center. It feels less like a library than like the main house of a large family, where a great tatami hall happens to be stuffed with comics.

It opened in March 2013. Current Awareness, the information service of the National Diet Library (Japan’s national library), reported its opening on 20 March that year as a paid facility holding about 30,000 manga. The collection later grew to about 40,000.

Here is a small thing I enjoyed. In June 2012, before the opening, the same Current Awareness described the planned facility as one that would “hold about 50,000 manga.” The official website today says the collection will be increased, partly in response to requests, “to around 50,000.” For more than ten years, 50,000 has been the goal. It is a number like the horizon: walk towards it and it steps back a little.

But the charm of this place is not the number of books. Once you learn what this building used to do, the tatami suddenly mean something else.

The day the city hall moved from Nishikicho to Izumicho

Tachikawa’s city hall today stands in Izumicho, on the north side of the station. A technical paper written in 2013 by the people who designed the new building records that the new city hall was planned to solve the problems of the old one in Nishikicho, built in 1958: it was ageing, it was cramped, and it was not accessible. Construction ran from July 2008 to March 2010. According to the history page of the Manga Park’s official site, the city hall moved to Izumicho in May 2010.

Try to picture the South Exit in 1958, the year the Nishikicho building went up. According to the Machi Archives of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, a local-history series, in the 1960s Tachikawa had ten cinemas, including the Tachikawa Meigaza and Tachikawa Nikkatsu at the South Exit, and was known as “the town of movies.” One of them even called itself the Tachikawa Nishikiza. In 1952 the first Marui Tachikawa department store had opened in front of the South Exit. Turn to the city’s own chronology, and three years after the city hall was built, under 1961, you find: “Japan’s first woman chair of a city assembly is chosen.” In 1970 the Second Building, the one that would later become the manga house, was completed. It was a time when a town that liked new things walked in and out of a brand-new city hall.

The memories of people who grew up around the South Exit survive too. On a website about the Tama area (the broad stretch of western Tokyo that lies beyond the 23 central wards), the heir to a local printing business that has been trading in Tachikawa since 1930 recalled his boyhood in the late 1960s and 1970s. Where the Tama Monorail’s Tachikawa-Minami Station stands today, private houses once stood in a long row. On Suwa-dori street there was a shop that re-fluffed old cotton futons, a trade you hardly ever see now. In Suwa Park, a spiral path led up to the top of a mound, from which two long slides ran down. In those days, where the monorail station is now, someone’s family sat down to supper. Today trains glide past there in mid-air.

Even so, the South Exit of that era was looking at the back of the North Exit. According to the Machi Archives, in fiscal 1972 the South Exit side took about 20 percent of the total sales of the shopping streets around the station, and the North Exit about 80 percent. A land-readjustment plan for the South Exit, approved in 1964, could only begin construction in 1974 after fierce opposition, and was not completed until 2015. A house move that took half a century.

When the city hall left, the flow of people at the South Exit changed. The official site says it plainly: once the city hall, with its many staff and its stream of residents, was gone, the North Exit side bustled with a growing range of shops, while foot traffic on the South Exit side fell, and the shopping streets slowly lost their old liveliness. A city hall, it seems, is more of a town’s heart than you would think. Staff going out for lunch, people stopping somewhere on their way back from the counter: that modest coming and going moved north along with the building. In the middle of a fifty-year effort to rebuild the South Exit, the heart moved north first.

A collection of case studies compiled by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism records where the sense of alarm came from. At a “Citizens’ 100-Person Committee” set up to discuss what to do with the old city hall site, people voiced worries about how lively the area would be once the offices had moved, and the Tachikawa Station South Exit Area Town-Planning Council began studying how to use the old site.

The old city hall consisted of two buildings. Giving weight to “cost reduction,” “making effective use of existing stock” and “reducing environmental impact,” the city decided to treat them separately. The older First Building was worn out and not earthquake-resistant enough, so it was demolished and its site put to new use. The Second Building would be seismically reinforced, then renovated and kept in service.

According to a collection of building case studies by the Japan Federation of Construction Contractors, the surviving Second Building was completed in 1970. At the time of the renovation it was 43 years old. The designers describe it as a building in the modernist tradition, with sculptural concrete whose corners were rounded off.

Up to this point, it is a story you could find in any town. Do you tear down the old offices, or keep them? If you keep them, what for? In most towns the answer settles on meeting rooms, storage, or the back office of some “centre” or other. Tachikawa’s answer turned out to be tatami, closets and manga. The difference came down to how one call for proposals was written.

“Fix only the minimum, leave the rest free”: the call for proposals

Of everything in the Ministry’s case study, the passage I stared at longest was the one listed as a key point of the project.

When it invited bids, the city set out as requirements only a minimum of functions, such as a “plaza” and “child-rearing support,” which reflected what residents had said. How to use the remaining space was left open to free proposals from private companies. As a result, the document says, a novel proposal on the theme of “manga,” the kind of idea “that rarely comes from inside the administration,” was realised.

The kind of idea that rarely comes from inside the administration. A national government document says this with a straight face. And it is true that I find it hard to picture a city employee in a meeting room saying, “Let’s lay tatami in the old city hall and build some closets.” Even if I can picture it, all I can picture next is the silence in the room afterwards. So the city kept to a minimum the things it would decide itself, and opened the margins to outsiders. Manga came in through that margin.

The call for proposals opened in March 2011, and a company was selected in April. A basic agreement was signed in September, and the renovation contract in October. In December 2012 the old city hall reopened as the Tachikawa City Children’s Future Center, and in March 2013 the whole building opened. Tachikawa Manga Park opened at the same moment.

The winning bid came from a group led by Gojinsha Keikaku Kenkyujo. According to the Federation’s case study, the adopted proposal was put forward by nine companies: Gojinsha, Shimizu Corporation, Sato Sogo Keikaku, studio-L, Machiseisakushitsu, Workers Co-op, Movic Promote Service, Kyoritsu and Kotobukiya.

Finding Kotobukiya in that list made me a little happy. This is the company known for its figures and plastic model kits. According to the company’s own announcements, it was founded in 1947 as a toy shop, “Omocha no Mise Kotobukiya,” in the Akebonocho district of Tachikawa. Its headquarters are still in Tachikawa, and it has become a listed company that files annual securities reports. A toy shop that opened at the North Exit not long after the war has kept its roots in Tachikawa for nearly seventy years, and its name stands among those who revived the old city hall at the South Exit. North and South, once split 80 to 20 in sales, quietly shake hands here.

The money worked differently from an ordinary public facility, too. According to the Ministry’s document, the renovation cost about 800 million yen, paid in full by Tachikawa City. But the figure carries a footnote: “excluding the Tachikawa Manga Park section.” The manga section is the operator’s own independent business, so the operator paid for the whole of its renovation.

The official FAQ even includes this question: “Is Tachikawa Manga Park run by Tachikawa City? Is it funded by taxes?” The answer is that it is run as a self-financed, independent business by the designated manager the city selected, and that the city pays no management fee for its operation. I find it funny that the question needs to be there at all. Reading manga in a former city hall, some people apparently can’t help wondering how their taxes are being spent. A building does not shed its past life that easily.

The Numbers: Tachikawa Manga Park

• About 40,000 — manga in the collection. New volumes will come out before you finish them all.
• About 2,500 — picture books. Here the reader’s voice gives out before the books do.
• 1958 — the year the old city hall in Nishikicho was built. In its era Tachikawa was called “the town of movies.” You could get a residence certificate and a film from the same station, on foot.
• 20 percent — the South Exit’s share of total sales in the station’s shopping streets in fiscal 1972. The North Exit took the other 80.
• 43 — the age of the Second Building when it was renovated. After seismic reinforcement, its second career is as landlord to a manga collection.
• 9 — the number of companies in the group that proposed the revival. Among them: a figure and model-kit maker born in Tachikawa.
• About 800 million yen — the renovation cost. Not a single yen of it went to the Manga Park section.

So how did this manga house, which came in through the margins, arrange its interior? The answer lies in its closets and in the way the shelves are ordered.

Closets, and shelves arranged by genre

In the history section of the official site, under July 2013, there is a single line: “Major expansion of the closet spaces in the Manga Park.” That was just four months after opening. The site does not say what happened. One can guess. People wanted to get into the closets.

According to the official floor map, the closet-style reading spaces are at the back of the manga corner, next to the picture-book corner, and under the stairs. Families and friends may use them freely. Plenty of people, I suspect, remember a childhood night spent wriggling into the upper shelf of the futon closet with a torch and a book. Here, on the second floor of a former city hall, is a place where adults are allowed to do it. I would like to go in. Going in is fine. Whether these knees can get me out again is another matter.

The shelving reflects a clear idea, too. The official site explains that bookshops and manga cafés normally sort comics by the magazine they ran in or by publisher, but here they are arranged by genre, with sections like “History, Culture, Music” or “Life, Child-rearing, Health.” The point is to make it easier to find works in a given field, regardless of author, and to encourage readers to reach for titles they would not normally pick up.

Crossing the boundaries between publishers, manga about raising children sit on the child-rearing shelf, and manga about history sit on the history shelf. These shelves are somewhere halfway between a library’s classification system and the instinct of a secondhand bookseller.

The official site says you can see rare copies of the classic manga Norakuro. There is also a corner of books that help with study: history manga, educational manga and illustrated encyclopedias. Books that do not fit on the open shelves are kept in closed stacks; write the title on a form inside the building, hand it to the staff, and they will bring it out for you. Behind the closet, in other words, there is another closet you cannot see.

Wanderer’s Quiz

How do you pay the admission fee at Tachikawa Manga Park?

• A. You pay a member of staff at the reception counter
• B. You put coins into the coin locker where you leave your shoes
• C. You tap a transit IC card at the entrance gate

The answer comes near the end of this article.