Akishima Day Trip from Tachikawa: Whale Fossil, Wisteria and History

Where the name Akishima comes from: Showa town, Haijima village and a Buddha on a sandbar

Half the answer was almost disappointingly simple. According to the City of Akishima, on 1 May 1954 the town of Showa and the village of Haijima in North Tama District merged, and Tokyo’s seventh city was born. The name “Akishima” combines the names of the two. The 昭 (read aki) of Showa (昭和), and the 島 (shima) of Haijima (拝島). The city emblem was adopted the same year: the black part represents 昭, and the four white katakana ma shapes (マ) inside it represent 島 — because “four” is shi in Japanese, and four ma make shi-ma. Once you have been told that, look at the emblem again and, sure enough, it starts to look that way.

Then where did “Showa town” come from? According to the city’s history, from the Edo period to the early Meiji era, the area of today’s city held nine villages, from east to west: Goji, Fukushima, Tsukiji, Nakagami, Miyazawa, Ogami, Kamikawara, Tanaka and Haijima. In 1889 the nine formed a village union; in 1902 Haijima split off and became independent. The remaining eight villages merged to form “Showa Village” in 1928 — the third year of the Showa era. Born in Showa 3, so: Showa Village. I suspect the naming meeting did not take very long.

Here, Tachikawa makes its appearance. The city’s profile says that after silk prices crashed early in the Showa era, and as the wartime system tightened with the Manchurian Incident and the war with China, one military factory after another, mainly making aircraft, was built here along with army facilities, “partly because it was close to Tachikawa Airfield.” Showa Village, its population swelling suddenly as military facilities gathered, became a town in 1941. Land that in the Taisho era had been mulberry fields from end to end — one of the leading sericulture villages in Japan, specialising in silkworm eggs — changed into an aircraft town, as if drawn in by the airfield next door.

The prime example is Showa Aircraft Industry. According to the city’s guide to historic-site walks, the company was founded in 1937, the year the war with China began, and before the war it was the largest military factory along the Ome Line, working for the navy. The city states plainly that the development of today’s North Exit of Akishima Station cannot be told without Showa Aircraft.

There is a trace of this in the station’s name, too. In the city’s history, under 1959, there is a short line: “Showa-mae Station renamed Akishima Station.” Showa-mae means “in front of Showa” — the station in front of Showa Aircraft. According to Wikipedia’s article on the station, it was born in 1938 as “Showa-mae Temporary Stop” on the Ome Electric Railway, and Showa Aircraft provided the land for the station building. There was a station outside the company’s gate, and the station’s name simply announced that it was in front of the company. It could hardly be more obvious.

Leave Akishima Station by the North Exit today and wide greenery meets your eye: the area known as “Showa no Mori” (“the Showa Forest”). According to the city, the site of the old head office has become the city’s Showa no Mori Plaza, where a stone marks “the place of founding.” A tree-lined avenue of 72 ginkgo trees runs about 420 metres north from Tsutsujigaoka-dori, one of the longest in Japan as a promenade, the city says. To the east stand buildings with arched, Quonset-hut-shaped roofs. These were once aircraft hangars; now an indoor tennis school uses them. Under roofs that once held aeroplanes, tennis balls now fly. The size of the flying things has become a good deal gentler.

The city’s guide lists one more unexpected sight: Daikanyama. In the Muromachi period (1336–1573), a deputy (daikan) of the Ogigayatsu Uesugi clan is said to have had his residence here, so later people called the area Daikanyama, “the deputy’s hill.” In June 2019, the “Junkyu Muto Sculpture Garden,” with nine works mainly in marble, opened in its woods. So Akishima has a Daikanyama too — complete with woods and sculptures. For anyone who knows the fashionable Tokyo neighbourhood of the same name, it will come as a small surprise.

Now, the other half of the name: Haijima. This one is not simple.

Heibonsha’s Nihon Rekishi Chimei Taikei (Encyclopedia of Japanese Historical Place Names), in its entry on the Dainichi-do hall in Haijima, quotes the hall’s founding legend: the principal image, a statue of Dainichi Nyorai (the Cosmic Buddha, Mahavairocana), washed up on a sandbar in a flood of the Tama River in 952 and was enshrined at Jodo-ji Temple. Shogakukan’s Nihon Daihyakka Zensho (Encyclopedia Nipponica), in its entry on Haijima, records that the place name is said to come from the old story of a Dainichi image that drifted ashore and was enshrined in a hall by the villagers.

So the “island” in Haijima was a sandbar in the river. Villagers worshipped a Buddha that had washed up in a flooded river. Hai means “to worship”: the island where they worshipped, Haijima. The “island” of a town without a sea was an island made not by the sea, but by a river.

Then again, the same Nihon Rekishi Chimei Taikei, in its entry on Haijima Village, also says that in the Middle Ages it was sometimes written 蠅島 — haejima, “Fly Island.” It was also written 早島, “Early Island,” apparently. The island where people worship a Buddha, and the island of flies. I cannot say which characters came first, but I am truly glad the city name took the former. Drawing “fly” on a city emblem with four katakana ma would be beyond anyone.

Haijima’s Dainichi-do and its 800-year-old wisteria: the temple that guarded Takiyama Castle

To see where the legend of the drifting Dainichi leads, I head for Haijima.

From Tachikawa, the bus is the way to go. According to the City of Akishima, from stop No. 10 at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, take a bus bound for “Haijima Sosha-jo,” “Haijima-eki” or “Fussa Eigyosho,” get off at “Haijima Daishi” (拝島大師), and walk 3 minutes. It runs west along the Okutama Kaido road, straight from Tachikawa’s station square with no change.

In one corner of Haijima Park stands the Dainichi-do. According to the city’s guide to historic-site walks, its formal name is Haijima-san Mitsugon Jodo-ji Dainichi-do. It is said to have been founded in 952, and in the Warring States period it was protected by the Hojo clan as a guard against evil from the unlucky north-east direction (kimon) of Takiyama Castle, built across the Tama River. According to Nihon Rekishi Chimei Taikei, it originally stood further east at Jodo in Ogami, and was moved west to its present site to guard the castle’s unlucky quarter when Takiyama Castle was built.

The principal image, Dainichi Nyorai, and the flanking Shaka Nyorai and Amida Nyorai are all Tangible Cultural Properties designated by Tokyo Metropolis. The two Kongo Rikishi guardian statues in the Nio Gate were made in 1314–1315. The city writes that, for works of the Kamakura period, they are gentle standing figures. Kamakura-period guardian kings are usually furious. These ones, it seems, are a little calmer.

In the temple grounds is the Haijima Wisteria. According to the city, it is also called “the Thousand-Year Wisteria” and is said to be 800 years old. It is a natural monument of Tokyo Metropolis; the City of Akishima records that it was designated a metropolitan cultural property in 1956, when Akishima had been a city for only two years. It is at its best every year from mid-April to early May. The city’s official page reports on its flowering every year almost like a diary. In spring 2026, for example: on 23 March, “They’re small, but buds have begun to form.” On 15 April, “Flowering is about a week ahead of last year.” On 20 April, “The whole wisteria trellis has turned purple.” And on 1 May, “This year’s peak has passed.” A city office’s web page kept up live coverage of a single tree for nearly forty days. A tree that has lived 800 years deserves that much respect.

Beside the wisteria is the Onei Well, a site designated by the city. The story goes like this. In the Warring States period, Ishikawa Tosa-no-kami, a senior retainer of the lord of Takiyama Castle, prayed at the Dainichi-do for his daughter Onei to be cured of an eye disease; she washed her eyes in this clear water, and was cured at once.

Next to the Dainichi-do is Hiyoshi Shrine, the guardian shrine of old Haijima Village. Its Sakaki Festival, held on the eve of the annual festival every September, is designated an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Tokyo. In the city’s list of cultural properties, the precincts of the Dainichi-do and of Hiyoshi Shrine are listed together as a Tokyo historic site. The hall of a Buddha and the shrine of a Shinto god side by side as if in one precinct presumably preserve the way things were before Buddhism and Shinto were officially separated in the Meiji era.

A short walk away is Haijima Daishi, properly called Honkaku-in. According to the city, it is a Tendai temple, also known as Ganzan Daishi, founded in 1578. Its fair days on 2 and 3 January have long been famous as a daruma-ichi, a market for daruma dolls (round, red good-luck figures). Around the Dainichi-do, three of the “Eight Temples of the Dainichi-do,” said to have been built by senior retainers of the lord of Takiyama Castle, still remain: Enpuku-ji, Fumyo-ji and Honkaku-in.

There is one more shrine in Haijima worth remembering: Haijima Tenjin-sha. According to the city, it enshrines Sugawara no Michizane, the scholar revered as the god of learning, and is said to have been founded in the Bunroku era (1592–1596) by dividing the spirit from Yaho Tenmangu in Kunitachi. So the “family home” of Akishima’s god of learning is in Kunitachi, Tachikawa’s neighbour to the east. With Tachikawa in between, Haijima in the west and Yaho in the east have been linked by the god of learning for more than four hundred years.

Incidentally, the City of Akishima offers a “Historic-Site Walk Course A” around Haijima, and its guide even states the calories you will burn: about 2 hours, about 3.2 km, about 441 kilocalories of energy (another page says about 411). It goes to the trouble of showing the formula: the calculation uses METs, a unit of exercise intensity in the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s standards, and assumes a person weighing 60 kilograms. A calorie count on a cultural-heritage walk. The guardian kings surely never imagined they would become tools for keeping fit. Then again, thanks to that number, I feel I could be forgiven anything I eat on the way back from the daruma market. Whether that is the city’s intention, I do not know.

Water and rails that tie Akishima to Tachikawa

Walking in Akishima, I kept meeting Tachikawa’s name. Not on signs, but on waterways and railway lines.

The first link is water. The city’s guide to its Tama River nature walk puts the “site of the Kukason Canal intake” at the start. This was the Tama River intake of the irrigation channel known as “Tachikawa-bori,” the “Tachikawa ditch,” which since the Edo period had watered the rice paddies of what are now both Akishima and Tachikawa. Beside the sluice gate stands a stone monument to the water god. In 1933, because less water was coming in through the intake, the new Showa Irrigation Weir was built to take in water from the Tama and Aki rivers and send it down the Showa Canal — that is, the Tachikawa-bori. It still waters the city’s paddies today, the guide says. As I wrote in our article on the Negawa and the Tama River in Tachikawa, this Kukason Canal coming from Haijima also flowed into Tachikawa’s Negawa. The water for Tachikawa’s rice paddies came from the riverbank in Akishima.

The second link is water too. At the southern end of Matsunaka Bridge on the Tamagawa Aqueduct, which flows through the north of Akishima, small intakes stand in a row. According to the city, the Sunagawa branch channel opened in 1657 and the Shibasaki branch channel in 1737, and they helped develop Sunagawa Shinden and Shibasaki Village respectively — today’s Tachikawa. In our walk along the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa, I followed the channels that nurtured Sunagawa’s strip-shaped village. Their entrance, it turns out, was on Akishima’s side.

The same guide has another line that caught my attention. Past Mihori Bridge, the woods on both banks end and the aqueduct goes underground in a culvert for about 300 metres. This is a remnant of covering it over during the Second World War, when the runway of the airfield south of the aqueduct was extended. A runway was stretched over an Edo-period waterworks. The land of Akishima keeps traces of the age of aircraft in unexpected forms.

The third link is a railway. In Tachikawa’s city timeline, under 1930, it says: “Itsukaichi Railway opens to Tachikawa. Tachikawa Station South Exit opens.” Tachikawa Station’s South Exit was opened to receive the Itsukaichi Railway. Where did those tracks come from? On Akishima’s Historic-Site Walk Course B there is the “site of Ogami Station,” a station on the Itsukaichi Railway, which ran from 1930 to 1944. The Tama River nature walk guide also says that before the war a line was laid from Musashi-Tanaka Station on the Itsukaichi Railway to the Tama River embankment to carry gravel. From Haijima, across the south of Akishima, to Tachikawa’s South Exit. These tracks, which no longer exist, were the parents of Tachikawa’s South Exit. Of all the Tachikawa people who pass through the South Exit every day, I wonder how many know that.

And the biggest link is that park. According to the official guide of Showa Kinen Park, the national government park spans both Tachikawa and Akishima. The park even has a gate called the “Akishima Gate,” about a 10-minute walk from Higashi-Nakagami Station. The park so often spoken of as Tachikawa’s pride is a garden shared by two cities. In 1977, the year Tachikawa Air Base — a former Japanese army airfield that became a US Air Force base after the war — was fully returned, Tokyo Metropolis and the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima drew up a plan for using the former base land, as I wrote in our article on the history of the base in Tachikawa.

Finally, a word about the Tama River banks. The site where the Akishima whale was found is along the Tama River nature walk. The same course guide also lists a memorial to the Hachiko Line train accident. On the morning of 24 August 1945, two trains collided head-on on the railway bridge in torrential rain, carriages fell into the river, and at least 105 people died. In 2001 wheels from the wrecked carriages were pulled out of the river, and they are on display. The riverbank where the whale slept is also a riverbank that holds the grief of a summer eighty years ago. When you walk there, pause for a moment.

The comings and goings between Tachikawa and Akishima went on even closer to daily life than canals and railways. Leaf through the City of Akishima’s timeline and a certain “Tachikawa” name appears again and again throughout the Showa era.