Fussa Day Trip from Tachikawa: Yokota Air Base History, Route 16 Walk

Why isn’t Yokota Air Base in Yokota? A walk from Tachikawa to Fussa: a US base born as Tachikawa’s annex, the Route 16 strip and white American houses.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Few people seeing the characters 福生 for the first time can read them as “Fussa.” Fussa City says so itself. “Regrettably,” it writes, “few people can read it at first sight.” I know of no other city hall that describes its own town’s name with the word “regrettably.”

The town with the unreadable name has another name that doesn’t add up: Yokota Air Base. It is the largest US Air Force base in mainland Japan and takes up about a third of Fussa City. And yet however long you stare at a map of Fussa, you will not find a district called Yokota. Yokota Air Base is not in Yokota.

Then, almost as soon as I began to dig, I came across a sentence that, as someone who lives in Tachikawa, I could not let pass. The base, it said, was born as an “annex” of Tachikawa Airfield. What is more, part of the land of today’s Yokota Air Base lies inside Tachikawa City. Suddenly the story behind that fence, in a town a dozen or so minutes by train from Tachikawa Station, was no longer someone else’s business. Where did Fussa’s American landscape come from? I decided to trace its history, with Tachikawa as my starting point.

The way in to Fussa: why Yokota Air Base isn’t in Yokota

At Tachikawa Station I board the JR Ome Line. At Haijima the Hachiko and Itsukaichi lines branch off; the next stop is Ushihama, and the one after that is Fussa. According to a Fussa sake brewery’s directions, it is about 12 minutes by rapid train to Haijima. Before a cup of coffee bought at the Tachikawa ticket gates has had time to go cold, the view from the window has become a base town.

According to Fussa City, Yokota Air Base straddles five cities and one town: Fussa, Tachikawa, Akishima, Musashimurayama, Hamura and Mizuho. Its total area is about 7.136 square kilometres; it measures about 2.9 kilometres east to west and 4.5 kilometres north to south, with a perimeter of about 14 kilometres. Of that, Fussa provides 3.317 square kilometres, 46.5 per cent of the base. Fussa City’s administrative area is 10.16 square kilometres, which means 32.6 per cent of the city is base. The city’s tourism association puts it more briefly: “about one third of the north-east of Fussa City.”

So where was “Yokota”? A Tokyo Metropolitan Government document says that in October 1945 the US military requisitioned privately owned land, extended the runway, and named the field “Yokota Airfield” after a place name in what was then Murayama town in Kitatama County, today’s Musashimurayama City. Fussa City explains the same name from a slightly different angle: the base was officially opened on 15 August 1946, and came to be called Yokota Airfield from the word “YOKOTA” on a map made by the US Army’s Far East map service.

So this, it seems, is what happened. On a US military map, a small place name in the next town was written as “YOKOTA.” Those letters became the name of the airfield. The base holds nearly half of its land in Fussa, but its name is borrowed from next door. It is like a house whose nameplate carries the neighbours’ surname. The documents do not say how the people of Fussa have felt about the name. But the fact that the city, the Tokyo government and the tourism association each carry an explanation of the name, each in slightly different words, suggests a town that has been asked this question many, many times.

Before it was called Yokota, though, the base had another name. Tama Airfield. And behind that name stands Tachikawa.

Tama Airfield, born as an “annex” of Tachikawa Airfield

The history section of the Tokyo government’s document begins: “This facility was established in 1940 as the Army’s Tama Airfield, an annex of the former Army Tachikawa Airfield.” The Fussa tourism association, too, writes that “in 1940, Tama Airfield was built as an annex of the former Imperial Army’s Tachikawa Airfield.”

On the birth certificate of the largest US Air Force base in mainland Japan, Tachikawa’s name is written in the parent’s box. Most people who live in Tachikawa probably don’t know this. I didn’t. Another article in this series follows the history of Tachikawa’s airfield from mulberry fields to its full return to Japan in 1977. Out on the plateau to the west, that Tachikawa airfield had given birth to a second child.

What was Fussa like then? Fussa City writes that through the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras it was a farming district centred on silkworm-raising, with sake brewing and silk-reeling as its local industries. Then, in 1939 and 1940, an army airfield was built in the north-east of today’s city, and the Army Air Technical Research Department and the Army maintenance school moved in. The population grew, and in 1940 the villages of Fussa and Kumagawa merged to form the town of Fussa. The airfield and the town were born in the same year.

According to the Tokyo government document, in 1942 the Army Air Technical Research Department was based here, and the army’s newest aircraft and prototypes were test-flown. A place to try out new aircraft first. One day, a village of mulberry fields found itself holding a sky full of test flights.

A trace of that era survives at a station: Ushihama. According to the station history collected in the online encyclopedia, when Tama Airfield was built in 1940 as an annex of Tachikawa Airfield, military facilities went up around it one after another, and the army ordered a new stop to be opened. To open it quickly, it was made a temporary stop and dealt only with military personnel holding season tickets. The station office had a floor area of 6.6 tsubo (about 22 square metres), and the platform, 70 metres long, was made of square timbers stacked crosswise. It opened on 1 March 1943. A station where ordinary people could not buy a ticket is a little hard to picture today. Imagining a ticket gate announcing “Passengers without a season ticket may not pass,” I realised I would be the first to be turned away.

So how did the airfield that was born as Tachikawa’s annex end up bigger than Tachikawa’s own base? The answer lies in a post-war announcement.

The name YOKOTA, and a 3,350-metre runway

In September 1945, Tama Airfield was requisitioned by the US military. The date varies slightly with the source. Fussa City says the US forces arrived and requisitioned it on 6 September 1945; the tourism association says 4 September. The encyclopedia sums it up as the Americans arriving overland on 3 September and the field being formally handed over on the 6th. The few days right after the end of the war survive in each record slightly out of step with the others.

When it was requisitioned, the runway was about 1,300 metres long. According to the Tokyo government document, the base then covered 4.46 million square metres, with a 1,300-metre runway. From there, it grew. During the Korean War (1950 to 1953) it became a major United Nations Command base, with B-29 bombers and fighters stationed there. As military aircraft became jets and grew bigger, the base expanded greatly. According to Fussa City, in 1955 an extension of the runway and overrun was decided, about 500,000 square metres to the north were provided, and by 1960 it had reached roughly its present size: about 7 million square metres, with a 3,350-metre runway.

From 1,300 metres to 3,350 metres: more than two and a half times as long in fifteen years. It was not just the runway that moved, but the roads around it. The encyclopedia says that with the expansion, the routes of the national railways’ Hachiko Line and National Route 16 were changed on the north side, and the Itsukaichi Kaido road was cut on the south side. It adds that, as a result, the area is “constantly congested.” There cannot be many junctions in Japan that an encyclopedia describes as constantly congested.

Post-war Fussa grew with this base. Fussa City writes that after the war the town developed rapidly around US Yokota Air Base, and its shopping streets grew rapidly. Right after that comes this: “From around 1962, serious thought was given to shedding the image of a base town.” A town that grew up with the base began, almost as soon as it had grown, trying to stop being only a base town. That these two sentences sit side by side seems to me to say something honest about Fussa.

By 1960, Yokota had reached roughly its present size. Meanwhile, at Tachikawa’s airfield, supposedly the parent, a major conflict broke out in Sunagawa over plans to expand it, and in 1968 the expansion was abandoned. The parent could not grow; the child did. That difference took definite shape with an announcement in 1969.

The day Tachikawa’s sky moved to Fussa: 3 October 1969

In March 1972 the Cabinet submitted a written answer to the House of Representatives in response to a question about the US Tachikawa Air Base. Attached to it is a Japanese translation of an announcement issued by US Forces Japan’s air force on 3 October 1969, in the name of Fifth Air Force headquarters at Fuchu Air Station.

The announcement begins by saying that flying operations at Tachikawa Air Base are scheduled to end in the near future, after most of the flying units and flying activities at Tachikawa have been relocated to the United States or to Yokota Air Base. The reason, it says, was the cut in military spending announced by the Secretary of Defense in August and the President’s announcement of a 10 per cent reduction in overseas personnel. Then come specific names. The 815th Tactical Airlift Squadron, with its C-130 Hercules transports, will withdraw. Air America, a civilian contract carrier, will soon move its operations, gradually, to Yokota. The 36th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron and others will be assigned to Yokota; the 609th Military Airlift Support Squadron will be deactivated and its personnel assigned to the 610th squadron at Yokota.

An “Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron” was based in Tachikawa in 1969, the year Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. It seems there was just a hint of outer space in Tachikawa’s skies too.

Fussa City’s chronology records the same event briefly from Fussa’s side. At the end of 1969, as flying operations at Tachikawa Air Base stopped, airlift units (C-130s) and others moved in, and the following year, 1970, the US Air Force’s largest transport, the C-5A Galaxy, began flying in and out. In the year the planes left Tachikawa, even bigger planes arrived in Fussa’s sky.

What happened next I wrote about in the Tachikawa article. On 30 November 1977, Tachikawa Air Base was returned in full, and its site is now Showa Kinen Park (a national government park) and a regional disaster-prevention base. Part of the reason big US transports no longer fly over Tachikawa’s lawns is that those planes moved west, to Fussa. The fates of Tachikawa’s sky and Fussa’s sky split apart from a single sheet of announcement.

Yokota Air Base and Fussa in numbers

Here are some of the figures I checked.

Yokota Air Base and Fussa, by the numbers

• 32.6 — the percentage of Fussa City’s administrative area occupied by Yokota Air Base. A third of the city is a place you cannot enter.
• 3,350 — the length of Yokota’s runway in metres. About 1,300 metres when it was requisitioned. It grew more than two and a half times in fifteen years.
• 0.29 — the area of Yokota Air Base provided by Tachikawa City, in square kilometres: 1.2 per cent of Tachikawa’s area. Tachikawa is still one of the towns where Yokota Air Base is.
• 6.6 — the floor area, in tsubo, of Ushihama’s station office when it was a temporary stop. Only military season tickets could pass.
• 62 — the number of nationalities of people living in Fussa as of 31 March 2021. The tourism association lists them with their flags. Include Japan and it is 63.
• 810 — the AM frequency in kHz of AFN Tokyo, the US forces radio station whose studio is inside the base. According to the tourism association, it used to be called FEN, the Far East Network.

Tachikawa’s name appears third on that list. According to the table in Fussa City’s materials, Tachikawa’s share of Yokota’s land is 0.29 square kilometres, 4.1 per cent of the base, far more than Akishima’s 0.021 square kilometres. Tachikawa gave back its own base in 1977, but it still holds the edge of the base next door. It is because Tachikawa is a party to this base that, in 1996, the Tokyo government and the five cities and one town including Tachikawa set up the “Liaison Council of Tokyo and Surrounding Municipalities on Yokota Air Base.”

On paper, Tachikawa and Yokota are parent and child, and today something like landlord and tenant as well. But when we walk around Fussa, what we see is not the inside of the fence. It is the outside. That long road, Route 16.