Hino Day Trip from Tachikawa: Shinsengumi History Walk and Guide

Cross the Tama River from Tachikawa to Hino, cradle of the Shinsengumi: Tokyo’s last honjin inn, Hijikata Toshizo’s family home and Takahata Fudoson.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

On a corner of the sewage treatment plant in Nishikicho, Tachikawa, there is a small memorial stone. The words carved on it are “Hino no Watashi,” the Hino Ferry. According to Tachikawa City’s guide to its walking routes, it was put up in October 1986 (Showa 61) by a group of people centred on the Tachikawa Tourism Association.

Odd, I thought. This is Tachikawa. The stone stands on Tachikawa’s bank of the river. Why would the people of Tachikawa go out of their way to commemorate a ferry crossing named after the town next door? Isn’t that like hanging your neighbour’s nameplate by your own front door?

And there was something else. The far bank of the Tama River is the land where Hijikata Toshizo was born, the vice-commander of the Shinsengumi. If you have watched a samurai drama or read a manga set in the last years of the shoguns, you have probably met the Shinsengumi: a band of swordsmen who policed Kyoto for the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1860s, and who are still among the most romanticised figures in Japanese history. Why did that famous company of swordsmen, who made their name in Kyoto, come out of the farming villages of Tama? Cross one bridge from Tachikawa, I thought, and the answer might be lying around waiting. So I decided to cross the river.

From Tachikawa to Hino: two bridges over the Tama River

If you want to walk from Tachikawa to Hino, there are two bridges.

One is the Hino Bridge (Hino-bashi). According to Tachikawa City, it was designed by Jun Masuda, who had worked for many years for an American company, as a steel girder bridge in anticipation of heavy motor traffic, and it was completed in 1926 (Taisho 15). The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Construction writes in its newsletter that it was finished in August of that year. The old bridge has carried the traffic of the Koshu Kaido for more than ninety years, and work to replace it is now under way.

The other is the Tachihi Bridge, pronounced “Tappi-bashi.” The name joins the first characters of Tachikawa and Hino: a thoroughly bureaucratic name. According to the Tokyo government newsletter, it opened in 1989 (Heisei 1), and the Tama Monorail runs above the bridge. Road and monorail share one structure.

Between the two bridges, the Tama River flows slowly, cradling a wide gravel bed. It is about 40 kilometres from the river mouth here; as the signposts along Tachikawa’s riverbank show, the sea is already far away. On a windy day, white streaks stand up on the water.

Cross the Hino Bridge to the end and you are in Hino, Hino City: the site of Hino-juku, a post town on the Koshu Dochu, the old highway from Edo (today’s Tokyo) to Kofu. But the first thing that caught my attention was what came before the bridge. Until the end of the Taisho era, how did people get across this river?

The Hino Ferry: a “Hino” stone on Tachikawa’s bank

The answer was a ferry boat.

Tachikawa City’s walking-route guide puts it like this. Tokyo Metropolitan Road 256, which crosses the Hino Bridge, was once part of National Route 20 and, before that, the old Koshu Kaido linking Shinjuku and Kofu, one of the Five Highways of the Edo period. The road passed the east side of the Shibasaki Gymnasium and reached the Tama River south-west of the sewage plant in Nishikicho. Until the Taisho era there was no bridge here; in the dry winter months a temporary bridge was put up, and in the high-water summer months people crossed by ferry. This crossing was the “Hino Ferry.”

An encyclopedia entry based on Hino local-history materials goes into more detail. In the early Edo period, the Koshu Kaido ran across the Tama River lowlands and crossed the river around today’s Manganji in Hino. But because floods kept cutting the road, it was moved up onto the river terrace. To match, in 1684 (Jokyo 1) a crossing that had until then been used by people going to work fields on the opposite bank, in Shibasaki Village, which is now Tachikawa, was designated the official ferry of the Koshu Kaido.

Half the mystery is solved here. The ferry is called “Hino” because it was run by Hino-juku, the post town. It was a toll ferry, and the fares were part of the post town’s income. In the dry winter months there was an earthen bridge; from March to October, boats. From 1824 (Bunsei 7), it is said, people were ferried by boat all year round.

From the Hino side, the ferry was an important earner for the post town. From the Tachikawa side, it was this bank of a great highway that ran on to Edo in one direction and Kofu in the other. A little crossing used by Shibasaki villagers to reach their fields over the water was promoted, just as it was, into part of the country’s main artery. It is as if the kitchen door of your house one day suddenly became the main gate.

When the Kobu Railway, today’s Chuo Line, opened in 1889 (Meiji 22), traffic on the ferry began to fall. In the Taisho era, once cars started to run, the lack of a bridge became a problem. It is said that two horse-carrying boats were lashed side by side, long planks laid across them, and cars loaded on top and carried to the other bank. When I imagine someone in the middle of the river holding down a car as it tilts on a boat, I can’t help laughing a little. Nobody can have done that trick for fun.

In 1926, with the opening of the Hino Bridge, the ferry’s work was done. Counting from the early Edo period, it had a history of some 270 years.

Now back to the stone. According to Tachikawa City, in 1986, exactly 60 years after the ferry was abolished and the Hino Bridge completed, a group centred on the Tachikawa Tourism Association put up the memorial at the corner of the sewage plant grounds, near the old landing.

The ferry belonged to Hino. But this bank of the crossing was in Tachikawa. For some 270 years, the people of Tachikawa used, almost every day, a boat that carried the name of the other bank. What I had taken for the neighbour’s nameplate was really the name on a gate the two households shared.

The foot of this bridge is also a place of Tachikawa summer memories. The organisers of the Tachikawa Festival Showa Kinen Park Fireworks write that it began with the first Tachikawa Summer Evening Fireworks, held in 1954 (Showa 29) on the Tama River’s gravel bed beside the Hino Bridge. And in 1964 (Showa 39), because Tokyo Olympic cycling was to pass along the Koshu Kaido, and with traffic growing too, major works were carried out from the mid-1960s into the early 1970s to widen the bridge from 7.3 metres to 10.5 metres.

In those days, at the foot of the Hino Bridge, Tachikawa’s summer fireworks opened over the heads of people camped out on the gravel. Today the fireworks go up over the meadow in Showa Kinen Park, and beside the Hino Bridge a temporary bridge carries the cars. There is more about the bridge foot in this series’ article on the Nekawa Green Path and the Tama River.

Now, let’s cross. The post town the ferry passengers were heading for is up the slope.

Hino-juku and the Hino-juku Honjin: the only honjin left in Tokyo

Hino-juku lay about 10 ri, or 39.3 kilometres, from Nihonbashi in Edo, the point from which all the highways were measured. So says a booklet produced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education for cultural-property tours. Rice-growing land spread out around the post town, and it was economically prosperous.

In the middle of the old post town, in Hino Honcho 2-chome, a large house with a black tiled roof survives. This is the Hino-juku Honjin.

According to Hino City, the Hino-juku Honjin is the residence of the village headman Sato Hikogoro, completed in 1864 (Genji 1), and as the only surviving honjin building in Tokyo it is designated a cultural property by both Tokyo and Hino City. A honjin was the inn where people of high rank, such as feudal lords and shogunate officials, stayed when they travelled. GO TOKYO, Tokyo’s official tourism site, rephrases this as a luxury inn of the Edo period. Today we might call it a highway inn of some distinction.

Here I ran into a small discrepancy. A booklet from the same Tokyo Board of Education calls the place “the site of the Hino-juku Waki-honjin.” Is it a honjin or a waki-honjin? A waki-honjin is the secondary inn that backed up the honjin. One house, two signboards, depending on the source.

Within what I could check, I was not able to establish how the two names came about. But Hino City, at least, preserves the building as a honjin and treats it as the only honjin building left in Tokyo. My own private guess is that the building simply outlived its names. Every time its role changes, it gains another name. It happens to old houses.

The master of this house, Sato Hikogoro, served as toiya, the official in charge of the post town, and was also the headman of Hino Hongo. According to the Board of Education booklet, as public order broke down in the last years of the shogunate, Hikogoro enrolled in the Tennen Rishin-ryu school of swordsmanship and opened a fencing hall in his own home. Kondo Isami, Okita Soji and others came out from the school’s dojo in Edo to train there. The friendships among the swordsmen who would later form the Shinsengumi began here, it says.

Why would a post-town headman take up swordsmanship? An encyclopedia records that during the great fire that burned Hino-juku in the first month of 1849 (Kaei 2), Hikogoro saw his mother cut down by a thief before his eyes, and felt the need for martial skills. The chaos of the fire must have taught the people of the post town that they had no one to protect them but themselves.

Hino City describes the Honjin as the place where Hijikata Toshizo, Inoue Genzaburo, Kondo Isami, Okita Soji and others met and threw themselves into sword practice: the starting point, you might say, of the Shinsengumi. So the Hino-juku Honjin was an inn, a headman’s house, and a place with a fencing hall. Putting up guests, running the village, young men swinging bamboo swords. A busy household.

A building more than 160 years old takes effort to keep. Hino City ran a hometown-tax crowdfunding campaign, the “Project to Pass the Hino-juku Honjin on to the Future,” and reports that 141 people contributed a total of ¥2,609,000. The money was used to survey the building, and from January 2024 (Reiwa 6) a ground survey and a diagnosis of deterioration got under way. The floor on which young men of the 1860s sweated is now being held up, little by little, by people of the Reiwa era chipping in.

Hino in numbers

• 39.3: kilometres from Nihonbashi in Edo to Hino-juku (about 10 ri). Today, on the Chuo Line, you get there in the time it takes to doze off.
• 1864: the year the Hino-juku Honjin was completed. The same year as the Ikedaya Incident: while Kyoto was in flames, in Hino they were building a house.
• 2.858 metres: the height of the seated Fudo Myoo statue at Takahata Fudoson. Sitting down, it is taller than most basketball players.
• 41: the number of haiku said to be in Hijikata Toshizo’s collection, “Hogyoku Hokku-shu.” He wielded a brush as well as a sword.
• 270: roughly how many years the Hino Ferry is said to have run. It worked a long time before one bridge took its job.
• 189,583: the population of Hino City (as of 1 September 2026). A little more than Tachikawa’s 188,093 (as of 1 October 2026).

A traveller’s detour quiz

How tall is the principal image of Takahata Fudoson, the wooden seated Fudo Myoo designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan?

1. About 1 metre (B) About 2.9 metres (C) About 5 metres

The answer comes near the end of the article.

Why the Shinsengumi came from Hino

Back to my opening question. Why did the Shinsengumi come out of the farming villages of Tama?

The Board of Education booklet gives several reasons. The Hino area was shogunate land and land held by hatamoto, the shogun’s direct retainers, so it had a pro-shogunate temperament. Partly because of the influence of the Hachioji Sennin Doshin, a corps of part-farmer, part-warrior guards based in nearby Hachioji, swordsmanship was popular. And the rice-growing land around the post town made it prosperous. Hino City’s Shinsengumi no Furusato History Museum likewise writes that Hino was land under the shogunate’s direct rule, a rich farming area known as the granary of Tama, where swordsmanship flourished.

In other words: a local character friendly to the shogunate, a habit of learning the sword, and enough rice and money to support it. The fencing halls were probably also social clubs for the young men of prosperous villages.

Inoue Genzaburo was born in Kitahara, Hino-juku, today’s Hino Honcho, into a family of the Hachioji Sennin Doshin, and he and his elder brother Matsugoro, who inherited the family post, enrolled in Tennen Rishin-ryu early on. The Board of Education booklet says that Okita Soji, a relative of the Inoue family, is also thought to have spent some time in Hino-juku.

In 1863 (Bunkyu 3), Kondo Isami and the others went up to Kyoto, having joined the Roshigumi, a band of masterless samurai organised by the shogunate to guard the shogun Tokugawa Iemochi on his journey to the imperial capital. According to the Board of Education booklet, when they first arrived in Kyoto, Kondo’s group received no allowance from the Aizu domain, and their activities were kept going with support from people such as Sato Hikogoro of Hino-juku and Kojima Shikanosuke of Onoji Village (today’s Machida).

The swordsmen of Kyoto were living on remittances from the headmen of Tama. Behind the glamorous Ikedaya Incident, there were money orders from Hino. That thought shifts my picture of the Shinsengumi a little. The family back home keeps sending rice and money to the son who has gone to the big city to make his name. A story every family knows, on a rather grand scale.

The bond survived in the form of letters. The Board of Education booklet explains that many letters and personal belongings linked to the Shinsengumi remain in the Tama area because members wrote to their supporters in Tama, telling them their feelings and their exploits. An encyclopedia mentions a surviving letter Hijikata sent from Kyoto to relatives in Ueda Village, in which he wrote: “For the details, ask Hikogoro.” Ask my brother-in-law. Whether this shows a diligent correspondent or a man who couldn’t be bothered, I find it hard to decide.

In 1868 (Keio 4), after defeat at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi, Kondo and the others returned to Edo and set out for Kofu as the Koyo Chinbutai, a force meant to secure Kofu for the shogunate. According to the chronology compiled by Takahata Fudoson, on the way they rested at the Sato house in Hino and formed a local farmer militia, the “Kasuga-tai,” which went with them. The Shinsengumi no Furusato History Museum writes that Hikogoro himself led a unit at the Battle of Kashio (Katsunuma) and fought alongside the Shinsengumi against the new government’s army. The post-town headman, in the end, walked west down the highway himself.

Land friendly to the shogunate, villages that learned the sword, rich paddies, and headmen to back it all. Hino was the Shinsengumi’s home town, and also its source of remittances and the household that kept the home fires burning.

So what kind of home was the young man at the centre of it born into? Leaving the Honjin, I walked towards the Asakawa River.