Kokubunji Walk from Tachikawa: Otaka-no-Michi Springs and History

The cliff named after Kokubunji begins in Tachikawa. Walk the spring-fed Otaka-no-Michi, Masugata Pond, the 8th-century temple ruins and Tonogayato Garden.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In teaching material put together by Tokyo Gakugei University for primary school teachers there is this sentence: the Kokubunji Cliff Line runs for about 30 kilometres from Tachikawa City to Setagaya Ward.

I read it twice. The Kokubunji Cliff Line, Kokubunji Gaisen in Japanese. It is the step in the Musashino landscape that people in Tama, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, call the “hake” (pronounced “ha-keh”). It is the stage for springs, mixed woodland and a pond listed among Japan’s 100 finest waters. The cliff carries Kokubunji’s name. And yet, apparently, it starts in Tachikawa.

Of the people who live in Tachikawa, how many know their town holds “the starting point of the Kokubunji Cliff Line”? I didn’t. A cliff named after a town two stops away sets out from mine. Why is the cliff called after Kokubunji, and why was the ancient Kokubunji temple built at the foot of it? To find out, I got on the Chuo Line.

Before the Kokubunji walk: a cliff that starts at Sunagawa Kyuban, Tachikawa

First, a word about the lie of the land. Without it, you only understand half the story of Kokubunji’s water.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Construction’s river improvement plan for the Nogawa River explains how the Musashino Plateau, the broad upland on which much of western Tokyo sits, was formed. The plateau consists of fan-like river terraces created by the ancient Tama River, and from oldest to newest it is divided into the Tama surface, the Shimosueyoshi surface, the Musashino surface, the Tachikawa surface and so on. After the ancient Tama River created the Musashino surface, it created the Tachikawa surface between several tens of thousands of years ago and about 30,000 years ago. The cliff that formed when it cut into the Musashino surface at that time is the Kokubunji Cliff Line.

In other words: the upper step is the Musashino surface, the lower step the Tachikawa surface, and the drop between them is the Kokubunji Cliff Line. The flat land spreading out below the cliff belongs, by its very name, to Tachikawa’s side.

So where does the cliff begin? According to the encyclopedia entry on the Musashino Plateau, the Kokubunji Cliff Line begins near the Sunagawa Kyuban (Sunagawa No. 9) intersection on the Itsukaichi Kaido in Tachikawa, crosses the JR Chuo Line just east of Kunitachi Station and enters Kokubunji. From there it continues through Koganei, Mitaka, Chofu and Setagaya to around Minecho in Ota Ward. The Todoroki Valley in Setagaya, a well-known green ravine in the middle of the city, is said to be part of the same cliff line. This lines up neatly with the Gakugei University material’s “about 30 km from Tachikawa City to Setagaya Ward.”

Sunagawa Kyuban. It is at the northern edge of Tachikawa, near the Tamagawa Aqueduct and the Itsukaichi Kaido: the area of long, narrow strip-shaped homesteads I walked in this series’ article on the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa. There, among the flat fields of Sunagawa, one of the most famous cliffs in Tokyo quietly begins. It must start modestly, so slight you would hardly call it a step at all. Just as the source of a great river is usually so thin it is almost a let-down.

On the origin of the word “hake,” the Gakugei University material says theories differ, but introduces one that connects it to “mizu wo haku,” “spitting out water,” meaning springs. The opening of Shohei Ooka’s 1950 novel “Musashino Fujin” (The Lady of Musashino) also explains the hake, it says.

Water spat out from partway down the cliff. The Bureau of Construction material describes how it works. Rain falling on the Musashino surface soaks into the ground, flows through a gravel layer, and part of it comes out as spring water along the Kokubunji Cliff Line. That becomes the main source of the Nogawa River. Along the cliff line there are many small valleys, like the teeth of a saw, cut back into the cliff by the springs. These, it says, are what are called “hake.”

The cliff is a cross-section through the groundwater. Where water comes out of that cut, people lived and built temples. The story of Kokubunji starts there.

From Tachikawa to Kokubunji on the Chuo Line: two stations born on the same day

From Tachikawa to Kokubunji is one train on the Chuo Line. On a Rapid, Kokubunji comes after Kunitachi and Nishi-Kokubunji. On a Chuo Special Rapid, the next stop after Tachikawa is Kokubunji.

These two stations share a bit of history. According to the encyclopedia’s entry on the station, Kokubunji Station opened on 11 April 1889 (Meiji 22), the same day the Kobu Railway opened between Shinjuku and Tachikawa. Tachikawa Station opened that day too. Tachikawa and Kokubunji are twin stations, born on the same day. One became Tama’s giant interchange; the other, the place where the JR Chuo Line meets the Seibu lines. Kokubunji City’s tourism site notes that the JR Chuo Line, the Musashino Line, the Seibu Kokubunji Line and the Tamako Line criss-cross the city.

The same site proudly declares that Kokubunji City lies at the centre of Tokyo, its centre of gravity: Tokyo’s “belly button.” Tokyo’s centre of gravity. A traveller from Tachikawa feels a little outclassed to find the town two stops along claiming to be the navel of all Tokyo. The scale of the boast is a size bigger.

A small bronze statue is due to appear soon at Kokubunji Station’s North Exit. According to Kokubunji City, the animation studio Tatsunoko Production was founded in the city in 1962 (Showa 37), and for half a century many classic anime were made in Kokubunji. To put a statue of Hutch, the hero of “Konchu Monogatari Minashigo Hutch” (known abroad as “The Adventures of Hutch the Honeybee”), in the station square at the North Exit, the city began a crowdfunding campaign in October 2026 (Reiwa 8). It will be 120 centimetres tall including the pedestal, a size, the city says, at which children and adults alike can hold its hand. The unveiling is planned for late March 2027 (Reiwa 9). The city also writes that Saito Production was founded in the city in 1960 (Showa 35), a studio of gekiga, the gritty, realistic comics drawn for adult readers.

A little honeybee and hard-boiled comics. Kokubunji is a town of springs and an ancient temple, and also one of the cradles of Japanese anime and gekiga.

Leave the station by the South Exit and walk south-west. After a while the road starts to go downhill. At the bottom of the slope you are below the cliff.

Otaka-no-Michi: water through the Owari Tokugawa hawking grounds

Turn into the path at the foot of the cliff and the air changes.

Clear water runs at your feet. Mixed woodland stands on either side, and on one side the cliff rises. According to Kokubunji City’s tourism site, zelkova, Japanese hornbeam, Japanese cedar and konara oak are common here, and the area keeps the look of the old woodlands.

Otaka-no-Michi, “the Way of the Hawks.” The tourism site explains the name like this. In the Edo period this area was designated a hawking ground of the Owari Tokugawa family. Hawking grounds were reserved for falconry by the shogun’s family and the “Gosanke,” the three senior branches of the Tokugawa clan, of which the Owari house was one. So the hawks of the lord of Owari once wheeled over this cliff. Today the path is walked not by hawks but by people out for a stroll, and by children stopping now and then to watch the carp.

About 350 metres of it has been laid out as a footpath. The water springs from the Kokubunji Cliff Line, passes through Masugata Pond and flows into the Motomachi irrigation channel, one of the tributaries of the Nogawa River. The channel runs beside Otaka-no-Michi and is cherished as a precious waterside in the middle of the city. The city writes that from spring to early summer calla lilies and other seasonal plants bloom along the path, and fireflies add their own colour.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Environment’s “57 Famous Springs of Tokyo” introduces the Otaka-no-Michi and Masugata Pond Springs as a precious group of springs surviving in an urban area, with an abundant flow that hardly changes through the year, and notes that they have been chosen as one of the Ministry of the Environment’s “100 Exquisite and Well-Conserved Waters” (Meisui Hyakusen). According to an encyclopedia, they were selected for the hundred in 1985 (Showa 60). The springs are also a Tokyo Metropolitan Place of Scenic Beauty.

And here another link with Tachikawa turns up. On the list of the 57 Famous Springs of Tokyo, alongside them, is the Yagawa Green Space in Tachikawa: the springs below the Tachikawa Cliff Line that I walked in this series’ article on the Yagawa and the hake. Tachikawa’s water and Kokubunji’s water appear on the same roll.

Kokubunji City’s tourism site also says this: ask the people of Kokubunji, and they will tell you with one voice that the Otaka-no-Michi and Masugata Pond Springs are “the number-one sightseeing recommendation in Kokubunji.” With one voice. I do wonder whether they went round asking every single resident, but once you have walked it, you feel no urge to argue.

The water of Otaka-no-Michi eventually becomes the Nogawa River and flows into the Tama River. According to the Bureau of Construction, the wards and cities in the Nogawa basin include Setagaya, Komae, Chofu, Mitaka, Musashino, Koganei, Fuchu, Kokubunji, Kodaira and Tachikawa. In the story of Kokubunji’s water, Tachikawa’s name comes up again. Not only at the start of the cliff: Tachikawa is also entered in the ledger of where the water goes.

Masugata Pond: the legend of a beauty restored

Partway along Otaka-no-Michi there is a small pond and a little hall to the goddess Benzaiten. This is Masugata Pond (Masugata-no-ike, 真姿の池).

The name comes with a legend. According to Kokubunji City’s tourism site, in 848 (Kasho 1), Tamatsukuri no Komachi, a woman of peerless beauty suffering from an incurable illness, came to Kokubunji to pray for a cure, and visited for 21 days. Then a boy appeared and told her to purify herself in the pond. She did as he said, the illness was cured, and her former beauty returned. A pond where she got back her true form: hence “Masugata,” “true figure.”

I bow to the perseverance of visiting for 21 days on end. On the third day I would have stopped at a teahouse on the way, eaten some dango and gone home. It is very clear why I will never be a legendary beauty.

Legend aside, the water in the pond really is clear. The city writes that the water is pure and highly transparent, and you can see carp swimming. Spring water whose flow barely changes through the year should feel cold in summer and, if you put your hand in in winter, slightly lukewarm. Water that has travelled a long way underground is slow to notice the seasons.

Right next to Masugata Pond is the Otaka-no-Michi Yusuien (Otaka-no-Michi Spring Garden), a park facility with an admission charge. According to Kokubunji City’s historical park guidebook, it opened on 18 October 2009 (Heisei 21) on the site of the former Honda family residence; the Hondas served as headmen of Kokubunji Village in the Edo period. The ground floor of the building in the garden is the Musashi Kokubunji Ruins Museum, and the Nagaya-mon (a gatehouse with rooms) of the former Honda residence dates from the late Edo period. The admission fees go towards the upkeep of the natural environment, to keep it for the future.

In the museum is a model reconstruction of Musashi Kokubunji as it is thought to have looked. The Kokubunji Cliff Line to the north, the Tosando Musashi-michi road to the west, the old course of the Nogawa River to the east. One glance shows you a temple surrounded by cliff, water and road.

Kokubunji in numbers

• 30: the approximate length of the Kokubunji Cliff Line, in kilometres. It starts in Tachikawa. Kokubunji is merely a stop along the way.
• 350: the length of the Otaka-no-Michi footpath, in metres. Walk the whole thing and you will still spend longer staring at the carp.
• 60: the estimated height of Musashi Kokubunji’s seven-storey pagoda, in metres. The most conspicuous building in Nara-period Musashino.
• 19: the number of ancient foundation stones still on the platform of the Golden Hall. There were originally 36. The rest may be serving as garden stones in somebody’s yard.
• 12: the width of the Tosando Musashi-michi, in metres. About as wide as a modern four-lane road, and people walked it 1,300 years ago.
• 23: the length, in centimetres, of Japan’s first rocket, launched in Kokubunji in 1955. A little longer than a ruler.

A traveller’s detour quiz

How tall is the seven-storey pagoda of Musashi Kokubunji thought to have been?

1. About 20 metres (B) About 60 metres (C) About 120 metres

The answer comes near the end of the article.

The Musashi Kokubunji ruins: one of Japan’s largest Golden Halls and a pagoda burned by lightning

Walk a little further along the foot of the cliff from Otaka-no-Michi and the view suddenly opens out. On flat ground covered in grass lie the platforms and foundation stones of ancient buildings. These are the ruins of Musashi Kokubunji.

According to Kokubunji City’s historical park guidebook, in 741 (Tenpyo 13) in the Nara period, Emperor Shomu ordered a kokubunji, a provincial temple, to be built in every province, to steady the nation through the power of Buddhism. (“Kokubunji” is not a name but a job title: there was one in every province, and many towns across Japan are named after theirs.) In Musashi Province, the monks’ temple was placed east of the Tosando Musashi-michi with the spring-rich Kokubunji Cliff Line at its back, and the nuns’ temple to the west. Musashi Province consisted of 21 districts, Tama District among them, and the strength of the whole province was mobilised to build the temple. It is thought to have been completed around the Tenpyo-hoji era (757–765).

Tama District. Tachikawa, too, was inside it. The people living around today’s Tachikawa 1,300 years ago can hardly have been untouched by this great project.

Why here? Kokubunji City’s tourism site gives reasons. The provincial government office was in Fuchu; the Tosando Musashi-michi, linking Kozuke Province (today’s Gunma) and the Musashi provincial capital, passed this way, so it was convenient for transport; and it was “shijin soo no chi,” an ideal site by the principles of feng shui, guarded by the four directional gods. To the east flowed the Nogawa River, to the south lay the flat land of the Tachikawa Terrace, to the west the Tosando Musashi-michi, and to the north the terrace cliff of the Kokubunji Cliff Line.

To the south, the flat land of the Tachikawa Terrace. Half of my opening mystery is solved here. Kokubunji was a temple built with its back to the cliff, on the flat terrace that bears Tachikawa’s name. Water springs from the cliff, wide flat land lies in front. For building a temple, or for living, there is no better spot. The cliff is called after Kokubunji, I suppose, because this temple claimed the best stretch of it.

Pick out the numbers in the guidebook and the size of the temple is startling. Its core, the Golden Hall, Lecture Hall, Middle Gate and so on, was enclosed by a wall and a ditch measuring about 156 metres east to west and about 132 metres north to south. The South Gate stood about 60 metres south of the Middle Gate, and about 200 metres to the east soared the seven-storey pagoda. The settlement that supported the temple spread about 2 km east to west and 1.5 km north to south, centred on the Golden Hall.

The Golden Hall was a building of seven bays by four on foundation stones, with eaves thought to have projected about 4.8 to 5.1 metres, and in size and splendour it ranked among the very largest Golden Halls of any provincial temple in Japan. Of the 36 foundation stones originally set on its platform, 19 remain today.

In the seven-storey pagoda were kept sutras written in gold to protect the nation, and it is thought to have been about 60 metres tall, the city’s tourism site says. It is also known to have been struck by lightning, burned down, and rebuilt a dozen or so years later. The encyclopedia records that according to the “Shoku Nihon Koki,” an official chronicle, it burned after a lightning strike in 835 (Jowa 2), and in 845 (Jowa 12) Mibu no Kishi Fukumasa, the chief official of Obusuma District, offered to rebuild it at his own expense and was given permission.

A local magnate rebuilding a seven-storey pagoda out of his own pocket. Today it would be like the boss of a company in the next county saying “We’ll cover it” and rebuilding a burned-down city hall tower. I cannot begin to imagine his wealth.

The temple carried on. According to the guidebook, Musashi Kokubunji burned during the Battle of Bubaigawara in 1333 (Genko 3) between Nitta Yoshisada and the forces of the Kamakura shogunate, and it is said to have been revived when a Yakushi hall was built near the Golden Hall in 1335 (Kenmu 2) with a donation from Nitta Yoshisada. The present Yakushi hall of Kokubunji is thought to have been rebuilt on its current site in the Horeki era (1751–1764), and its principal image, a wooden seated Yakushi Nyorai (the Buddha of Healing), is an Important Cultural Property of Japan. According to the city’s tourism site, the image is unveiled to the public every year on 10 October.

In the temple’s Manyo Botanical Garden there are about 160 kinds of plants that appear in the Man’yoshu, Japan’s oldest poetry anthology, collected over 13 years from 1950 (Showa 25) by the then head priest. He is said to have gathered and grown them on his own, patiently, and put up a label for each one. Thirteen years. Perseverance on a different order from Masugata Pond’s 21 days.

The Musashi Kokubunji ruins were designated a National Historic Site on 12 October 1922 (Taisho 11), following a field survey by Tokyo Prefecture in 1919 and 1920. With further designations added over the years, according to the city’s tourism site, the site now covers more than 165,000 square metres, including the entrance to the approach within Fuchu City. In August 2026 (Reiwa 8), the newly restored area around the South Gate was added to the Kokubunji City Historical Park.

But before it survived to today, there was a perilous moment in the Showa era. Before telling that story, I want to look at another ancient road that ran to the west of the temple.