Kunitachi Walk from Tachikawa: Daigaku-dori, History and Yaho Tenmangu

Kunitachi borrowed its “tachi” from Tachikawa. One stop away: an earthquake-born college town, a red-roofed station and eastern Japan’s oldest Tenmangu.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Board an inbound JR Chuo Line train at Tachikawa Station and the next stop is Kunitachi. You pull out, gaze absent-mindedly out of the window for a moment, and you are already there.

From the station’s South Exit a broad, dead-straight road runs south. This is Daigaku-dori, “University Avenue.” Cherry blossoms in spring, ginkgo in autumn, and old university buildings peeking through the line of trees. It is a stylish, unhurried town, the kind of place that suits bookshops and cafés. Living in Tachikawa, I sometimes feel that this town, though it is only the next station along, belongs to a slightly faraway country.

And yet when you look into the name of the place, an unexpected character turns up. The “tachi” (立) in Kunitachi (国立) is the same character as the “tachi” in Tachikawa (立川). So why did the village next door to Tachikawa end up wearing the initial of somebody else’s station instead of its own name? And what was this town really called before? To find out, I decided to travel exactly one stop from Tachikawa.

Into Kunitachi: the “tachi” in Kunitachi is Tachikawa’s

Kunitachi City’s official website explains the origin of the name like this. At the end of the Taisho era (1912–1926), when a developer called Hakone Tochi (Hakone Land Company) was opening up the forests in the northern part of Yaho Village, the name came up while the town was being christened. In those days, on the Chuo Line, the station after Kokubunji was Tachikawa, and a new station was to be built exactly halfway between them. So people suggested taking the first character of each, “Koku” (国) from Kokubunji and “Tachi” (立) from Tachikawa, to make “Kunitachi” (国立). The proposal, the city says, seems to have been welcomed partly because it also chimed with a hope that “a new country will rise from this land”: read literally, the two characters mean “country” and “stand.”

“Kuni” from Kokubunji, “tachi” from Tachikawa. As a Tachikawa resident, I feel entitled to boast that we lent the town half its name. I have no memory of it ever being returned. Then again, I have no memory of lending it either, so we are even.

What was the land called before that? The answer is Yaho (谷保). According to the city, the place name “Yaho-go” (Yaho district) was already established by the later Kamakura period (1185–1333). The character for “ya” originally meant “yatsu,” a wetland, and the area is thought to have been well suited to rice paddies. In 1889 (Meiji 22), Yaho Village, Aoyagi Village and an outlying part of Ishida Village merged to form a new Yaho Village, Kunitachi’s predecessor. In 1893 (Meiji 26) it moved from Kanagawa Prefecture, to which it had belonged until then, to Tokyo Prefecture. Like Tachikawa, Kunitachi was once part of Kanagawa.

Even at the end of the Taisho era, Yaho was just a village of a few hundred farmhouses scattered along the Koshu Kaido, the old highway west from Edo (today’s Tokyo). Then a large development arrived to clear the forest to the north. A station came, a university came, people came. After the war, on 1 April 1951 (Showa 26), when the village became a town, opinion was split over what to call it. According to the city, the Yaho Village assembly put it to a vote, and “Kunitachi Town” won. The name Yaho, which had lasted since the Kamakura period, stepped down from the town’s signboard. Today it survives in the name of a station on the JR Nambu Line and in the name of the shrine you will meet later in this walk.

The characters 国立 are often misread. Read the usual way, they say “kokuritsu,” which means “national,” as in a national museum or a national university. An encyclopedia notes that the name is easily misread as “kokuritsu,” and that because private schools such as Kunitachi College of Music are easily mistaken for state institutions, the town is sometimes written in phonetic kana as くにたち instead. The city library is called the Kunitachi Library, spelled in kana: a name that heads off the question in advance. No, the nation did not build it.

That Kunitachi College of Music is no longer in Kunitachi. As I wrote in an earlier article in this series on Tachikawa’s cultural venues, it moved to Kashiwacho in Tachikawa in 1978 (Showa 53). Next to the town that borrowed Tachikawa’s character, Tachikawa now hosts the college that carries Kunitachi’s name. The lending and borrowing of names, it seems, did not stop at one round.

Daigaku-dori and the red triangular roof: a college town born of an earthquake

Kunitachi began with an earthquake.

According to Kunitachi City’s page on the Former Kunitachi Station Building, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 (Taisho 12) brought down the buildings of the Tokyo University of Commerce, today’s Hitotsubashi University, which then stood at Hitotsubashi in Kanda, central Tokyo. The university signed a contract with Hakone Tochi, a company then running large suburban developments, to build a college town with the university’s campus at its heart. Hakone Tochi had been founded by Yasujiro Tsutsumi, regarded as the founding father of the Seibu group, and around the same time it was also developing the Kodaira and Oizumi “gakuen toshi” (college towns).

The “Memorandum on the Land Exchange Contract” signed by the university and the company in 1925 (Taisho 14) already sketched out the bones of the town. According to the city, the memorandum specifically required that the station building be worthy of a university town, and it set out the relationship between the station square and Daigaku-dori. The city describes this as an excellent piece of town planning, with the station and the town designed as one.

Kunitachi Station opened in 1926 (Taisho 15). It was not a station the railway built for itself. Hakone Tochi put up the building and donated it to the Ministry of Railways: what is known in Japan as a “seigan-eki,” a station built at the request, and often the expense, of local people. Build a station, present it to the state, then sell the town under the station’s name. For a 1920s property developer, a rather bold idea.

A red triangular roof and white walls. The city believes this Western-style station served as a giant advertising tower for Hakone Tochi’s housing lots. The sales leaflets featured a big photograph of the station. The roof was asymmetrical, the windows were Romanesque-style semicircular arches, and the design borrowed from the small houses of English garden cities; there was a door at the entrance, the city writes, so it looked like a home. Part of its frame used old rails made in Britain, Germany, the United States and elsewhere. Before it was dismantled, it was one of the oldest wooden station buildings in the Tokyo area, second only to stations such as Harajuku’s of 1924 (Taisho 13).

The station square has a surprise of its own. According to the city, nearly all stations with a square like Kunitachi’s actually date from after the war. When the development was new, a waterfowl house stood in the circular park at the centre of the square, and pelicans were kept there. For a time there was even a plan to pile up earth in the circular park and build an “observation platform.” You step out of the station and a pelican greets you. At the end of the Taisho era, the landmark people met at in Kunitachi may well have been a bird.

From that square, Daigaku-dori runs south. According to the city it is about 44 metres wide. In the green belts on either side, cherry trees and ginkgo trees are planted alternately: in spring the cherry petals turn the town pink, and in autumn the ginkgo glows gold. The view was chosen as one of the “New Tokyo 100 Views” (Shin-Tokyo Hyakkei). The cherry trees were planted in 1934 (Showa 9) to celebrate the birth of the Crown Prince the year before, the man who is now the Emperor Emeritus. As for who chose the trees, an encyclopedia records an intriguing story. According to an interview with the son of one of the engineers who designed Kunitachi, Tsutsumi consulted Seiroku Honda, the forestry scholar who designed Hibiya Park in central Tokyo among other places, and Honda recommended ginkgo and cherry.

Daigaku-dori in spring is genuinely hard to walk along. Not because of the crowds. Because you keep stopping to look up.

Hitotsubashi University and Kanematsu Auditorium: the hall or the move, which came first?

Hitotsubashi University’s Kunitachi campus spreads out on both sides of Daigaku-dori.

According to the university’s official history, its source is the Shoho Koshujo, a private school of commerce founded by Arinori Mori in Owaricho, Ginza, Tokyo, in August 1875 (Meiji 8). It became a Tokyo Prefectural school, then came directly under the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, then the Ministry of Education, and changed its name to the Higher Commercial School and then the Tokyo Higher Commercial School before becoming the Tokyo University of Commerce in 1920 (Taisho 9). Each time it changed its name it grew a little grander. In 1944 (Showa 19), in wartime, it was renamed the Tokyo University of Industry, and three years later, in 1947, it went back to its old name, the Tokyo University of Commerce. In 1949 it became Hitotsubashi University under the new post-war system. The name of Hitotsubashi in Kanda became, in Kunitachi, the name of a university.

When did it come to Kunitachi? Here the sources disagree slightly. Kunitachi City writes that the Tokyo University of Commerce moved in in 1927 (Showa 2). The university’s own history says that in December 1930 (Showa 5) “the Kunitachi campus was completed and the university moved.” And the symbol of the campus, Kanematsu Auditorium, was built in August 1927. It seems the hall went up before the real move. Rather like finishing a splendid drawing room before the furniture has arrived at the new house.

According to Kunitachi City’s cultural properties page, Kanematsu Auditorium is a full-scale Romanesque building put up when the Tokyo University of Commerce moved from Kanda Hitotsubashi to Kunitachi after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It was donated by Kanematsu Shoten, a trading company, on the 13th anniversary of the death of its founder, Fusajiro Kanematsu, as a memorial project in his honour. It was designed by Chuta Ito of Tokyo Imperial University. The exterior is clad in scratch tiles (tiles scored with fine grooves), and the wheel-shaped window at the centre of the façade bears the university crest. In 2000 (Heisei 12) it became a Registered Tangible Cultural Property of Japan.

Registered on the same day was the Former Gatekeeper’s Lodge, a small single-storey wooden Western-style building of 1931 (Showa 6) with a French-tiled roof and half-timbered walls. Until the present West Guardhouse was built in 1967 (Showa 42), it was where the university’s gatekeepers were stationed. The Architectural Institute of Japan selected it as a “building worthy of preservation.” A gatekeeper’s hut with that kind of recognition: guarding the gate of this university was evidently a job of some standing. On the east side of Daigaku-dori there is also the East Main Building, built in 1929 (Showa 4) as the main building of the university’s commercial college.

A word of caution about visiting. According to the city, you may enter the campus after completing a procedure at the guardhouse, but as a rule these buildings are closed to anyone not connected with the university. On some days, such as entrance examination days, entry to the campus itself may be restricted. Even from outside, the reddish-brown Romanesque walls make a fine picture.

Kunitachi in numbers

• 44 metres: the width of Daigaku-dori. Less a road than a long, narrow park with a carriageway running through it.
• 1926: Kunitachi Station opens. The station came first; the town followed.
• 80 years: how long the triangular-roofed building served as a station. It was taken down in 2006 (Heisei 18) and came back in 2020 (Reiwa 2).
• 8.15 square kilometres: the area of Kunitachi City, 2.3 km east to west and 3.7 km north to south. A city you can cross on foot.
• 903, not 1903: the year Yaho Tenmangu Shrine began. Drop one digit and the shrine gets a thousand years younger.
• 4: Jomon-period stone rods over a metre long, found lying in a row at a site in the city. Kunitachi City’s first Important Cultural Property of Japan.

A traveller’s detour quiz

When Kunitachi Station opened, what animal was kept in the circular park in front of it?

1. Pelicans (B) Goats (C) Peacocks

The answer is near the end of this article.

Station, university, avenue of trees. So far, this is postcard Kunitachi. But these calm streets did not survive simply by being left alone. In the middle of the Showa era (1926–1989) the town split clean in two. And the trigger lay next door, in Tachikawa.

Birth of an “education district”: what the town chose in the age of the Tachikawa base

On the roundabout in front of Kunitachi Station hangs a sign reading “Kunitachi Bunkyo Chiku,” the Kunitachi Education and Culture District. Kunitachi City’s official website says the name does not come merely from the number of universities and schools in town, and then tells a story from the Showa era.

Some background helps here. After the Second World War, the former Japanese army airfield in Tachikawa became a large US military base, and Tachikawa grew into a base town (this series has traced that history in other articles). In 1950 (Showa 25) the Korean War broke out. Next door in Tachikawa there was a base, and large numbers of American servicemen arrived. The effects spread to Kunitachi, where cheap lodging houses and bars catering to the soldiers began to appear. Led by residents and students who wanted to protect the local environment, a campaign began to have the town designated under Tokyo’s “Education District Building Ordinance.” In such a district, buildings such as ryotei (high-end restaurants with hostesses) and cabarets covered by the entertainment business law cannot be built, and hotels and inns are restricted too.

The opposition was strong. Designation would get in the way of economic growth, opponents said; the town would decline and taxes would go up. The city writes that it became a great controversy that divided the town in two. Heated debate continued in the town assembly, and after several reversals the assembly voted for designation and applied to Tokyo. On 6 January 1952 (Showa 27), Kunitachi was designated an “education district” by the Ministry of Construction and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. An encyclopedia records that it was the first education district in Tokyo.

The city frames the campaign not as a simple protest against a red-light district moving in, but as a movement that chose again the ideal college town the place had aimed at since its development. Kunitachi’s residents, together with schools and the local government, chose to build their town around “environment” rather than “development.” Because the residents themselves decided the town’s direction, the city says, it has great historical significance as a pioneering example of local self-government.

As someone from Tachikawa, how should I read this? I found myself thinking for a while. Tachikawa, as a base town, had its own Showa era, and its way of life in those years is what I explored in the articles in this series on the base’s history and base-town culture. The town next door, meanwhile, felt the same wind in the same era and made the opposite choice. This is not a story about which was right. It is about two towns joined by one railway line, each giving its own answer at the same moment in history. And now, a little over seventy years later, Tachikawa has become the hub of the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, drawing people in, while Kunitachi draws them as a quiet, tree-lined college town. Neighbours with different faces. That doubles the pleasure of walking this area.

So how did people live day to day in the town they had protected? The city’s records note a queue outside a cinema, and one summer of wild excitement.