Ome Day Trip from Tachikawa: Showa Retro Walk, Things to Do, History

Thirty minutes from Tachikawa, Ome is a Showa-retro post town of striped cloth, lime and lost movie signboards, whose people built a railway to Tachikawa.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In November 1888, fifty-three volunteers from Ome and Hamura put their names to a single letter of request. It was addressed to the Kobu Railway, the company then about to lay the line that is today’s JR Chuo Line, between Shinjuku and Hachioji.

The request went like this. In Hinatawada village, deep in the hills behind Ome, there is limestone beyond counting. Carry it out and the profits will be far from small. But to set up a whole company for a little line of a mere 12 miles might not pay its way. Would your company, therefore, kindly extend a line “from Tachikawa village to Hinatawada village”?

The letter opens with an address: “Ome district, Nishitama County, Kanagawa Prefecture.”

At the time, the Tama area, today the western half of Tokyo, belonged to Kanagawa Prefecture. That alone is a surprise. But what tripped me up was something else. I had always assumed the Ome Line was a track that grew out from Tachikawa towards Ome: that Tachikawa had stretched a branch out towards the mountain town. In the old documents, though, the hand reaching out belonged to Ome.

Why were the people of Ome trying to reach Tachikawa? And what became of their wish? To find out, I board the Ome Line at Tachikawa.

The way in to Ome: a valley-mouth town 30 minutes from Tachikawa

The directions given by Musashi Mitake Shrine are almost disappointingly simple. From JR Tachikawa Station to Ome Station, about 30 minutes. Board the Ome Line at Tachikawa and all you have to do is sit. For visitors coming from Shinjuku, the Ome Tourism Association writes: “a Chuo Line Rapid bound for Ome, or change at Tachikawa.” Either way, the road to Ome runs through Tachikawa.

The train runs over the plateau through a continuous belt of houses: Nishi-Tachikawa, Akishima, Haijima, Fussa, Hamura. Past Ozaku, the presence of the mountains closes in on both sides of the window. One stop after Higashi-Ome is Ome Station.

The encyclopedias call Ome (青梅) a tanikuchi shuraku, a “valley-mouth settlement”: a town that grew at the very exit where the Tama River flows out of the Kanto mountains onto the Musashino Plateau. Goods from the mountains and goods from the plain were exchanged here. Markets were held from the Middle Ages, and the town was also a post town on a back road from Edo (old Tokyo) to Kai province, today’s Yamanashi. This was Ome-juku.

Stand in front of the station and the lie of the land is right there in front of you. Mountain slopes press in close to the north and to the south. The area around Ome Station is squeezed between the Tama River and the hills, with no great breadth of land. So the town grew long and thin along the road. If Tachikawa is a city that grew up with being flat and wide as its weapon, Ome is a town that grew up with being narrow as its fate.

The station building is remarkably imposing. According to railway records, this building of three storeys above ground and one below was built in 1924 as the head office of the Ome Railway. Walking through the ticket gate, I am walking through a company’s headquarters. The company is long gone, yet its head office still greets passengers every day. A conscientious building.

I will come back to the Ome Railway later. First, let me tell you about the name of the town.

The plum that never ripened, and a road for white walls

The place name Ome brings in Taira no Masakado, a 10th-century warrior who rebelled against the court and became a legend in the Kanto region.

According to Ome City, around the Johei era (931–938), Masakado came here, pushed a sprig of plum into the ground and vowed: “If my wish is to be granted, flourish; if not, wither away.” The plum put out branches and leaves and grew thick, and Masakado, delighted, built a temple. It is today’s Kongo-ji.

The story does not end there. The plum eventually bore fruit, but even in autumn the fruit did not ripen; it stayed green on the branch. The local people found this strange, and at some point began to call the place Ome, “green plum,” the city writes.

The plum that took root on a vow failed in the one thing that mattered: its fruit never ripened. And the town is named after that failure. Its people handed the starring role in a success story to the small disappointment instead. There is something rather wonderful about their sense of naming. In the grounds of Kongo-ji, “Masakado’s Vow Plum” is still handed down. It is about 15 minutes’ walk from the station.

The backbone of the town is the Ome Kaido road. It bears Ome’s name, but its purpose lay in Edo. According to Heibonsha’s historical gazetteer of Japanese place names, in 1606 the great rebuilding of Edo Castle required vast quantities of lime for the white walls of the keep and other buildings, and the shogunate ordered that lime be dug at Kaminariki and Kitaogiso in Ome and delivered. To link Edo directly with Ome-juku, about 11 ri away (roughly 43 kilometres), Okubo Nagayasu built up the road. That, it says, was the beginning of this highway.

In other words, the Ome Kaido was a road built to paint Edo Castle white. What is more, in the Edo period it was not even called the Ome Kaido; people called it the Ome road, or the Edo road. The present name only settled in after the Meiji era began in 1868.

I would ask you to remember one word: lime. This town’s fate moves with that white stone the whole way. When the people of Ome tried to run a railway to Tachikawa nearly 300 years later, the reason was the same white stone.

But what really made the post town of Ome rich was not stone. It was cloth.

Ome-jima, the kimono of the shop clerks

There is a textile called Ome-jima (青梅縞), “Ome stripes.”

According to the Ome Municipal Museum of Local History, it was a cloth of silk and cotton woven together in the Ome area in the Edo period, famous enough to be sold all over Japan until the beginning of the Meiji era. Shogakukan’s Nihon Daihyakka Zensho encyclopedia goes into more detail. In the Kyoho era (1716–36), weavers imitated Ueda stripes and created a mixed weave with silk warp and cotton weft. From the late Edo period it changed to an all-cotton cloth, and the area became known for yogiji, fabric for bedding (futon covers), and for kimono fabric. Striped cloth continued to be woven in quantity after Meiji and, together with Ome cotton wadding, made the area’s name, but it declined after the Second World War as bedding became Westernised. Heibonsha’s World Encyclopedia, too, says that Ome-jima for bedding and Ome cotton were famous until after the war.

So the people of Edo slept under Ome striped futons. I tried to imagine an Edo townsman’s bed, pictured a rather stiff futon, and quickly gave up. The encyclopedias do not tell you how hard the futons were.

More interesting is what happened to the word. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, Japan’s great historical dictionary, gives as the second meaning of “Ome-jima”: “a person wearing cheap clothes; often merchants such as head clerks and assistants.” The example it cites is a comic verse from the collection Yanagidaru Shui, dated 1801:

“Into pitch-dark Yoshiwara / comes an Ome stripe.”

Into the pitch-dark Yoshiwara, the licensed pleasure quarter of Edo, comes an Ome stripe. The name of the cloth has become the name of the man wearing it. The verse pins down a shop employee slipping off to the pleasure quarter behind his master’s back, identifying him by nothing but his stripes. Edo’s comic poets showed no mercy. I wonder whether the weavers of Ome knew their cloth was being used like that.

The tools that wove the stripes survive too. The Museum of Local History holds three bolts of Ome-jima designated tangible folk cultural properties of Ome City. They carry tags stating that they were woven in the Bunka era (1804–1817), the Bunsei era (1818–1829) and the early Meiji era, making them among the very few actual samples in existence. An old loom called a jibata, a backstrap-type ground loom, survives as well. Ome-jima was woven on the jibata until partway through the Edo period, and in the later Edo period it was replaced by the takahata, a high-frame loom.

The museum itself, however, has been closed since April 2025 because its facilities are worn out. Anyone who wants to see the stripes will have to wait for news of its reopening.

Instead, you can see the house that sold the stripes. The Old Inaba Residence is about ten minutes’ walk west of the station. According to Ome City, the Inaba family were wealthy merchants who served as town elders of Ome-juku in the Edo period, dealing in timber and acting as wholesale brokers of Ome-jima. The main building, a fireproof clay-walled structure of the kind called misegura (“shop storehouse”), is thought from its style to have been built in the late Edo period, between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was donated to the city by its owners in 1979 and designated a Tokyo tangible folk cultural property in 1981.

Thick earthen walls and heavy-looking doors. Timber from the mountains and stripes woven in the villages passed through this shopfront on their way to Edo. This is where the post town kept its purse.

Ome in numbers

• 30 — minutes, the approximate time from JR Tachikawa Station to Ome Station given by Musashi Mitake Shrine. A little short for a nap.
• 11 — ri, the distance between Edo and Ome-juku along the road that carried lime for the white walls of Edo Castle in the 1600s.
• 53 — the number of volunteers who, in 1888, asked the Kobu Railway to “please extend your line from Tachikawa.”
• 12 — miles, the distance from Hinatawada to Tachikawa that their letter called a “little line.” It is honest of them to call it small themselves.
• 20 — the number of large movie signboards that once hung in Ome’s shopping streets. The man who painted them was the only signboard painter in the city.
• 3 — bolts of Ome-jima, with tags, held by the Museum of Local History as actual samples. Living witnesses to Edo’s futons.

A detour quiz

When the Ome Railway opened, its track was narrower than the Kobu Railway’s. Because of that, carrying limestone involved a troublesome extra job at one particular station. Which station? (A) Shinjuku (B) Tachikawa (C) Hachioji. Think about it as you walk on.

Stripes, timber and lime. The products of a mountain town are all heavy and bulky. That is why Meiji-era Ome wanted a railway.

A railway built towards Tachikawa: the making of the Ome Railway

Rikkyo University’s economics journal published a paper called “The Founding of the Ome Railway and Asano Soichiro.” I touched on it in this series’ article on Tachikawa Station, but reading further, I found that the relationship between Ome and Tachikawa was far more tangled than I had imagined.

The story begins with the predecessor of the Kobu Railway itself. According to the paper, on 22 April 1884 an application was filed to build a horse-drawn tramway between Shinjuku and Hachioji. At first this horse tramway was planned to run between Tokyo and Hamura. When one of its promoters visited Ome to recruit supporters along the route, he learned for the first time that the Ome area produced a great deal of limestone, and drew up a plan to extend the line from Hamura to Ome.

But prominent men in Fussa and Hamura, along the route, advised that extending to Ome was not urgent, and that extending to Hachioji would be the wiser course. The plan fizzled out.

I cannot help wondering what would have happened without that advice. The main line towards Kai province might have bent towards Ome. Whether Tachikawa Station would look the way it does now is anyone’s guess. Forks in history are usually decided by someone saying, “It’s not urgent.”

Even so, the people of Ome did not give up. In 1888, volunteers from Fussa, Hamura and Mita planned to quarry the limestone of Hinatawada and got as far as signing contracts with the landowners. A document of the time described the Hinatawada limestone as “an amount that, whether you dig it for ten years or twenty, one might almost call inexhaustible.” The language is extravagant and full of confidence.

This is where the letter from the opening comes in. Twelve miles was too small for them to build a stone-carrying line of their own. So, let the Kobu Railway extend from Tachikawa. At this point the Ome volunteers had withdrawn their own company’s application and pinned their hopes on an extension of the Kobu line. They even added an offer that the land for stations would be donated free by volunteers in the town.

The Kobu Railway’s reply was cold. According to the paper, the reason for the refusal was that the company was “busy with the plan for the city line to Shinjuku-Misakicho”; that is, it was busy extending its line into central Tokyo and had no room to extend a branch. What is more, in submitting the request, the volunteers had been made to sign a pledge that “whether or not to build is left entirely to your company, and we will not interfere.” The people asking the favour were the ones made to put their promise in writing first. The big companies of the Meiji era did not lack confidence.

And so “the volunteers had no choice but to start a separate company.” Reluctantly, they founded one themselves.

Still, the Kobu Railway was not entirely cold. In May 1891, when it was formally confirmed that the Ome Railway would be set up as an independent company, the Kobu Railway accepted the Ome side’s contract. Its first article became an important sentence in the history of Tachikawa Station. Any land the Ome Railway needed within Tachikawa station would be lent free of charge. The cost of enlarging the station for passengers changing trains and goods being transferred would be borne by the Kobu Railway. The second article said the Kobu Railway would take on all of the Ome Railway’s business at Tachikawa station, without charge.

They refused the extension, but welcomed the connection. This contract laid the groundwork for Tachikawa Station to become a station where lines meet.

Around the same time, Asano Soichiro, who ran a cement works in Tokyo, joined the venture. According to the paper, the Asano works had been bringing limestone from Kuzu in Tochigi, but the transport route was full of obstacles and he was looking for a new source of raw material. It was with the participation and investment of Asano and his associates that the Ome Railway finally became a realistic prospect. The first article of the Ome Railway’s rules said that the company would operate transport between Ome and Tachikawa and also quarry and sell limestone. It was a railway company and a stone company at the same time.

On 19 November 1894, the line between Tachikawa and Ome opened. Tachikawa City’s chronology also records the opening of the Ome Railway that year. The following year, the line was extended to Hinatawada, where the limestone quarry was.

There was one choice that would have consequences later. To save on construction costs, the Ome Railway adopted a narrow gauge of 2 feet 6 inches, about 762 millimetres, narrower than the Kobu Railway. The paper writes that once limestone transport got going in earnest, this caused many problems, including small loads and “the need for transshipment work at Tachikawa.”

Which rather gives away the quiz answer. Ome’s stone was transferred once at Tachikawa, from one wagon to another. In the yard at Tachikawa Station there were men sweating as they hauled the white stone across.