Tachikawa at Night: Bar Alleys, Black Markets and Cinema History Walk

Why do Tachikawa’s North and South Exits feel so different after dark? A night walk through geisha songs, a black market, GI bars, ten cinemas and back alleys.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Eight o’clock at night. Step out of the ticket gates at Tachikawa Station, turn north or turn south, and you arrive in two different cities.

Go out the North Exit and a wide pedestrian deck links the second floors of the buildings, while the lights of big buildings cut squares out of the night sky. Go down the South Exit and, beyond the station plaza, narrow lanes branch off, and small signboard lights sway low to the ground. The front and back of the same station show completely different faces at night.

Some people, asked about Tachikawa (立川) at night, will say nothing in particular comes to mind. It is a city in the Tama area — the western half of Tokyo, beyond the 23 central wards — and it is not a city that never sleeps like Shinjuku, nor does it have a famous yokocho (a cramped alley of tiny bars and eateries) like the old drinking quarters of other Chuo Line towns. But the gap between north and south nagged at me. On either side of the same tracks, why is the night built so differently? To find out, I opened old chronologies, library shelves and statistical tables.

Why do Tachikawa’s North and South Exits feel so different at night?

Let me start with numbers.

Open the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s table of daytime population from the 2020 census, and Tachikawa’s night-time population — its resident population — is 183,581. Its daytime population is 207,832. Divide the daytime figure by the night-time figure and you get a day-night population ratio of 113.2 per cent, the highest among Tokyo’s 26 cities (the municipalities outside the 23 wards).

A city that has about 24,000 more people in it by day than by night. When the sun goes down, that many people head home from Tachikawa. Tachikawa at night is a little roomier than Tachikawa by day.

The reason people gather is the station. In the boarding figures JR East publishes for each station, Tachikawa Station averaged 154,091 passengers a day in fiscal 2024, 14th among all JR East stations. People getting off are not counted, so the number actually passing through the station is higher. Look at the breakdown: 80,286 board on commuter passes and 73,805 without them. Nearly half are boarding at Tachikawa not on a fixed route to work or school, but for whatever business the day has brought. This station belongs to people who come every day, and equally to people who just happened to come.

In the evening, those 150,000 people split north and south and scatter. Some go straight home; some stay in the city. Why are the night-time vessels that catch those who stay so different to the north and south?

Half the answer goes back to a time when the station had only one exit.

Tachikawa Station only had a northern exit

The city’s walking course “Walking the Modern Era” names, as one reason Tachikawa grew into the transport and economic centre of Tama, the opening in 1889 of the Kobu Railway, today’s JR Chuo Line. After that came the Ome Railway in 1894, the Nambu Railway in 1929 and the Itsukaichi Railway in 1930.

The city’s chronology, under 1930, says simply: Tachikawa Station South Exit opened.

In other words, for more than 40 years after it opened, Tachikawa Station had an exit only on the north side. According to a record of the town compiled by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, the Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School was built at the end of the Meiji era, but until the early Showa era (the late 1920s), mulberry fields spread south of the station. The north was the front; the south was literally the back.

To that front side, in 1922, came an airfield. According to the same record, once the airfield was built, the population rose sharply and houses crowded in. The city’s chronology notes that Tachikawa’s first cinema, the Tachikawa Kinema, opened in 1925. According to the town record it was a North Exit cinema, and on the South Exit side the Tachikawa Engeikan, a vaudeville hall, also opened.

The land to the south had started preparing a little before its exit opened. From 1928, landowners carried out a farmland consolidation, and the area became neatly divided blocks. In 1999 the Tachikawa City Board of Education published a book, Early-Showa Land Consolidation and the Development of the Railway Network, recording this South Exit consolidation through documents and oral testimony. It is the first book listed for researching the South Exit in the Tachikawa City Library’s research guide “Researching the Changes around Tachikawa Station.”

Plots laid out for farming became the plots of the town. On lines that re-divided the mulberry fields, eaves would soon stand in rows. These plots would later decide the shape of the South Exit’s nights.

“Tachikawa Kouta,” sung at banquets

A town that grew suddenly with the arrival of an airfield also gained more banquet tables.

Issue 7 of Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter of the city’s office for compiling its history, tells the story of “Tachikawa Kouta” (“The Tachikawa Ballad”). It was written in 1930, the same year the South Exit opened. Quoting a local historian’s study, the newsletter says that Tachikawa Kouta was planned on the cultural momentum of the time: a lyricist was commissioned to write the words, and the project drew on the support of Tachikawa’s intellectuals and on opinions gathered by public appeal. It was sung with dancing at ozashiki — private parties in tatami-matted banquet rooms, often with geisha — and was widely loved at banquets.

A town’s song, made by asking the public for their views. The people of early-Showa Tachikawa wanted to put their town into a song. And the place where that song was sung was the banquet room.

An essay on urban history published on a housing information website says that before the war, there were about ten ryotei (traditional high-end restaurants) around the station whose main customers were people connected with the airfield and the aircraft factories; that Nishiki-cho, on the South Exit side, was designated a nigyochi — a district licensed for restaurants and geisha houses — around 1928; and that a pleasure quarter also formed in Hagoromo-cho. The nights of this “capital of the sky” were made of lights from the banquet rooms of ryotei.

A monument built to pass the memory of Tachikawa Kouta on to later generations still stands. According to the newsletter, it is in front of what was once the main gate of Tachikawa Airfield, near the head office of Tama Shinkin Bank. That head office moved in 2020, and the old head-office building was reborn as a different facility in 2023, the town record says. Only the song’s monument, in front of the place where the airfield’s main gate stood, remembers the banquets of 1930.

The lights of the banquet rooms went out as the war neared its end.

On land cleared for firebreaks, a black market rose

The Tachikawa City Library’s research guide “Researching the Tachikawa Air Raids” introduces a book called Records of Building Clearance in Tachikawa. It examines wartime building clearance — the demolition of buildings to create firebreaks — through newspaper articles and residents’ oral accounts. According to Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty’s town record, in 1944, in preparation for air raids, buildings in front of the North Exit and elsewhere were torn down. A large empty space was created there.

According to the city’s chronology, Tachikawa was hit by 13 air raids in 1945 and suffered heavy damage. And in September of the same year, the US military moved into Tachikawa Airfield.

A study of black markets in the annual report of the Kanto Urban Studies Society says that after the war, many street-stall markets called yamiichi, black markets, appeared on empty land in front of stations across Japan. The systems of rationing and distribution had collapsed, policing had weakened, and there was well-connected empty land such as the sites of forced clearance. Tachikawa’s North Exit met every one of those conditions.

According to the urban-history essay on the housing site, many people who lost military-related work went back to their home towns, the city’s population briefly halved, and the streets overflowed with the unemployed. When the US military arrived, stalls lined up from the North Exit plaza to Takamatsu-dori, and a black market formed. The town record also says stalls and a black market filled the North Exit.

The empty land was created to prepare for air raids. On that empty land, the people who had to live on after the air raids set up shop. The North Exit’s nights begin in this plaza.

There are books that record the Tachikawa of this era from the local side. In its South Exit materials, the city library’s guide lists two books by residents: Tachikawa: From 1945 to the 1950s and 60s and Tachikawa: The Postwar Years Opened Up by Private Citizens. The postwar years opened up by private citizens: the title captures the character of this city’s postwar period exactly. Before any official plan, people’s businesses filled the empty land in front of the station. The same guide also introduces a photo book that preserved Showa-era Tachikawa in colour, Tachikawa Scenes: A Showa Colour Album. Not black-and-white memories but the station front of the Showa era in colour can be seen on the library’s shelves.

Night-stall street, and English signs along the Midorikawa

“The History of Tachikawa Airfield,” a commentary by the Tachikawa City History and Folklore Museum, conveys the postwar town in a single line: here and there around town, shops with English signs catering to American soldiers became a common sight. The caption on the accompanying photo reads: shops with English signs (along the Midorikawa).

The Midorikawa is a river essential to how the North Exit town came to be. According to the town record, before the war, every heavy rain sent rainwater from the airfield pooling in front of the station and flooding it. Work on a drainage channel began around 1943 but was not finished by the end of the war. With help from the US military it was completed in 1947, and according to the city’s chronology it was named the Midorikawa (“Green River”) in 1949. On the banks of a channel dug to stop flooding, English signs lined up.

When the Korean War began in 1950, the town boomed on business with American soldiers. According to the urban-history essay, the east side of the North Exit was called “Yomise-dori” — Night-Stall Street — and many cafés and beer halls for the US military gathered there. The town record says that in the North Exit of the late 1950s to early 1970s, there was the Takamatsu-dori shopping street and the Fuinkamu-mae (フインカム前) shopping association, which ran northwest from the base’s main gate, and that the latter had many bars and cabarets for American soldiers.

The same essay records that a great many hotels, beer halls, bars and cabarets opened from around the station to Takamatsu-cho, Akebono-cho, Fujimi-cho, Nishiki-cho and Shibasaki-cho. Behind that bustle, the town record also says, violence against residents and noise became problems for the town. The lights of the night were not always the same colour.

A town called “Dawn,” and a bridge over a vanished river

Walk the busy corner of the North Exit and the place names start to intrigue you. Akebono-cho, Takamatsu-cho, Nishiki-cho. According to the city’s chronology, the district names Fujimi, Shibasaki, Nishiki, Hagoromo, Akebono, Takamatsu and Midori were set in 1942, in the middle of the war.

The name of the North Exit district with the most night-time lights is Akebono: dawn. The people who named it probably never imagined this would become the district busiest at night. A night-owl town wearing a name tag that says “daybreak.” A witty coincidence.

The Midorikawa, where shops for American soldiers once lined up, can no longer be seen. According to the town record, its banks were rebuilt in concrete in 1954, but from the late 1950s it was progressively covered over — partly to prevent people falling in — becoming today’s Midorikawa-dori and other streets. The name of a bridge that once crossed the river survives in the name of a crossing: “Akebonobashi,” Dawn Bridge.

A street over a river, a bridge’s name left to a crossing. Walk Midorikawa-dori at night and you will see almost nothing to tell you water is flowing under your feet. The surface that once reflected English signs now lies beneath the paving.

Street names have layers of time, too. According to the town record, the street that held the Takamatsu-dori shopping arcade in the late 1950s to early 1970s became part of “Tachikawa-dori,” a common road name set by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 1984. The street of the Fuinkamu-mae shopping association, which stretched northwest from the base’s main gate, is now called the “North–South Road” by the City of Tachikawa. The road American soldiers once took to the bars and cabarets has changed its name and now carries cars day and night.

Tachikawa at night in numbers

• 1930 — the year Tachikawa Station’s South Exit opened. For more than 40 years before that, Tachikawa Station faced only north.
• 113.2 — Tachikawa’s day-night population ratio (2020), the highest of Tokyo’s 26 cities. When the sun sets, about 24,000 people start getting ready to go home.
• 154,091 — average daily passengers boarding at Tachikawa Station (fiscal 2024). Those getting off are not counted.
• 10 — the number of cinemas at the North and South Exits combined in the 1960s.
• 80:20 — the North Exit–South Exit split of sales at the station-front shopping streets in fiscal 1972. For a long time, the South Exit had to keep its head down.
• 51 — the number of years from the city-planning decision on the South Exit’s land readjustment to the project’s completion.

The cabaret building that became a school

Tachikawa in this era has one supremely Tachikawa-like story.

According to the urban-history essay, in Akebono-cho there was “Tachikawa Paradise,” a well-known establishment for the US military. It stood on the site of a former Imperial Army warehouse, around what is now Self-Defense Forces land. Paradise closed within a few years, and Tachikawa Senmon Gakko, a vocational college, was founded using its building.

The city’s walking course “Walking the Modern Era” has the record from the school’s side. In 1947, it was founded as Tachikawa Senmon Gakko, south of what is now Municipal Daini Junior High School. Its first principal was a local man who founded it with his own money. It contributed greatly to educating people in the postwar Tama area, and later became a metropolitan junior college.

Students studying in a cabaret building. A night spot becoming a daytime school. Postwar Tachikawa switched the use of its buildings from night to day with remarkable boldness.

The nights of the base town also cast a shadow over the choices of the town next door. A written question submitted to the House of Representatives in 1955 records that the “education district” of Kunitachi Town in North Tama District was designated by a notice of the Minister of Construction in January 1952. The urban-history essay says Kunitachi came to proclaim itself a city of education and culture out of a movement opposing the conversion of boarding houses into hotels. The brighter Tachikawa’s nights became, the more its neighbour chose quiet nights. Both were trying to decide the shape of their own towns for themselves.

And by Tachikawa Station there is one more monument that brings the night to mind. The next stop after the station on the walking course is a stone carved with a tanka by the poet Wakayama Bokusui: “Tachikawa no eki no furu-chaya sakuragi no momiji no kage ni miokurishi ko yo” — “At the old teahouse of Tachikawa Station, in the shade of the cherry tree’s autumn leaves, the girl who saw me off.” In 1906, while a student at Waseda University, Bokusui travelled to Okutama with a friend, got off at Tachikawa Station, rested at a teahouse and composed this poem. The stone was erected in 1950 by volunteers to mark the tenth anniversary of Tachikawa becoming a city. The inscription is in the hand of Bokusui’s wife, who after the war had moved to Tachikawa with their son, an architect and poet, the walking course says. That son’s name is Tabito — “traveller.” The son of the travelling poet was named Traveller, and lived with his mother in this station town. The walking course introduces Bokusui as a man known for his love of travel and sake.

Choosing a poem by a man of travel and sake to celebrate the city’s tenth anniversary — and by the station, only five years after the war ended. The tastes of the people of this town are, it seems, consistent.

But the biggest light of Tachikawa’s nights was not the light of its bars. It was the light of the screen.