Tachikawa Oni Park Guide: A Red Demon Slide and Trains for Kids

Near Tachikawa Station, a red concrete demon said to guard the town’s “demon gate” is a slide for kids. On a map, he sits 45 degrees off his post.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

There is a demon who, they say, was put in place to guard the town’s demon gate. But measure the bearings on a map, and he is sitting 45 degrees away from the north-east he is supposed to be guarding.

From the South Exit of Tachikawa Station, walk east alongside the railway tracks. After about six minutes, between apartment blocks and office buildings, the sky suddenly opens up. And there is the demon.

It is a red-faced oni — the horned ogre of Japanese folklore. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open, and his shoulders slope gently down to the ground. The shoulders are slides. Children climb up the demon’s shoulders and slide down beside his face. The demon keeps a face that could be anger or could be laughter, and silently allows it.

His official name is Nishiki Daini Park (錦第二公園, “Nishiki Second Park”). Hardly anyone in Tachikawa uses that name. Almost everyone calls it Oni Park (オニ公園) — Demon Park.

The demon comes with a legend. This spot, it is said, lies on the town’s kimon, its “demon gate”, and the demon slide was built to keep out the misfortune that enters through that gate. Guard the demon gate with a demon. Fighting fire with fire, playground edition.

The demon gate is the north-east. So north-east of what, exactly, is this demon standing? I take that question with me and head out from the South Exit to meet him.

Getting to Oni Park: six minutes from Tachikawa Station South Exit

Tokyo Location Box, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s guide to filming locations, gives Nishiki Daini Park’s address as 1-5-13 Nishikicho, Tachikawa, and says it is a six-minute walk from JR Tachikawa Station. Tachikawa Kanko Navi, the tourism site of the Tachikawa Tourism and Convention Association, lists it at the same address as “Oni Park (Nishiki Daini Park)”. In the tourism association’s own heading, the nickname comes first. I know very few parks whose official name has been demoted to the brackets.

The route is simple. Leave by the South Exit and walk east with the tracks on your left. The local information site Tama Tebako Net places the park east of Tachikawa Station, on the south-west side of the “Tachikawa Rittai” underpass, where Tachikawa-dori Avenue dives beneath the JR tracks. When you see traffic sinking down under the railway, the demon is on the corner just before it.

Measured on a map from the station, Oni Park lies very slightly south of due east, about 420 metres in a straight line. It is not a distance anyone could get lost over, though someone with my sense of direction might charge right down the slope of Tachikawa-dori to the bottom of the underpass. There is no demon at the bottom of the slope. Only cars.

The South Exit itself did not exist until 1930. That story belongs to this series’ article on Tachikawa Station.

It took much longer still for the area in front of the South Exit to take its current shape. A document on the website of an urban planning laboratory at Tokyo Metropolitan University describes the South Exit of the 1960s as a dense built-up area cut off by the station, with not even a station plaza — in contrast to the North Exit, which thrived as a shopping district serving the US military’s Tachikawa airfield. (For decades after the Second World War, a large US air base occupied central Tachikawa; it shaped the whole town.) To correct this north-south gap, the city planned the Tachikawa Station South Exit Land Readjustment Project.

That project took more than half a century, from its city-planning decision in 1964 to its completion in 2015; this series’ article on the night alleys touches on it. What I want to add here are other numbers from the city’s official record of the project. The area was about 28.2 hectares, covering parts of Shibasakicho 2- and 3-chome and Nishikicho 1- and 2-chome, and the project plan was changed a total of twelve times. The record also notes that carrying out land readjustment in an area already crowded with houses and shops was unusual at the time.

While the town was being rearranged over half a century, out to the east the demon just went on being a slide.

The rearranging was sometimes bold. Among the methods of relocation, the record gives an example of hikiya — moving a building whole, without demolishing it, by jacking it up and pulling it bit by bit to its new site. A three-storey hospital in the district still had inpatients, so it was moved this way. The work took from March 1981 to August 1983; the wards stayed in use the whole time, and the patients moved house with the building without ever being discharged.

A hospital spends two years and five months walking across town. In the same Nishikicho, in the same year of 1981, a demon sat down in a park and never moved a step. The moving hospital and the unmoving demon. The South Exit in the early 1980s must have been quite a show.

The red demon slide and Tachikawa in 1981

Seen from the front, the demon’s face looks like one huge mask. According to the travel site Nippon Tabi Magazine, both shoulders are slides. The left one, as you face him, is wide, and you can slide down from the top of his face. The right shoulder is a smaller slide for little children, who climb part of the way up by steps. So the demon’s left and right have different age ratings.

A parent who brings a child here wrote in a blog that the child set off with a water pistol to slay the demon and kept up the water attack the whole time. For children raised on the story of Momotaro, the Peach Boy who sails off to defeat the ogres of Ogre Island, a demon is both a playmate and a target. The demon, for his part, keeps on being a slide even when soaked.

A park feature in the December 2023 issue of the magazine Sanpo no Tatsujin (“Master of Walking”) reports that the demon is made of concrete. A companion who tried the slide said there was a moment halfway down when your body floats up — a sort of “whoosh”. The writer visiting the park confesses that he could not stop imagining that the demon’s body was actually buried underneath. Once you hear it, the demon does look a little like a giant with only his head and shoulders sticking out of the ground. Which would mean the children are playing on a giant’s shoulders. The article adds the impression that the demon seems to be repainted regularly.

Around the demon is the usual kit of a neighbourhood park. Tama Tebako Net lists, besides the demon slide, swings and spring riders shaped like a chameleon and a jeep, and notes that the south side is a wide open ground. The trees are cherry and hydrangea. In spring, the demon looks down over people having hanami, cherry-blossom parties, under the full blossoms. A cherry-blossom party chaperoned by a demon: come to think of it, an odd thing.

According to Sanpo no Tatsujin, the park has a multipurpose toilet and a drinking fountain. No vending machine, no ashtray. For anyone bringing children, that is enough.

So how long has the demon been here?

Nippon Tabi Magazine gives the opening date as 19 September 1981, and the Sanpo no Tatsujin article, citing an inquiry to the city of Tachikawa, also reports that the park opened in September 1981. Two sources, the same year and month.

Look at 1981 in the city’s timeline. That year, Tachikawa Station began using a temporary station building, and work started on the station building. And the city-planning decision was made for the area that would become Showa Kinen Park (国営昭和記念公園, Showa Memorial Park), a national government park to be built on the former US base. Open the record of the South Exit land readjustment and you find that in March of the same year, a residents’ group opposing the readjustment and the city exchanged a ten-point memorandum.

So the demon was born in a corner of the South Exit in the very year the station was being rebuilt, the town was being rearranged, and the blueprint for a giant park was being drawn on the old base to the north. Part of Showa Kinen Park opened in 1983. In the history of Tachikawa’s parks, Oni Park is about two years senior to the national park.

Still: why a demon? A slide could just as well have been an elephant or a giraffe.

The South Exit when the demon was born: underpasses and penny-candy shops

What was the South Exit like in 1981, when the demon arrived?

The city’s timeline for the following year, 1982, records the completion of the Tachikawa Station building, the station shopping building and the north–south free passage. The wide concourse that now links the North and South Exits is just one year younger than the demon. People who knew the station before that seem to remember an underground passage. When a photograph of the South Exit taken in 1993 went viral online, one of the reactions gathered by a news site said it brought back the days of the underpass. In that photo the South Exit was, in the news site’s words, very plain and simple.

An oral memoir by someone who spent his boyhood near the South Exit survives on Tama Tebako Net. It covers the late 1960s to the 1970s. A dagashiya, a penny-candy shop, he went to all the time. A shop on Suwa-dori that re-fluffed old futons. The slide at Suwa Park, his playground: you climbed a spiral path to the top, and from there two slides came out, so you shot down a long way from a great height — an unusually thrilling slide for its day. The park had a fountain, a wisteria trellis and an arbour, and an old man who kept watch over the park. Along the South Exit main street, around where the monorail’s Tachikawa-Minami Station is now, he remembers houses standing in a long row.

Then: South Exit children climbed the spiral path, shot down the slide, and played with one eye on the old man keeping watch. Now: South Exit children scramble up a demon’s shoulders while Chuo Line trains roll past behind his back. The futon shop has vanished from the town, and a station stands where the row of houses used to be. But the child’s urge to slide down from somewhere high has not changed in half a century.

In the parks of the Showa era (1926–1989), a slide was a device for frightening children just a little. A concrete demon-face slide belongs to that same lineage. The “whoosh” reported by Sanpo no Tatsujin is probably the same kind of fear that Showa children knew.

But the demon apparently did not come here to frighten children. According to the legend, the demon’s job is gatekeeper.

Which way is the demon-gate demon facing?

Look up kimon in a dictionary. The Digital Daijisen dictionary explains it as the direction of ushitora, the north-east, which in onmyodo (Japan’s traditional system of yin-yang divination) was shunned in all matters as the way evil demons come and go. The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, Japan’s largest dictionary, says under ushitora that because divination held this to be the direction from which spirits and demons visit, the word sometimes carries the special sense of the demon gate.

Picture a Japanese demon. He has horns like an ox on his head and wears a loincloth of tiger skin. There is a theory that this costume comes from the ox (ushi) and tiger (tora) directions of the Chinese zodiac compass — the two signs that together mark the north-east, the demon gate. Which would mean the picture-book demon walks around with his home address written on his head and his hips.

Commoners were not the only ones who worried about the demon gate. It is said that Enryaku-ji Temple on Mount Hiei was placed north-east of the imperial palace in Heian-kyo (ancient Kyoto), and Kan’ei-ji Temple north-east of Edo Castle in Edo (old Tokyo). The earthen wall of the Kyoto Imperial Palace has a notch cut into its north-eastern corner only, and in it sits a carved wooden monkey. The spot is called Saru-ga-tsuji, “Monkey Corner”; the usual explanation is that the direction opposite ushitora is hitsujisaru, sheep-and-monkey, so the monkey was put there to ward off the demon gate. Those who built capitals and those who built castles all gave the north-eastern corner some attention.

Modern government offices were apparently no exception. In 1936, the story goes, right after several former education ministers died suddenly one after another, the Ministry of Education tore down a brand-new private toilet for the minister that had been built on the demon gate — and was criticised by the Osaka Mainichi newspaper for, as the people supposed to stamp out superstition, doing such a thing. The demon gate moved even the toilet of a national ministry.

There are capitals that put a temple on the demon gate, a palace that put a monkey there, a ministry that moved its toilet. And Tachikawa put a demon there. Neither capital nor castle ever tried a move that bold.

So what demon gate is Oni Park’s demon guarding?

According to the Sanpo no Tatsujin article, when they asked the city of Tachikawa, the reply was first that this spot falls on the “demon gate” in feng shui terms, and then that when the park opened in September 1981, its designer built it intending to guard the town’s demon gate and ward off misfortune. Tachikawa Kanko Navi says nothing about the origin, and Nippon Tabi Magazine writes that, since the spot lies on the “front demon gate” to the north-east of the town, it is said to have been built to guard the town’s demon gate and prevent disaster.

Every source says “the town’s”, but none says north-east of where.

Look at what local people have written, and something like an answer appears. A local information site and the blog of someone who tours Showa-retro landmarks both say the spot lies on the demon gate of the old Tachikawa City Hall. Until it moved to Izumicho in 2010, City Hall was in Nishikicho. On its former site now stands the Tachikawa Children’s Future Center. A demon guarding City Hall’s demon gate: a demon as guardian deity of the town hall is rather stylish.

And yet. Using the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan’s address search, I took the coordinates of the representative points for the addresses of the Children’s Future Center and Oni Park and calculated the bearing. Seen from the old City Hall, Oni Park lies almost due north, about 377 metres away. Not north-east. North. The demon is standing roughly 45 degrees away from the direction he is supposed to guard.

Measured from the station, the park is almost due east. Not north-east either.

Half out of stubbornness, I looked for another reference point. The old heart of Tachikawa is Shibasakicho, which spreads south-west of the station. Shibasaki village changed its name to Tachikawa village in 1881; before that, the centre of life around here was Shibasaki. Measured from the representative point of Shibasakicho 3-chome, Oni Park’s bearing is north-east — inside the range of the demon gate.

A demon in a new park guarding the north-east of an old village: you could read it that way. But I found no document anywhere saying the designer thought that far. Is the old-City-Hall theory a legend that treats direction loosely, or is there some other centre I do not know about? All that is certain is that the answer received by the person who asked the city was “this spot falls on the demon gate”, and that the demon is still here today.

The mystery of the demon gate is half solved. The other half stays inside the demon’s open mouth.

Oni Park in numbers

• 1981 — the year the park opened. In 2026 the demon turns 45. If he were human, he would be safely past yakudoshi, the ages Japanese tradition marks as unlucky.
• 6 — minutes’ walk from Tachikawa Station. From ticket gate to demon is about as long as it takes to make two cup noodles.
• 2 — slides. The wide side down his face, and the small-child side you climb partway up by steps. Different age limits on his left and right.
• 377 — metres from the old City Hall site to Oni Park. Bearing: not north-east, but almost due north.
• 28.2 — hectares in the South Exit land readjustment area. Half a century to finish. The demon moved in first.
• 79 — neighbourhood parks (gaiku koen) in Tachikawa as of 1 April 2024. As far as I know, only one has a demon sitting in it.

The wanderer’s quiz

Which of these happened in Tachikawa in 1981, the year Oni Park opened?

• A. The Tama Monorail opened
• B. The city-planning decision for the Showa Kinen Park area and related roads
• C. The opening of the Faret Tachikawa district

The answer comes near the end of this article.

Let us set aside, for now, which direction the demon is guarding. This park has one more thing children love as much as the demon. You can hear it. Something passes behind the demon’s back with a great rumble.