Tachikawa Cherry Blossoms Guide: Where to See Sakura, and the History

Where to see cherry blossoms in Tachikawa, beyond Showa Kinen Park: river banks, an Edo aqueduct, an old base rail spur, and a station cherry with a name.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

If you want to see the cherry blossoms in Tachikawa, go to Showa Kinen Park. That is what most people will tell you, and they are not wrong. I was going to tell you the same.

But as I leafed through the city’s records, cherry trees kept popping up all over the place outside the park. On the banks of a spring-fed stream. Along a river that tends to run dry. At the edge of an aqueduct from the Edo period. And along the track of a freight line that once ran into a US military base. Tachikawa’s cherry trees seem to have a habit of choosing strange places to bloom.

Go back further and there was a single cherry tree in front of Tachikawa Station in the Meiji era (1868–1912). It was well loved by station staff and townspeople alike, and it was called Tamazakura, the “jewel cherry.” Where is that tree now? And why do Tachikawa’s cherries bloom where they do? What I started as a search for picnic spots ended up redrawing a hundred-year map of this city.

Where to see cherry blossoms in Tachikawa: when they bloom, and one map

Let me set out the answers first. If you want to see cherry blossoms in Tachikawa (立川), these are the places.

In the south, the Negawa Greenway is one of the “Twelve Green Views of Tachikawa,” chosen by the city’s Greening Promotion Council, under the name “the Negawa cherry bank.” The city says its highlight is the cherry blossom that fills the surface of the water, with Tachikawa Park, Kaigarazaka Bridge and the rich greenery of the Tachikawa escarpment all around. Upstream, a row of cherry trees continues along the banks of the Zanbori River. In the north, the city’s walking map says the Sunagawa stretch of the Tamagawa Aqueduct turns into a tunnel of cherry blossom in spring. Around Izumi-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail there is a cherry tunnel that the monorail company’s station guide calls “a famous cherry-blossom spot even among those along the monorail line.” In Sakae-cho there is Sakae Ryokuchi, a green path that follows the old rail spur into the base, planted with wild mountain cherries. And Showa Kinen Park, the national government park, has about 1,500 cherry trees of 31 varieties.

The best time varies from year to year. Showa Kinen Park gives the best viewing time for its cherries as late March to mid-April. According to the observations that the Japan Meteorological Agency has long kept in central Tokyo, the normal (thirty-year average) date for the first blossoms of the Somei-Yoshino cherry in Tokyo is 24 March, and the normal date for full bloom is 31 March. In recent years, however, the actual first-bloom dates have swung by about half a month: 14 March in both 2021 and 2023, and 29 March in 2024. Tachikawa is some distance west of central Tokyo, so the central observations are only a rough guide. Before you set out, check that year’s reports, such as the park’s flower news.

The same goes for full bloom. In Tokyo, full bloom came on 22 March in 2021 and 2023, and on 4 April in 2024. In 2024, both first bloom and full bloom were the latest of those six years. In Japan the school year starts in April, and whether the cherry blossoms make it into the entrance-ceremony photos is, every year, up to the sky.

Here is a guide to walking routes, too. In the south, Course A on the City of Tachikawa’s walking map is just right. Starting from Shibasaki Gymnasium, it takes in the monument to the Hino ferry, the Tama River cycling road, the Negawa Greenway and Fusai-ji Temple. The city gives it as about 4.5 km and about 67 minutes. In the north, Course B runs from Musashi-Sunagawa Station past the site of Tomoe Gashi, an old landing on the Tamagawa Aqueduct, to Tachikawa City Hall: about 3.8 km, about 57 minutes. Walk either in cherry season and it becomes a blossom-viewing path.

Laid out like this, one thing becomes clear. Almost all of Tachikawa’s cherry spots are lines. The line of a river, the line of an aqueduct, the line of an old railway track. Apart from the one park, the cherries here do not spread out in areas; they run in long, narrow strips. And because the cherries outside the park are on river banks and green paths, there are no gates and no closing times. The reason for all this will become clear later. First, I want to start with the oldest tree of all.

Tamazakura, the cherry outside Meiji-era Tachikawa Station, and the city flower

Among the city’s designated cultural properties is a set of pictures called “Twelve Views of Tachikawa Village.” The local painter Baba Kichizo sketched the village as it was in the late 1890s and the 1900s, and coloured the sketches in the early Showa years. The city says they became a city cultural property in 1976 as a record of the customs of an age when photography was not yet common. Most of them show the area around Tachikawa Station and the Tama River.

One of them is called “The Thousand Cherry Trees in Front of Tachikawa Station.” It shows Tachikawa Station and a cherry tree around 1902, and that cherry, it is said, was called Tamazakura and was well loved by station staff and locals alike.

Tachikawa Station opened on 11 April 1889, when the Kobu Railway — today’s JR Chuo Line — began running between Shinjuku and Tachikawa. There was only a north exit; the south exit did not open until 1930, according to a guide from the city’s Museum of History and Folklore. So around 1902, when Tamazakura was blooming, the station was barely a dozen years old and had an entrance only on the north side. There was a reason for that, too. Tachikawa Village hesitated to give up water for the steam locomotives from the Shibasaki branch channel, which was the village’s precious supply of everyday water. The village of Sunagawa offered water instead, and in return the station entrance was built on Sunagawa’s side — the north. So says a document recording the history of the area. In the Meiji era, “in front of the station” meant in front of this north exit, opened in exchange for water.

The picture is called “The Thousand Cherry Trees,” but the city’s description names only one tree, Tamazakura. How many cherries there are in the picture, I cannot say: I have not yet seen the original. But the fact alone that a cherry tree with its own name stood in front of the station is quite enough to delight me. Naming a cherry tree in front of a station. If you tried the same thing in front of today’s Tachikawa Station, the tree would probably have to stand out more than the bus destination signs.

Other records also describe the station square of the day. A teahouse opened in front of the station for passengers waiting for trains, and there was also a large cherry tree. In 1906 the tanka poet Wakayama Bokusui stopped in Tachikawa and composed a poem near that teahouse. The site of the teahouse is now a bus terminal, and a stone with the poem carved on it stands in one corner. But the poem’s season is not spring. That story I am saving for the autumn article.

The cherry that bloomed in front of the Meiji station is gone. The station has become a station building above the tracks, and the north and south exits are joined by an elevated deck. Still, there really was a time when a cherry tree was a landmark for the people of Tachikawa.

And if you talk about spring in Tachikawa, you cannot leave out the flower that blooms before the cherries. Tachikawa’s city flower is the kobushi, a white magnolia (Magnolia kobus). In 1974, after the city invited residents to propose candidates, and on the recommendation of the city’s Greening Promotion Council, which the city had consulted, the zelkova was chosen as the city tree and the kobushi as the city flower. The city says the kobushi was chosen because it is native to the Musashino plain and opens pure white flowers ahead of spring. The flowers come before the leaves, from around February to March, and they are fragrant.

The city flower of this cherry-blossom town is not the cherry. Spring in Tachikawa opens with the white kobushi, and the cherries come on after. It is as if the star walked into the dressing room only to find the opening act already warming up the audience.

In some places, it is said, people called the kobushi ta-uchi-zakura, “the paddy-tilling cherry,” or tanemaki-zakura, “the seed-sowing cherry,” because they began work in the rice fields and their sowing when it bloomed. An opening act with a cherry’s name, then. It is a little funny that a city on a plateau of red volcanic soil useless for rice would pick a “paddy-tilling cherry” as its flower. Then again, there were rice paddies on the lowland to the south, below the plateau. Water from the Shibasaki branch channel, drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct, was drinking water for Shibasaki Village up on the plateau and irrigation for the paddies below it. Sawa Inari, a small shrine beside the Negawa stream, was a god of the rice paddies, the city writes.

So where, in today’s Tachikawa, did the cherries begin? The oldest that can be traced are on the spring-fed stream in the south.

The Negawa cherry bank: one tree every 10 metres, for an emperor’s enthronement

I walked the Negawa Greenway in another article. The story of how this little stream, gathered from springs, was filled in and reborn as a green path is told there. Here, I will write only about the cherries.

The “Tachikawa Green Master Plan,” the city’s ten-year plan from fiscal 2025, contains this passage. To commemorate the enthronement of Emperor Taisho, the people of the former Shibasaki Village planted cherry trees every 10 m along both banks of the Negawa for 1.3 km; later the place became “a cherry-blossom spot of Tokyo City,” and many writers and poets came to celebrate it in verse. After that, the row of cherries on the green path extended to the green path of the Zanbori River, and so it remains today.

Every 10 m. This is the number I like best. The villagers must have planted the saplings on the bank one by one, measuring the gaps with a tape measure or a rope. Under the grand banner of an imperial enthronement, the work itself was terribly plain. They expressed their celebration at regular intervals. It must have been a very tidy village.

The city’s guide to its walking routes also says that cherries planted on the Negawa banks by young men in the Taisho era (1912–1926) grew to bloom magnificently, and people came to enjoy the stream by floating boats on it. It adds that the Negawa from around Kaigarazaka Bridge, at the end of the green path, down to the Koshu Kaido road still has earth banks and keeps much of its old form, and is a well-known cherry spot. When the Negawa Greenway was laid out, the spring water flowing in from the escarpment and the rows of Somei-Yoshino, now old trees, were left as they were.

How many cherry trees are there now? I could not find a number in the city’s records. A local community magazine’s website says about 250 cherry trees have been planted along the Negawa Greenway, with mostly wild mountain cherries upstream and, downstream, a row of Somei-Yoshino planted to commemorate the enthronement of Emperor Taisho. Every 10 m on both banks for 1.3 km would, on paper, give somewhere around 250. More than a century on, the numbers are not so far apart.

As for when the trees were planted, though, each source puts it a little differently. The city’s green plan says it was to mark the Taisho enthronement; the city’s walking guide says young men planted them in the Taisho era. Meanwhile, an encyclopedia entry on the Negawa Greenway says cherries were planted on the banks during flood-prevention works in 1935, and that the place has been a famous cherry spot ever since. The community magazine’s site says cherries were planted on the bank during the river works, and also explains the downstream Somei-Yoshino as the row planted for the Taisho enthronement. Read it as a row planted in the Taisho era, with more added during the Showa-era river works, and the stories fit. But I have not yet found any document that shows which trees belong to which generation. The cherries on the bank keep quiet about their birth years.

All the same, the phrase “a cherry-blossom spot of Tokyo City” tickles me a little. Tachikawa only became a city on 1 December 1940, the third city in Tokyo Prefecture after Tokyo City and Hachioji. Before that it was a town, and certainly not Tokyo City. So the cherries on a village bank had joined the ranks of Tokyo’s famous spots before the town they stood in could even call itself a city.

The story of how the green path was laid out is interesting too. According to the encyclopedia, in works between 1992 and 1994, the trees, which had grown gloomy with evergreens mixed among them, were thinned to let light onto the water. About half of the Somei-Yoshino planted for blossom viewing were cut down as well. The aim was to keep each remaining tree healthy and revive the place as “a waterside cherry-blossom spot.” To bring a famous spot back to life, first cut down half of it. A bold move — but that thinning a crowded stand lets the remaining trees grow well is presumably a principle well known to tree growers.

Old trees, though, have old trees’ troubles. Among its measures, the city’s green plan lists continued maintenance of the Negawa Greenway’s cherry trees and volunteer efforts at “restoring tree vigour.” There is also a line in the plan about inspecting the cherries in city parks. The trees that villagers planted a century ago are now looked after by citizens. The blossom-viewers spread their picnic sheets on top of all that care.

The Negawa Greenway is also the “Path of Poetry,” lined with stones inscribed with haiku and tanka. One of them carries a haiku by Yamaya Nogiku: “More than anywhere, / the cherry blossoms / of the primary school.” A stone standing on a cherry bank, praising somebody else’s cherries. There is also a stone for Mizuhara Shuoshi, whose pen name contains the character for cherry blossom, but the poem carved on it is “The first sun shining — / the pines, the pines still standing / on Musashino,” a poem about the New Year pines. The literary monuments of a famous blossom spot are surprisingly cool towards the blossoms.

A personal photo-travel website has a line saying cherry trees are planted along the whole length of the Negawa Greenway, and that it is known as one of the finest blossom-viewing spots in Tokyo. I have no yardstick for “one of the finest in Tokyo,” but at least it is certain that, for someone, the cherries on this bank are among the finest.

The words of someone who remembers the Negawa cherries of the Showa era also survive in the city’s records. In 2017, marking 25 years since the city’s 1992 declaration as a City of Peace, Tachikawa compiled residents’ war experiences into a collection. In it is a contribution from a person who was caught in an air raid in Fujimi-cho at the age of five. After describing the day the air-raid shelter at Yamanaka-zaka collapsed, they add one line: they remember a light rain falling, and the buds of the Negawa cherries turning pink. In the spring of 1945, too, the Negawa cherries were getting ready to bloom.

In those days the Negawa was a river. Until its lower reaches were filled in in 1972, water collected from springs flowed down to the Tama River, with cherries lining the banks. Today it is a green path, a new little stream is made of water highly treated at a sewage plant, and on its banks the same row of cherries blooms. The river vanished once. The cherries did not.

The Twelve Green Views were chosen in February 2003. The council added a wish that in the near future these twelve views would become a green cultural heritage following on from the city’s cultural property, the “Twelve Views of Tachikawa Village.” Among the twelve scenes painted by a Meiji-era artist is the cherry in front of the station; among the twelve scenes chosen a century later are the Negawa cherries. Every hundred years, the people of Tachikawa choose twelve views again, and every time, they include cherries.

So what kind of river is the Zanbori, to which this row of cherries is said to have extended? When I heard its name, I felt a little uneasy.