Tachikawa Schools Walk: History of Night Classes, Bells, Antarctica

Tachikawa’s hidden school town: a 120-year-old high school with no uniform, a night school lit for 90 years, a music college of bells, and polar science.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tachikawa’s oldest high school has no school uniform.

The school’s website says so in one line: “Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School has no school uniform.” The next sentence adds that the students must strictly refrain from creating an atmosphere in which they compete over showy clothes. Freedom, and a nail to hold it down. That the two should sit in the same paragraph tells you a good deal about the school’s 120 years.

In Japan, almost every secondary school has a uniform — the sailor collar, the dark blazer — so a famous old school without one is a little like a cathedral without a bell. Hold on to that thought; we will meet some bells later.

Not many people would call Tachikawa (立川) a “student town”. Tachikawa is a city in the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, and the people walking around its station are mostly office workers, shoppers and families heading for Showa Kinen Park. Not one station in the city bears the name of a university. Does the town, then, have little to do with schools? I was halfway to thinking so when I opened the official histories of a few of its schools. And out came, one after another, schools you cannot see if you only look at the daytime timetable. A classroom that starts at night. A music college that once had a night division. Graduate students researching Antarctica. Tachikawa’s places of learning, it seems, sit somewhere else on the clock face.

Tachikawa’s first school: Tachikawa High School, a century-old school with no uniform

The official history of Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School (都立立川高校) begins in May 1900, when it was approved as the Second Tokyo Prefectural Middle School. It opened the following May, in 1901. In its first year it had 126 pupils in the first year and 27 in the second. In July it was renamed Tokyo Furitsu Daini Chugakko — Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School. That is where its old nickname, Furitsu Nichu (府立二中, “Prefectural Number Two”), comes from. (Before the war, a “middle school” was an elite five-year secondary school for boys, not a junior high.) Why this school was placed in Tachikawa I told in the feature’s article on the station: it was easy to reach by railway, land for it was donated, and there was no entertainment district.

At the first graduation ceremony, in April 1905, eighteen pupils were sent out into the world. So the class of 27 who had joined as second-years in the opening year was the first to finish. When you consider that today’s Tachikawa High School counts its pupils in the hundreds per year, that first ceremony must have fitted into a single classroom.

The school song was adopted in 1910. The words were by Maeda Tsuneki, supervised by the poet Doi Bansui, and the music by Minami Yoshie. The first verse sings of the Tama River, and calls its water, which flows without rest, “a silent teaching”. The second verse sings of Mount Fuji, which, it says, is “a teaching in visible form”. From the river, take the lesson that has no words; from the mountain, the lesson that has a shape — that seems to be the idea. The school simply turned Tachikawa’s landscape into an educational policy. The song gives meaning to the two views you can see from the school grounds.

In April 1924 the school adopted “a learning method based on self-study”. The history adds, in brackets, “until 1928”. It says nothing more about what those lessons were like. But a hundred years ago this school tried, once, to make pupils’ learning by themselves an official method. Today’s school guide describes its character as shitsujitsu goken — plain living and fortitude — and jishu jiritsu, independence and self-reliance. The roots of that second phrase may lie somewhere around here.

Work on a reinforced-concrete school building began in 1934, and the new building was completed in 1938. In wartime, in 1943, when the city of Tokyo became the Tokyo Metropolis, the school became Tokyo Metropolitan Second Middle School. After the war, in 1948, it became the Tokyo Metropolitan Second New-System High School, and in 1949 it admitted girls as well as boys. In January 1950 it took its present name, Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School. The school badge, adopted the same year, places the two characters 立高 (“Tachi-ko”, short for Tachikawa High) at the centre of kyokko, the rays of the rising sun.

Among the graduates’ words quoted in the school’s own guide, one says there were hardly any school rules, so they could spend their high-school years at ease. Another writes that people often say Tachikawa High is free, but that freedom is something the students build themselves. At a school with no uniform, the students even have to explain freedom themselves.

What that freedom consists of can be read in the yearly calendar. In June, the founding anniversary and the choir festival; in September, the drama contest and the school festival; in March, the inter-class sports matches. The head teacher’s greeting describes the sports day, choir festival, drama contest and school festival as “student-led” events, and stresses that this school is different from a university-prep school devoted only to study. Here is the head of a school designated by Tokyo as a “priority school for university-entrance guidance” volunteering that it is not just a place for studying. The Edo-Tokyo Museum keeps postcards printed for the tenth anniversary of Furitsu Nichu in 1911, showing the speech club, the kendo (gekken) club, the judo club and the baseball club. A school that celebrated its tenth birthday with a line-up of its clubs, it seems, still describes itself a century later by the number of its events.

Reading down the list of facilities, I stopped at one number. Bicycle parking: room for 400. In the facilities page of one of Tokyo’s most distinguished old schools, the number of bicycle spaces sits proudly alongside an astronomical dome and a self-study room. On the flat Musashino plateau, Tama pupils come to school by bicycle. Mornings at this old school must begin with the squeal of four hundred sets of brakes.

There is, however, one more story folded into this school’s history — a story of the sea, and of the sky.

The Boso sea and the soundproof windows: Tachikawa High School in the Showa era

Among the bundle of Furitsu Nichu postcards kept by the Edo-Tokyo Museum, mixed in with the club photographs, is one from the 1912 school year titled “Swimming Scene at Tomiura, Awa”. It shows the pupils of Nichu swimming in the sea at Tomiura, on the Boso Peninsula in Chiba, across Tokyo Bay.

At the end of the Meiji era, middle-school boys from inland Tama were already swimming in the Boso sea. Turn the pages of the history and you find the sequel. In July 1940, a seaside lodge called Seimei-ryo was completed at Nishizaki, Awa District, Chiba Prefecture. A building was added in 1981, and in July 2012 it was rebuilt. In today’s calendar, the July line reads rinkai kyoshitsu — “seaside school”, a summer stay by the sea. The school lists it as one of its traditional events. For more than a hundred years, every time summer came, Tachikawa pupils have headed for the sea to the south. Tachikawa has no sea. So the sea found its way into the school calendar instead.

After the sea, the mountains. The Kamishiro Lodge was completed in December 1960, with a building added in 1981. A lodge by the sea, a lodge in the mountains. A school whose song sings of a river and a mountain seems to be collecting landforms in its buildings, too.

The line in the Showa-era history I stared at longest was the one for October 1963. “Soundproofing renovation of school buildings begun; completed March 1966.” In those years, American military aircraft still flew over Tachikawa — the US forces had taken over the old Japanese army airfield next to the town after the war. According to the chronology of the city’s Museum of History and Folklore, it was in October 1969 that the US military announced the end of flying at Tachikawa. Close the windows, shut out the roar of the engines, and carry on with the lesson. The thickness of the classroom glass records the Showa years of a base town. (For the base’s story, see our article on Tachikawa’s base history.)

In January 1970, the school hall burned down. In March that same year a new gymnasium was completed. A complete renovation of the buildings began in 1988, and in 1992 the school celebrated its 90th anniversary and the completion of its new building.

Here, let me set then and now side by side.

Then: windows repaired to keep out the noise of the aircraft, a hall lost to fire, and summers spent swimming from the lodge in Boso.

Now: in 2003 the school was made one of Tokyo’s priority schools for university-entrance guidance; in 2018 it was designated a Super Science High School by the national Ministry of Education; and in 2022 it opened a Creative Science and Mathematics course. According to the head teacher’s greeting, in the 2022 school year it also produced a student who represented Japan at the International Biology Olympiad. The sky outside the window has gone quiet, and there is an astronomical dome on the roof. A school that once shut out the roar of the sky now looks up at it through a telescope.

The head teacher sets out the school’s aim as “the Seven Cs”: a spirit of challenge, collaboration, concentration, creativity, confidence, critical thinking, and the ability to fulfil one’s duties as a citizen. In English, every one begins with C — the list runs from Challenge to Citizenship. Lining up exactly seven of them has the tidiness you would expect of a school with a science course.

That is enough of Tachikawa High School by day. This school has another history, one that begins after sunset.

The night classroom “Tachitei”: a part-time school lit for 90 years

Tachikawa High School’s part-time course (teijisei) was opened in 1937 as the night middle school of the Tokyo Prefectural Second Middle School. In Japan, a teijisei high school is a part-time course, traditionally held in the evening for young people who work by day. According to the school’s greeting, this one is known locally by the affectionate name Tachitei (立定) — a contraction of Tachikawa teijisei — and it has sent out more than 6,700 graduates.

Lessons begin at 5:20 in the afternoon. Students study four hours a day for four years; if they meet the conditions, they can also graduate in three. Thirty students to a class, two classes to a year. They use the same buildings and the same wide playing field as the full-time school. After the daytime pupils have cycled home, other students sit down in the same classrooms.

The school’s guide contains a few phrases that stay with you. School meals are cooked on the premises: warm, cheap, and freshly made. Some of its clubs compete at national level. And, unusually for Tokyo, it holds a speech contest, in which students put their own arguments to the whole school. In a classroom at night, students eat a warm dinner and then stand up before the whole school to speak in their own words. If the day school has its Seven Cs, the night school has supper and oratory.

The students who come here are of every kind. The school writes that it has welcomed students of all circumstances and ages: students who work while they study, students who left other schools partway and are aiming to graduate here, students of foreign nationality, students who have experienced not going to school. Students with roots in many countries are enrolled, and some are aiming to learn Japanese through their subject lessons. Twelve teachers, joined by a school nurse, a nutritionist, a librarian, a school counsellor and a youth adviser, have been looking after them.

That night classroom is now closing. Under the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education’s “Plan to Promote the Reform of Metropolitan High Schools”, Tachikawa High School’s part-time course stopped taking new students from the 2025 school year. In the 2026 school year only third- and fourth-years are studying there. The head writes that, even as the course moves towards closure, the school will stay close to its students exactly as before. In the spring when the last fourth-years graduate, a night light that has burned for almost 90 years will go out.

In the same neighbourhood of Nishiki-cho, another school has opened. In April 2025, Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa Midori High School (都立立川緑高校) opened its doors. It is a part-time high school running in three shifts — morning, afternoon and evening — combining a general course with a credit system: what Tokyo calls a “Challenge School”. According to the school’s guide, it is the first Challenge School in the Tama area, a school where students who have mainly experienced not going to school, or dropping out of high school, find their own goals and take them on. Its entrance selection uses neither an academic test nor the report from the pupil’s junior high school; it puts weight on the desire to learn.

Open the tables of the Board of Education’s plan, and you find the two schools side by side in the same document. Under “establishment”: “Tachikawa district Challenge School, 2025 school year, on the site of the former Tama Education Centre.” Under “closure of course”: “Tachikawa High School — co-location ended through closure of the evening part-time course.” In the same district, one night classroom finishes its work, and another school opens its gates in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. The table says nothing about which one inherits from which. All I can say is that in Tachikawa, a place to study at night has survived in a different shape.

Tachikawa Midori High School has a mascot. Its name is “COICOI” (pronounced koi-koi). Because the school stands in Nishiki-cho — and nishikigoi is the Japanese word for the colourful ornamental carp, the koi — the mascot takes the form of a fairy of the koi carp. Fetching a carp out of the name of the district is the result of taking a place name seriously. Next to it stands its friend, “WKWK” (ukuuku). In a district where a 90-year night school is ending, the new school began with a carp fairy.

In Sunagawa, in the north of the city, there is another metropolitan high school where students choose their own hours. The part-time course of Tokyo Metropolitan Sunagawa High School is a general course run in three shifts on a credit system. According to its guide, Shift I starts at 8:30 in the morning, Shift II at 10:10, and Shift III runs from 2:25 in the afternoon to 8:40 at night. The base pattern is six hours a day, five days a week, and students are encouraged to graduate in three years. From the 2025 school year, as one of Tokyo’s diversity-promotion schools, it has also started overseas training trips.

The Sunagawa guide contains this sentence: “We have a school uniform.” Skirts or trousers, ties or ribbons — you can choose. The 120-year-old school has no uniform; the part-time school where you choose your hours has one. Tachikawa’s schools refuse to line up neatly in places like this.

The last years of Tachitei have their own small numerical pride. According to the school’s management report for the 2025 school year, students who chose the three-year route had a graduation rate of 100 per cent. In a classroom whose light is about to go out, one goal has been met in full.

There is, in fact, one more story of studying at night, on Tachikawa’s north side.