Tachikawa Shopping Guide: Why It Has Everything, a History Walk

Tachikawa, they say, has everything. Why here, and not in bigger Tama cities? A walk from a 1900 fish shop to Tokyo’s first IKEA, built on an old US base.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Ask someone who lives in Tachikawa (立川) what is good about their city. Most of them will think for a moment and then say: “It has everything.”

It sounds like praise, but it is a slightly shaky kind of praise. Ask them for a local speciality and they hesitate. Ask them for a sight worth seeing and they mention Showa Kinen Park, and that is where the conversation ends. A city that has everything — doesn’t that really mean a city that has nothing in particular? I thought so myself for a long time.

Lay out the numbers, though, and the story changes. Tokyo Metropolitan Government calculates a “daytime/night-time population ratio” from the 2020 national census, and of the 26 cities in Tokyo, the one with the highest ratio is Tachikawa. More than 15 per cent more people are in the city during the day than live there at night. Every day, people come in from outside.

If you are counting residents, the Tama area — the western half of Tokyo, beyond the 23 central wards that most visitors never leave — has Hachioji. It has Machida. Both are much bigger than Tachikawa. So why did department stores, station buildings and even the very first IKEA in Tokyo gather in a city of about 180,000 people? With that question in my pocket, I stood on the deck outside the North Exit of the station.

Tachikawa “has everything.” First, count what that means

Let me begin by counting what “everything” actually contains.

The City of Tachikawa introduces itself like this: around JR Tachikawa Station there is a network of pedestrian-only decks, there are many well-known department stores and large supermarkets, and the area has become the commercial centre of the Tama region. For a piece of municipal prose, that is a fairly confident chest-thump.

So I count on my fingers. On the north side of the station is the station building Lumine Tachikawa; on the south side, the station building Granduo Tachikawa. Inside the ticket gates there is ecute Tachikawa. Cross the deck and you reach the department store Isetan Tachikawa and Tachikawa Takashimaya S.C., a former department store now filled entirely with specialty shops. There is From Nakabu (フロム中武), a commercial building put up with local capital; Tachikawa Tacross (立川タクロス), built in a redevelopment; and a big commercial building on the south side. A little further out: the furniture giant IKEA Tachikawa, LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi two monorail stops to the north, and GREEN SPRINGS, a new district laid out like a park. Department stores, station buildings, specialty-shop buildings, suburban megastores. Almost every type of shopping place Japan has invented is gathered around a single station. “Everything” turned out to be meant literally.

The confidence has grounds. According to Tokyo’s report on daytime population from the 2020 census, among the cities of Tokyo the daytime/night-time ratio is highest in Tachikawa at 115.4, followed by Musashino at 110.1 and Tama at 101.4. Tachikawa’s daytime population is 211,798, the fourth largest of Tokyo’s cities after Hachioji, Machida and Fuchu. By number of residents it does not reach fourth place, but when daytime comes it moves up the table. This is a city people come to.

The amount of shopping is large for the population, too. In the 2014 Census of Commerce, the last one ever taken in that form, Tachikawa’s retail sales came to about 238.1 billion yen a year. Among Tokyo’s cities, that ranks third, after Hachioji at about 488.3 billion yen and Machida at about 430.1 billion yen. In the 2020 census, Hachioji had about three times Tachikawa’s population. Tachikawa sells about half of what Hachioji sells.

A blog by someone who loves walking around Tachikawa notes that large commercial facilities are concentrated near the station, on a scale that “you could call the greatest outside the 23 wards.” As a local’s gut feeling, that does not seem far off.

So when did this begin, and why? Leafing through the records for clues, I found that the story begins not with a department store but with a fish shop.

A department store opened opposite the fish shop by the station

The year is 1900, the 33rd year of the Meiji era.

According to “The Inageya Story,” the official company history of the supermarket chain Inageya, a man named Sawatari Namizo, born to a farming family near the border of Kawasaki and Inagi, set up home in front of Tachikawa Station on the Kobu Railway — at the time, the history says, Tachikawa was no more than “a poor village.” He pulled a two-wheeled handcart around the nearby towns and villages, selling salted and dried fish. Most of his customers were farmers, and the orders grew: next time, bring a whetstone; I want a sickle. Namizo laid out the vegetables and eggs he brought home in barter on wooden boards at his house, and in time he rebuilt it and opened the Inageya Fish Shop (稲毛屋魚店). The shop’s name, the company says, honours Inage Saburo Shigenari, a warlord who ruled the land of his birth in the Kamakura period. It has nothing to do with Inage in Chiba. I had always assumed it did.

The shop grew. By the early Showa era, its sales floor measured more than 60 tsubo (about 200 square metres), unusual for the time, and the company history calls it “the most prosperous shop in the Tama area.” As far as I could trace it, the commercial story of Tachikawa that continues to this day begins with one fish shop in front of the station.

In 1948, after the war, Inageya became a company. Its first president, the history says, in a time of shortages, stuffed a rucksack with cash, travelled alone to Karafuto (southern Sakhalin), bought dried herring and kelp, sent it back by freight wagon, and the next day headed off to Kyushu to buy dried fish and nori. The operating radius of a Tachikawa fish shop ran from Sakhalin in the north to Kyushu in the south.

That first president died suddenly in 1955, aged 43. And just around that time, the history says, “a department store with its main shop in central Tokyo” opened opposite Inageya.

The name is withheld, but the time and place match one department store: Isetan. “Kono Machi Archives,” a collection of old photographs and timelines of Tachikawa compiled by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, records that Isetan’s Tachikawa store began trading in 1956, and that the store at the time was on the north side of the station. According to an encyclopedia entry, Isetan opened a small kiosk selling stationery and the like near the South Exit of Tachikawa Station in 1947, moved to the north side in 1952, and in April 1956 began full-scale business as a department store in a reinforced concrete building in Akebonocho. The Tachikawa store is said to have been Isetan’s very first branch.

The pillar of the family gone, and now a department store right across the street. Normally, that is where the story ends.

Instead, the second president adopted the self-service system that had only just been introduced to Japan. Under 1956, the Inageya company timeline reads: “Introduced the self-service system at the Tachikawa North Exit store” and “Opened the first supermarket in Tokyo outside the 23 wards.” Kono Machi Archives also says that in 1956 Inageya adopted self-service and became the first supermarket in that area. In the same year that the department store opened properly, the fish shop opposite turned into a supermarket.

Give the customer a basket and let them pick what they like off the shelf. This system, which nobody now thinks twice about, was first tried in the Tama area opposite a department store at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station. Rather than lose its customers to the department store, the shop changed its shape. I suspect the character of Tachikawa’s commerce was settled in that year: when a big shop arrives, a small shop starts something new.

Inageya then expanded, taking American chain stores as its model, and began building a supermarket chain with its Tamadaira store in 1959. In 1976, the company timeline says, it became the first in Japan to adopt the “Open Dating System,” a label guaranteeing the freshness of perishable foods — showing customers, in plain sight, when an item was processed. The descendant of the fish shop by the station had pushed the supermarket method itself one step further. In 1984 it changed its name to Inageya written in hiragana, and the following year it moved its headquarters from Higashiyamato back to Tachikawa, the place where it was founded. In 2024 it was delisted and became a wholly owned subsidiary of another holding company, but its head office is still in Sakaecho, Tachikawa.

A department store facing a fish shop. If that is Act One of Tachikawa’s commerce, Act Two is set in burned-out ground and in department stores built by committee.

The “shared” department store, and the one that rose from the ashes

After the war, the bustle at the North Exit belonged to a base town. Kono Machi Archives writes that when the US military took over Tachikawa Airfield after the war, street stalls and a black market lined the north side, and that when the Korean War began in 1950, business with American soldiers brought a boom. On the south side, the Marui department store opened in 1952. The history of Tachikawa as a base town I leave to another story in this series. What I want to follow here are the department stores that local people built afterwards.

In 1962, Nakabu Department Store (中武デパート) opened at the North Exit. Kono Machi Archives calls it a yoriai hyakkaten — a “shared” or “co-operative” department store. Instead of one company owning every sales floor, local merchants each took their own section, and together they made one building look like a department store. A 2007 news article explains that Nakabu and the Daiichi Department Store (第一デパート) were originally small department stores built mainly by local landowners.

The Daiichi Department Store was born more dramatically. According to Kono Machi Archives, in January 1964 an unmanned tank wagon crashed at Tachikawa Station, and fire spread through the area along Ginza-dori. The Daiichi Department Store was built on the site of the burned shops and opened in 1966. A department store rose from the ashes. That said, the 2007 news article gives the Daiichi Department Store’s founding as 1961, and in the same year a “Tachikawa Ginza Department Store” also opened at the North Exit. Whether the company was founded in a different year from the building’s opening, or whether the records themselves wobble, I cannot settle with the material I have. The same article does not hold back on the building either: low ceilings, part of the floor worn away. It was a multi-tenant building that did not try to hide its age.

The following year, a toy shop moved in. According to an encyclopedia entry, Kotobukiya (壽屋), known for its plastic models and figures, was founded as a toy shop in Tachikawa in 1947 and had a shop in the Daiichi Department Store from June 1967. Tachikawa’s multi-tenant department stores would later be called by a name nobody could have expected — but that comes a little later.

First, there was an explosion at the station. The year was 1970.

1970: the year the big stores lined up in Tachikawa

In the Kono Machi Archives timeline, the line for 1970 is unusually crowded. February: Marui moves to the North Exit. September: Isetan moves to a new building. And Tachikawa Takashimaya opens.

Isetan’s new home was a building in Akebonocho called the Kinshin Building (金辰ビル), and according to the encyclopedia its sales floor measured 13,332 square metres. When the store opened properly in 1956 it had been 3,560 square metres, so in 14 years it had grown almost fourfold. It had been growing upwards in the meantime, too: in 1959 a sixth floor was added with a “Panorama Dining Room.” In a Tachikawa with few tall buildings, the view from the top floor of a department store must have been a treat in itself. In 1975 Isetan bought the whole Kinshin Building it had been renting. A department store that liked its rented building so much it bought it — apparently department stores fall in love too. A fashion news site writes that Tachikawa Takashimaya opened in front of Tachikawa Station in 1970. In 1971 a Tokyu housing centre opened as well.

1970 was also the year all of Japan was giddy over the World Expo in Osaka. At Tachikawa Station, like a small expo of its own, shops with big names opened all at once. That may be overstating it, but judging by the station’s timeline, for the people of Tachikawa 1970 must have been busier in Akebonocho than in Osaka.

Even with the big stores lined up, the local department stores did not disappear. In 1984 Nakabu Department Store was completely refurbished and renamed From Nakabu. The station building at the North Exit had opened two years earlier, in 1982, under the name “WILL.” It started calling itself Lumine Tachikawa in 1992. The station has its own story in this series, so here I will only say that a place to shop appeared on top of the station as well.

Tachikawa’s shopping in numbers

• 1900 — The year the Inageya Fish Shop opened in front of the station. Tachikawa’s commercial story begins with the smell of fish.
• 1956 — The year Isetan began full-scale business as a department store, and Inageya across the street became the first supermarket in Tokyo outside the 23 wards. The same year, the same spot.
• 115.4 — Tachikawa’s daytime/night-time population ratio in 2020, the highest of any city in Tokyo. This city is busier by day than by night.
• 36 — The number of large stores in the city counted by a senior chamber of commerce official in 2001. The person counting was probably tired too.
• 91 — Per cent: the share of the city’s retail floor space held by large stores at around the same time. In the remaining 9 per cent, the small shops held on.
• 1,500 — Parking spaces at IKEA Tachikawa. Even so, the official website urges you to come by public transport.

A wayfarer’s quiz

In 1956, Inageya — which started as a fish shop at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station — opened the “first” of something in Tokyo outside the 23 wards. What was it? (A) a department store (B) a supermarket (C) a station building. The answer is at the end.

By 1970 the line-up of big stores was in place. But some twenty years later, a new role fell on Tachikawa from the national government. A second face was about to be added to this city of shops.