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

A “business core city,” and the South Exit where Sogo never came

In 1977 the Tachikawa base was returned to Japan in full. A document from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism sets out what followed. In June 1986, the national government’s Fourth Capital Region Basic Plan designated Hachioji and Tachikawa as “business core cities.” In August 1995, the basic plan for the Hachioji–Tachikawa business core city was approved. The idea was to spread the work of companies and government offices, which had been piling up in central Tokyo, across hubs in the suburbs, and Tachikawa was chosen as one of the places to take that load.

On the former base land, Faret Tachikawa (ファーレ立川) opened as a new district in 1994, and in March 1995 Takashimaya’s Tachikawa store moved to its present site. Faret Tachikawa’s streets and art have their own story in this series.

And then the South Exit. In the City of Tachikawa’s timeline, the entry for 1999 reads: “South Exit Combined Building opens at Tachikawa Station.”

Gattai biru — “combined building.” In Japanese, gattai is the word used when giant robots in children’s cartoons lock together into one bigger robot. It hardly sounds like the language of a government timeline. In reality it was a joint redevelopment building, developing the Tachikawa Station terminal and the South Exit area as a single project, and it is today’s Granduo Tachikawa. It opened on 18 April 1999.

This combined building has a prehistory. According to an encyclopedia entry, in December 1993 JR East agreed to set up a subsidiary jointly with the department store chain Sogo, with the aim of opening a “JR Tachikawa Sogo” by around 1997. But as Sogo’s finances worsened, the plan was scrapped in 1996. JR East chose Hankyu Department Stores as its new partner and in 1997 set up JR East Department Store Co. (ジェイアール東日本商業開発). Granduo was the first shop that company opened.

What if Sogo had come to Tachikawa as planned? A few years later, in 2000, the Sogo department store group collapsed. Tachikawa’s South Exit may have narrowly escaped being left with a huge empty building. That is my own speculation; the records do not go that far.

In January 2001, Isetan left the Kinshin Building after more than 30 years, moved to its present site and expanded. According to the encyclopedia’s timeline, the new store’s sales floor was over 40,000 square metres. Considering that the 1947 kiosk had measured 23 tsubo, about 76 square metres, the store had grown more than 500-fold in half a century. The old store became the Bic Camera Tachikawa store, Kono Machi Archives says. Marui, which had moved to the North Exit in 1970, closed in 2012 and was replaced by Tachikawa Loft, and in 2020 the site became a different building. The shops change. But the ground at the North Exit remains a place for trade.

Back then, older people will say, counting on their fingers: Isetan was in the Kinshin Building in Akebonocho, the station building called itself “WILL,” the low-ceilinged Daiichi Department Store stood to the west of the North Exit, and you could see the Marui sign. Later the Kinshin Building became a Bic Camera, and the Marui site became another building. And now WILL calls itself Lumine Tachikawa, and Tachikawa Tacross stands where the Daiichi Department Store was. For young people, the North Exit has probably always looked the way it looks today. Standing on the same corner, one person remembers the old signs and another knows only the new ones. Tachikawa’s North Exit is a street corner that hands each generation a different map.

Something ties all these constantly changing shops into one city. Look down at your feet and you will see it.

The deck that turned department stores and station buildings into a single street

Step out of the North Exit of Tachikawa Station and people start walking without ever coming down to street level. From the station to Isetan, to Takashimaya S.C., to the monorail station. Pedestrian-only decks link shop to shop at second-floor height.

The City of Tachikawa’s timeline shows how this deck grew. In 1990 land readjustment began in front of the North Exit, and in 1998 work began on the North Exit station plaza. In 2001, sections of the pedestrian decks at the North and South Exit plazas opened, and in 2005 the South and North Exit decks were opened. When the city introduces itself and takes the trouble to mention that “pedestrian-only decks have been built,” it is presumably because this deck is Tachikawa’s backbone, joining the station to the shops.

Just as the deck was starting to stretch out, in 2001, the year Isetan moved to its present site, the executive director of the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry contributed an essay on the monorail and Tachikawa to a Chuo University publication. He wrote that with the opening of Isetan Tachikawa in January that year, the rush of large-store openings had, for now, come to an end; that 36 large stores were operating in the city; and that large stores accounted for 91 per cent of all retail floor space. They could satisfy the shopping needs of every generation, he wrote, from the young to the elderly. He also noted that the monorail’s Tachikawa-Kita and Tachikawa-Minami stations had been connected to JR Tachikawa Station by the deck, completing a transport junction running north, south, east and west.

The essay also reported a survey of 209 Chuo University students who commuted by monorail. The most common place they had been to by monorail was the station building Granduo, at 38 per cent; second, tied at 37 per cent, were the station building Lumine and “a friend’s or acquaintance’s house.” For students, it seems, the station buildings were somewhere they went about as often as their friends’ homes.

Asked for their image of Tachikawa, “a city where you can enjoy shopping” came first, at 80 per cent of male students and 78 per cent of female students. But “a city that’s fun to wander around in” stayed at about half. And the executive director added this: even just to hold a student drinking party, Tachikawa perhaps still had not formed a proper “town” of places to eat and drink. “It makes us reflect,” he wrote.

A senior figure at the chamber of commerce, seriously reflecting on where university students could hold their drinking parties. I find I rather like this earnestness of Tachikawa’s. And after that reflection, the city’s multi-tenant department stores went in a direction the chamber of commerce probably never expected.

Two North Exit buildings that became an otaku “holy land”

A news article from March 2007 reported that Tachikawa was being called an “otaku holy land” — a pilgrimage site for anime and figure fans — third after Akihabara and Nakano, drawing customers along the Chuo Line not only from the Tama area but from Nagano and Yamanashi too. It had started being called that only in the past year or two, the article said.

The stars were those two buildings. According to the article, at the Daiichi Department Store a long-standing tenant began selling anime and figure goods, found support, and other shops followed. At From Nakabu, in June 2006, a doll and figure shop opened with a sales floor of about 660 square metres, and that clinched the “holy land” status. Kotobukiya, born in Tachikawa, also drew fans from across Tama with its name, the article says.

The article’s analysis is clear. These had originally been small department stores built by local landowners; then big stores like Takashimaya, Isetan and electronics chains opened one after another and competition grew fierce. In response, the two buildings added more otaku shops and set themselves apart from the big stores.

When a big shop arrives, a small shop starts something new. The same shape of story as 1956, when the fish shop across the street became a supermarket, had happened again half a century later. The “shared” department stores did what the department stores could not.

The Daiichi Department Store was demolished in the redevelopment of the west side of the North Exit. According to the encyclopedia, Kotobukiya’s Tachikawa shop closed as a result in May 2012, and in May 2016 the company opened its Tachikawa main store in a new head-office building along the monorail line. On the redevelopment site, Tachikawa Tacross was completed in 2016.

That is enough about the two multi-tenant buildings by the station. The final act of Tachikawa’s commerce opens a little way from the station, on a very, very large piece of land.

Tokyo’s first IKEA, on the site of the old base

On 10 April 2014, IKEA Tachikawa opened in Midoricho, Tachikawa. According to news reports, it was the seventh IKEA in Japan and the first in Tokyo.

Tokyo’s first IKEA came not to the 23 wards but to Tachikawa. Tell people in central Tokyo and they are usually a little surprised.

Midoricho is a district spread across the former base land that was returned to Japan. According to the official website, it is a 10-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station and a 7-minute walk from Takamatsu Station on the Tama Monorail. There are 1,500 parking spaces. Even so, the official website says serious traffic congestion occurs and asks visitors to use public transport. This is a shop for which 1,500 spaces are not enough.

Before it opened, according to news reports, a Tama Monorail train was decorated with IKEA products and members chosen by lottery were taken on board for a party. One carriage was apparently for making decorations out of paper napkins, another for trying Swedish food. Sampling meatballs on a monorail running through the sky — Tachikawa sometimes does oddly delightful things with a perfectly straight face.

In December 2015, LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi opened next to Tachihi Station on the monorail. According to the encyclopedia, it was the first LaLaport mall in the Tama area. The history of the company that owns that land is told in this series’ story on Tachihi. Both sites were once the wide open land of an airfield or a base.

While big shops spread out from the station, things changed by the station too. In 2022, Takashimaya announced that its Tachikawa store would stop trading as a department store on 31 January 2023. According to the same fashion news site, the company president explained that the strategy of blending a department store with specialty shops had “drifted out of step with the actual market.” The building reopened in November 2023 as Tachikawa Takashimaya S.C., filled entirely with specialty shops. On its official website, the list of large tenants includes a grocery supermarket, a furniture store and a big bookshop.

So the two department stores that lined up at the station in 1970 became one. But it is too early to read that as decline. People still walk into the building that took down its department-store sign. The sign changed; the flow of people did not. Tachikawa’s shopping, it seems, is held up less by the shape of the shops than by the city’s pulling power.

Why did so many shops gather in Tachikawa, of all places in Tama?

Let us go back to the question we started with. By population, Hachioji is about three times bigger. So why Tachikawa?

After following the records, I was left with three answers and a half.

The first is that Tachikawa is a knot in the railway lines. According to the city, the JR Chuo, Ome, Nambu and Itsukaichi lines all run into Tachikawa Station, the Tama Monorail links north and south, and the city calls Tachikawa Station “a key transport hub of the Tama area.” A Tokyo Metropolitan Government document also says that Tachikawa has developed as one of Tama’s commercial centres thanks to the favourable condition of several railway lines meeting there. People from the mountains up the Ome Line, people from the Kawasaki end of the Nambu Line, people coming by monorail from Tama Center — they get off at Tachikawa while changing trains. Population counts the people inside the city, but commerce deals with the number of people passing through the station. That pull has even been written into the documents of the neighbouring city. Tokyo’s plan for developing hubs in Tama says of Akishima, Tachikawa’s western neighbour, that its existing small and medium retailers tend to struggle because of the concentration of shops around Tachikawa Station and large commercial facilities nearby. Tachikawa Station has drawn people strongly enough to be a headache for the shopping streets of the next city along.

The second is the size of the land that was returned. The former base land, returned in 1977, spread out just north of the station. Faret Tachikawa, IKEA, LaLaport and Showa Kinen Park all sit on that flat, wide land. No other city in Tama gained such a large single stretch of open land within walking distance of its station. The flatness that was chosen to build an airfield became, half a century later, a flatness that attracted big stores.

The third is the role the national and Tokyo governments gave it. It was chosen as a business core city, and national research institutions and the courts moved onto the old base land. A Tokyo Metropolitan Government document says that at the time of the 2005 census, Tachikawa’s ratio of people working in the city to working residents was 1.25, the highest in the Tama area. Where there are people working during the day, daytime shopping follows. Department stores and station buildings are kept going partly by the wallets of people on their way home from work.

And the remaining half: something like a refusal to lose, in the temperament of the city’s merchants. When a department store came across the street, the fish shop became a supermarket. When the big stores lined up, the “shared” department stores became a holy land. In the shadow of the big shops, the small ones were always starting something new. It does not show up in the numbers, but between the lines of the records you can definitely read it.

Tachikawa, they say, is a city that “has everything.” But after walking this far, I want to rephrase that a little. Tachikawa is a city where everything comes. People come. Shops come. And so as not to lose to what has come, something new is born again. “It has everything” is just a very modest way of describing what has piled up from that repetition.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), a supermarket. According to the Inageya company timeline and Kono Machi Archives, in 1956 Inageya introduced the self-service system at its Tachikawa North Exit store and became the first supermarket in Tokyo outside the 23 wards. In the same year, across the street, Isetan began full-scale business as a department store.

Before you go

• Getting to Tachikawa: From Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line; Tachikawa Station is on the line. Check the current timetable before you set off.
• Isetan Tachikawa: 2-5-1 Akebonocho, Tachikawa. According to the official guide, a 2-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station along the pedestrian deck to the 2nd-floor main entrance, or a 1-minute walk from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail to the 3rd-floor connecting entrance. Opening hours on the official site (Japanese): https://www.mistore.jp/store/tachikawa/access.html
• Tachikawa Takashimaya S.C.: 2-39-3 Akebonocho, Tachikawa. Filled entirely with specialty shops since November 2023. Hours and shop list on the official site: https://www.takashimaya.co.jp/tachikawa/
• Lumine Tachikawa (station building on the North Exit side) and Granduo Tachikawa (South Exit side, with a ticket gate leading straight in from the station): https://www.lumine.ne.jp/tachikawa/ / https://www.granduo.jp/tachikawa/
• IKEA Tachikawa: 6 Midoricho, Tachikawa. A 10-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, or 7 minutes from Takamatsu Station on the Tama Monorail. The official site recommends public transport because of traffic congestion: https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/stores/tachikawa/
• LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi: next to Tachihi Station on the Tama Monorail. Official site: https://mitsui-shopping-park.com/lalaport/tachikawa/
• Walking it: Isetan, Takashimaya S.C., Lumine and Granduo are all linked by the decks on the north and south sides of the station, so you can walk between them. For IKEA, walk about 10 minutes from the North Exit. LaLaport is two monorail stops north.
• Combine it with: the public art of Faret Tachikawa below the North Exit deck, GREEN SPRINGS at the end of Sun Sun Road, the view from the Tama Monorail, and the sandy beach at Tachihi. Each has its own story in this series.
• Practical tips: Carry an IC transport card such as Suica or PASMO; it works on JR trains and the monorail alike. Shop hours and closing days change, so check each official site before you go.

Put down the shopping bags and go up to the third floor by the North Exit

From Isetan to Takashimaya S.C., across the deck to Lumine. If you walked all the way to IKEA, your arms will be carrying big bags on the way back. Shopping in Tachikawa is fun, and that is exactly why it gets you in the shoulders and lower back.

One minute’s walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a hot yoga studio heated by lava-stone plates. Besides lava-stone hot yoga, it offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lesson.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30. Even after the department stores have closed, it is still open.

A trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and a yoga mat included in the rental. You can drop in with nothing but yourself, shopping bags and all.

Pregnant guests cannot take part in lava-stone hot yoga, but room-temperature maternity yoga is available. Many of our yoga instructors speak English, and the studio’s owner, Naomi Fujita, who holds Japan’s top English qualification (Eiken Grade 1) and a perfect TOEIC score and once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and who lived in Alaska for three years, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself (visitors from abroad have even left Google reviews about the care they received in English); if you would like an English-friendly lesson, just say so when you book.

Studio information: https://ontheshore.jp/ — trial lesson booking: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

The station front that began with a fish seller’s handcart is now lit until late at night. For more than 120 years, Tachikawa’s North Exit has remained a place people come to.

Cover photo: The Isetan Tachikawa building against a blue sky, with the store name sign on its wall. (Photo: shigen / CC BY 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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