Showa Kinen Park, Tachikawa: A Walking Guide to Highlights and History

Showa Kinen Park, Tachikawa: how long it takes to go round, what to see each season, and why its ginkgo avenue is clipped into boxes, via its airfield past.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

In Tachikawa, the ginkgo trees are square.

I am not speaking figuratively. Just inside the Tachikawa Gate of Showa Kinen Park (the Showa Memorial Park), 106 ginkgo trees stand along both sides of a water channel, their heads trimmed exactly level, their sides shaved flat, so that they look like enormous green boxes. In autumn the boxes simply turn yellow. Most people seeing them for the first time tilt their heads once. I tilted mine.

Tachikawa (立川), I sometimes think, gets a raw deal. Most people riding the Chuo Line west out of central Tokyo know it only as a place to change trains. The station is ringed with buildings and you can buy anything there. So it gets written off: “it has everything, which means it has nothing.” Yet walk ten minutes from the North Exit and you reach an emptiness that does not feel like a continuation of the station district at all: 180 hectares of it. Buried in that emptiness, square ginkgoes included, is a century of history that this town has never bothered to boast about to anyone.

Why clip ginkgo trees into boxes? I will keep the answer until the very end of this article. To reach it, you first need to know what this park used to be.

Showa Kinen Park Highlights, and How Long It Takes to Go Round

Let me deal with the practical matters first. Showa Kinen Park is a national government park that straddles the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima in Tokyo. Its planned area is 180 hectares, of which 169.4 hectares are open. I am not in the habit of converting things into “Tokyo Domes” (the Japanese media’s favourite unit of size), so I will use other yardsticks. Inside the park is a dedicated cycling course of about 14 kilometres where you can ride without worrying about cars or pedestrians. The Park Train, a train-shaped vehicle that tours the grounds, goes all the way round in about 50 to 60 minutes. If you walk, the most honest figures are the ones in the official guide. From the Tachikawa Gate to Komorebi no Sato on the far side of the park is about 38 minutes on foot. From the Canal to the Sunagawa Gate, 42 minutes. One way, that is.

So if you ask how long it takes to go around Showa Kinen Park, I think the accurate answer is: “An hour on wheels, half a day on foot, and more than a day if you want to see it all.”

The highlights, in one breath: the “Canal” water channel stretching straight ahead of the Tachikawa Gate, with the square ginkgo avenue on both sides. “Minna no Harappa” (“everyone’s meadow”), about 11 hectares at the centre of the park, with a great zelkova tree in the middle. A Japanese garden of about six hectares, said to be the largest made in the Tokyo region since the war. “Kodomo no Mori” (the Children’s Forest), with a rainbow hammock that the park says is the largest in Japan. “Komorebi no Sato,” a re-creation of a farming village of the Musashino area as it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Hana no Oka” (the Flower Hill), the park’s largest flower field, with poppies in spring and cosmos in autumn. And beside the Tachikawa Gate, a dog run where you can let your dog off the leash.

According to the official website, more than 800 species of flowers and plants can be seen in the park over a year. The star of the show changes with each season, so whenever you go, something somewhere is “at its best.” That is the park’s own claim, admittedly, but looking over its annual flower calendar, it is not a lie.

What I wanted to know first, though, was not the names of the flowers but the reason for all this space. About 35 kilometres west of central Tokyo, on one corner of the Musashino Plateau (the broad terrace of land on which western Tokyo stands), why did such a vast blank survive? Carrying that question, I headed for the entrance nearest the station.

Entering Showa Kinen Park by the Akebono Gate

The entrance closest to the station is the Akebono Gate. According to the official directions, it is about ten minutes from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, and about eight minutes from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail. The Tachikawa Gate, the one with “Tachikawa” in its name, takes about 18 minutes from the same North Exit. You probably need not walk eight extra minutes out of loyalty to a place name. The area just inside is called the “Midori no Bunka Zone” (“green culture zone”), and it is free to enter.

The first thing you see is a building called the Hana Midori Culture Center. Or rather, it takes a moment to realise it is a building. Its roof and walls are covered in green, and the roof is named the “Fuyu no Niwa,” the Floating Garden. The park describes it as a space where the surface of the earth seems to have lifted up just as it was. It covers 5,278 square metres. On top of the cylinders that hold up the roof, they have even planted large trees moved from elsewhere in the park. You are supposedly walking on a building, but the soles of your feet don’t know it. Stand on that hill and the towers behind you and the lawn in front of you seem to join at the same height. Here, the boundary between the town of Tachikawa and the park is just one roof thick.

Inside the center is the Showa Emperor Memorial Museum, which displays the biological research of the Showa Emperor, who loved nature, and materials connected with him. Since the park was created as a project to mark the 50th year of his reign, it makes sense that the museum stands at the entrance. However, the official website announces that it is closed for major renovation from 1 June to 27 November 2026.

Beyond the Midori no Bunka Zone, a much larger paid area continues. Before going on, I took my eyes off the lawn for a while and climbed down into a timeline on paper.

How an Airfield Became a 180-Hectare Park

The chronology published by the Showa Kinen Park Office begins with one line from 1921 (Taisho 10): “Decision to establish an Army airfield.”

According to the city of Tachikawa’s guide to its walking courses, after the First World War people began to call loudly for aircraft, and Tachikawa was chosen as the site for an airfield. The reasons were that it was close to the capital, had wide, flat land, and had a railway. In 1922 (Taisho 11), when the airfield was completed, the Army’s 5th Air Regiment came from Kakamigahara in Gifu Prefecture. This is why Tachikawa came to be called “the capital of the sky.”

Flat, wide, on the railway. The three conditions listed for an airfield are exactly the conditions of today’s park. The reasons people gather and the reasons aircraft land are, a hundred years apart, the same. Neither a runway nor a meadow needs a slope.

The timeline continues. September 1945: the US military takes over the former Army facilities. December 1969: the US airfield ceases operating. November 1976: the cabinet approves the construction of a “Showa Memorial Park (provisional name),” and on 30 November 1977 the Tachikawa base is fully returned. On 30 November 1979 the cabinet decides to establish Showa Kinen Park. And on 26 October 1983 the first phase, 70 hectares, opens: Minna no Harappa, the Flowering Tree Garden, the Fureai (“get-together”) Plaza. The timeline records that the opening ceremony was held in the presence of the Showa Emperor.

Here my eye stops on another line in the timeline. On 19 November 1979: “The National Property Central Council submits its report on the outline plan for the use of the former Tachikawa base land.” According to material published by the disaster-management office of the Cabinet Office, this report made “a large-scale park and a wide-area disaster-response base the two pillars” of how the land would be used, with land needed for the healthy growth of the town arranged around them.

In other words, the returned airfield was split in two from the start. One part, the park. The other, the Tachikawa Wide-Area Disaster Prevention Base.

This disaster base is quite something. According to the Cabinet Office, if a major earthquake strikes directly beneath the capital, the places where the government will set up its emergency disaster headquarters have been fixed by cabinet agreement, in this order: the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Defense. If all of these are badly damaged and unusable, the headquarters moves to a reserve disaster-headquarters facility inside the Tachikawa base. It stands about 30 kilometres from central Tokyo, on a plateau with relatively good ground, and is unlikely to be hit at the same time as the city centre. What’s more, given Tokyo’s prevailing winds (south or south-south-west in summer, north or north-north-west in winter), even if great fires broke out in central Tokyo, aircraft taking off and landing here would be unlikely to be troubled by the smoke.

In an emergency, the fourth seat of this country’s command centre is in Tachikawa. A town people think of only as a place to change trains is, in fact, the keeper of the nation’s emergency exit. It is a little wasteful that residents don’t know this. And there is a reason for the big park beside the disaster base. The documents list as an advantage that the wide grounds, park included, can be used for temporarily gathering supplies and for looking after people affected by a disaster. The flower fields have another face in an emergency.

Back to the park’s timeline. From here on, it is little more than a string of “openings.” The official chronology of a national park starts to look like the “Grand Opening!” posters in a shopping street. The South Gate in 1985; the Waterfowl Pond and the Stream Plaza in 1986; all of the Children’s Forest and the Tamagawa-Josui Gate in 1992; the Japanese Garden in 1997; the Sunagawa Gate in 2001; the Midori no Bunka Zone in 2005; Komorebi no Sato in 2007; the Flower Hill in 2011. On 1 April 2014 the Takamatsu Gate opened and the open area reached 169.4 hectares, about 94 percent of the plan.

Visitor numbers make a timeline too. According to press releases from the park office, in fiscal 1983, the year it opened, 184,000 people came in the six months from October to March, and 316,000 the following year. By fiscal 2014 that had grown to 4,543,000 a year. The original plan had expected 3 million a year, so that is one and a half times as many. In Golden Week (the cluster of holidays in early May) of 2016, the cumulative total passed 80 million. Of the 17 national government parks in Japan, among the 12 that charge admission, this was the first to reach 80 million.

Looking over the timeline, one thing strikes me. This park was not made all at once. Over thirty years it opened little by little, as if being slowly unwrapped. The base fences came down one length at a time, and each time people could go further in. Somewhere on the lawn I am walking on was, around the time I was born, still on the other side of the wire.

The park’s founding idea is “the restoration of greenery and the enhancement of humanity.” The word “restoration” makes me pause. Not creating new greenery, but taking it back. Written in from the very start is the awareness that something here needed to be taken back. Then what stands at the centre of this green that was taken back?

Minna no Harappa and the Great Zelkova

At the heart of the park is Minna no Harappa. About 400 metres north to south, about 300 metres east to west, about 11 hectares. The numbers mean little until you stand at one edge and look across: people on the far side become sesame seeds. In the middle stands a single zelkova tree, more than 20 metres tall.

The official website says something interesting about this tree. The great zelkova was not planted when the park was laid out; it was already standing here before the park existed. When it was found it measured 17 metres high, with a branch spread of 16 metres and a trunk 2.4 metres round, and its age was estimated at 70 to 80 years. Some forty years have passed since, so it is now more than a hundred years old. And the park’s designer who found this zelkova thought, “Let’s make the meadow with this tree at its centre.” That, they say, is how Minna no Harappa was created.

So the order is reversed. They did not plant a tree in the middle of a meadow. They opened a meadow around a tree. One tree that survived the base years decided the centre of gravity of an 11-hectare space. The design gave way to a single tree.

The zelkova, I might add, is also Tachikawa’s official “city tree.” In 1974, after asking residents, the city chose the zelkova as a tree native to Musashino with deep local roots, long grown as a windbreak alongside people’s homes. The city tree stands at the centre of gravity of the city’s biggest meadow. As coincidences go, it is almost too neat.

The meadow has one more secret. It looks like neat turf, but it is made of all sorts of grasses besides lawn grass. When the park opened, the whole area was laid with turf, but since then it has been managed without herbicides or other chemicals, so that it can live with weeds. That is why wild flowers bloom here through the seasons. People who thought they were lying on a lawn were lying on weeds. The park is proud of it.

And further underfoot. Beneath the southern half of the meadow lies a huge tank that stores rainwater. When enough has collected it is pumped to the Waterfowl Pond and used for the water features of the Stream Plaza and to flush the toilets. The water of the Waterfowl Pond, some five hectares of it, is rain that fell on the park. Beneath the backs of people lying here gazing at the sky, the murmuring stream and the toilet water are being prepared. Poetically, it is the memory of rain. Practically, it is toilet water.

In summer this meadow hosts the night of the year when it is most crowded. The main viewing ground for the Tachikawa Festival Showa Kinen Park Fireworks is Minna no Harappa. According to the organizers, the display traces its origins back to the first Tachikawa Summer Evening Fireworks, held in 1954 on the bank of the Tama River beside the Hino Bridge. In those days the fireworks were river fireworks. Today you lie on the grass of a meadow that was a base and watch the fire open straight above you. More than seventy years have passed since the first. For more on the fireworks, see another article in this feature.

The meadow has three flower fields, east, west and south, whose flowers change with the seasons. Around it is the Cherry Garden, with big cherry trees more than fifty years old. Many of them, says the official site, hang their branches down to the eye level of someone sitting beneath. Near the Cherry Garden is the Dragonfly Wetland, an artificial marsh made to preserve Musashino’s nature, home to dragonfly larvae, pond skaters, whirligig beetles and tadpoles; in season, emperor dragonflies, red dragonflies and butterfly-winged dragonflies fly over it. Near the Waterfowl Pond is a bird sanctuary, managed as a home for wild birds only. The sky that was cleared for aeroplanes is now flown by dragonflies, without a permit.

Showa Kinen Park in Numbers

• 180 ha — the planned area. Quite a bold figure for an empty space ten minutes from a station.
• 106 — the number of ginkgo trees along the Canal. All exactly the same height. I give the reason at the end.
• About 14 km — the length of the cycling course. The official site insists you may not practise riding a bicycle in the park. Apparently this is a place you come to after practising at home.
• 80 million — the cumulative number of visitors, reached 33 years after opening. The first national park with an admission fee to get there.
• 4th — the place of Tachikawa’s reserve facility in the order of sites for the government’s disaster headquarters after an earthquake directly under the capital: after the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defense.
• 800+ — the number of species of flowers and plants you can see in a year. I can probably name about 2 percent of them.

At the edge of the meadow, beside the Tachikawa Gate, a lot of tails are wagging. Over there, the rules are far more detailed than in the human park.