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

The Showa Kinen Park Dog Run and the Children’s Forest

People with dogs disappear to the left of the Tachikawa Gate. That is where the park’s dog run is.

According to the official guide, the dog run is an area where you can let your dog off the leash to play, and it can be used for the price of park admission alone. Its entrance is to the left of the Tachikawa Gate and also serves as a park entrance. You can also enter it from inside the park after coming in through any of the gates. Inside, they say, are specialist staff qualified as dog-life counsellors.

The areas are divided by the dogs’ size and temperament. An area only for large and medium dogs of 40 centimetres or more at the shoulder; an area where dogs of any size can play; an area only for small dogs under 40 centimetres; and the “Wanpaku Area” (“rascal area”), open to all breeds but where balls and toys are not allowed. There is even a “Beginners’ Area” for dogs not yet used to dog runs. Even dogs get new-recruit training.

The rules are detailed and make sense. Every time, each dog must show a certificate of a combination vaccine covering at least three diseases, given within the past year, and a rabies vaccination certificate or tag. Copies or photos are fine, but a pet shop’s sales contract is not; only documents issued by a veterinary clinic in Japan are accepted. If showing them every time is a chore, you can pay a registration fee and make a “Wan Pass!” dog registration card (“wan” being Japanese for “woof”), which exempts you for a year. Aggressive dogs, females in heat and unvaccinated dogs may not use it. Inside, the only food or drink allowed, for humans and dogs alike, is water. High heels are banned. So are flying discs.

That line about high heels, I imagine, was written precisely because someone once came to the dog run in high heels. Rules are usually made out of somebody’s precedent.

Inside a national park there is a place with areas sorted by dog size, specialist staff, and even a registration-card system. I found no data showing in figures how rare this is in the Tama area, but from the dogs’ point of view this is prime real estate.

About 35 minutes’ walk from the Tachikawa Gate is the Children’s Forest, a forest of strange play equipment that opened in full in 1992. The “Sea of Clouds,” a huge white dome-shaped trampoline, is only for children of junior-high age and younger; from high-school age up, nobody may use it except parents accompanying small children. Adults can only watch. In compensation, right in front of the adults hangs the “Rainbow Hammock.” The official description calls it “the largest hammock in Japan.” A piece of play equipment claiming to be Japan’s biggest hangs, quite casually, in the woods of a park in Tama. This one, though, is only for children of elementary-school age and younger. For adults, the Children’s Forest really is a place for looking.

In the Fog Forest, pure white mist rises at set times; in winter, the fog takes a rest to prevent freezing. The Dragon Sand Hill has four big dragons, but the official site honestly notes that, after safety standards for play equipment were tightened, the dragons can no longer be climbed. Even dragons mellow with the times.

The water play area has changed a little. In 1985, the park’s second summer, the Rainbow Pool opened: a summer playground full of water on the site of an airfield. For many who grew up in the Tama area, a midsummer visit to Showa Kinen Park meant this pool. The pool and the water play plaza have since closed because of ageing facilities and the redevelopment around the Akishima Gate. According to the official guide, through a public–private redevelopment the area is to be reborn as a “waterside space” where everyone from children to adults can enjoy water all year round. Back then, the water was only there in summer. From now on, it will be water for the whole year.

The Wanderer’s Quiz

The great zelkova at the centre of Minna no Harappa: how did it come to stand there?

• A: It was planted as a sapling to mark the park’s opening.
• B: It was already standing there before the park was built.
• C: It was moved from central Tokyo, where it was about to be cut down for redevelopment.

The answer comes near the end of this article, just before “Before You Go.” First, let us make one round of the seasons.

Winter to Spring to Summer: Showa Kinen Park Through the Seasons

To see only the autumn and go home would be a bit of a waste. Even in midwinter, this park’s flower calendar has no blank spaces.

Winter: Sasanqua, Wintersweet and Plum

The park in winter is a little lonely. But it is in loneliness that some flowers catch your eye. Sasanqua camellias bloom pink all over the park from late October to late February. Where the camellia drops its flowers whole, the sasanqua sheds its petals one by one. Wintersweet blooms from late December to mid-February, yellow flowers like waxwork giving off a refined scent. Christmas roses flower from late December to early April; what look like petals are actually sepals, which is why they last so long.

Plum blossoms run from mid-January to mid-March. The plum grove in the Flowering Tree Garden is planted with many varieties, from early to late bloomers. The Flowering Tree Garden is a large area holding about 200 kinds of flowering trees and about 200 kinds of flowers, and when you walk it in the clear winter air the scent comes straight at you. In winter the Japanese Garden shows off its yukitsuri, ropes strung from a pole over pine trees to protect the branches from snow. Hung with their cones of rope, the pines hold up skeleton umbrellas and wait for snow.

Spring: Cherry Blossoms, Tulips and the Poppies of the Flower Hill

Spring is when the park is at its most glamorous, and a Flower Festival is held every year.

Cherry blossoms are out from late March to mid-April. The park has about 1,500 trees of 31 varieties, half of them Somei-Yoshino. Sit under the big trees of the Cherry Garden and the blossoms are right in front of your face. At the “Old Cherry Garden” in the Flowering Tree Garden, look north from the Fureai Bridge and along the Zanbori River the pale pink of Somei-Yoshino, the deep pink of Yoko cherries and the yellow of forsythia overlap.

The Tulip Garden in the Stream Plaza began in 2004, supervised by a former director of Keukenhof in the Netherlands. Tulips line the stream among the trees. The former director of a park in the home of the tulip worked out how to arrange bulbs on the site of an old Army airfield. Seen from the Netherlands, that is a fairly distant business trip. In the meadow’s flower fields, rapeseed blooms in time with the cherries, with the Cherry Garden behind. From mid-April to mid-May there is a blue carpet of nemophila, and from late April the Bouquet Garden. On the Flower Hill, poppies bloom in spring. At about 10,000 square metres it is the park’s largest flower field, a young hill by the park’s standards, made in 2011. From the top you can see across toward Tachikawa Station.

Summer: Komorebi no Sato and a Hill of Rubble

What draws me in the summer park is not so much the flowers as Komorebi no Sato, in a corner near the Sunagawa Gate.

It re-creates the farming landscape and way of life of Musashino in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and opened in 2007: rice paddies, fields, a farmhouse with its sheltering woodland. Under the theme “Showa, Musashino, Farming,” citizens took part from the planning stage, and it is still maintained and run with their participation. In 2013 four buildings were moved here and restored: a farmhouse, a nagaya-mon gatehouse, an inner storehouse and an outer storehouse. The farmhouse, gatehouse and inner storehouse came from Komae City in Tokyo and are designated Tangible Cultural Properties of Tachikawa City.

Stand in front of the farmhouse, and to young people it looks like a set for a samurai drama; to their grandparents’ generation, a roof they have seen somewhere before. The same building becomes a document or a memory depending on the age of whoever looks at it. On the site of an airfield, they have rebuilt the life that was here before the airfield. When you think about it, it is a strange fold in time. What was on this plateau before the Army came? The park does not answer directly. Instead it makes rice paddies and lets lotuses bloom. The lotuses flower in the pond at Komorebi no Sato from mid-June to mid-July.

The neighbouring Komorebi Hill is more candid. It is a stretch of woodland built artificially on flat ground, using rubble from the demolition of the US base and surplus soil from the construction of Tama New Town. They first stripped off the good original topsoil, filled the core with rubble and surplus soil, then piled on Kanto loam and finally the stripped topsoil to form a hill, and transplanted trees onto it. Today, thanks to volunteers who keep cutting the undergrowth and raking the fallen leaves, about 180 kinds of wild flowers bloom on the woodland floor through the seasons: dogtooth violets and golden orchids in spring, golden-rayed lilies in summer, ladybells in autumn, and in winter the shimobashira plant, whose dead stems sprout delicate frost ribbons.

On top of the base’s rubble, Musashino woodland has put down its roots. Here is the most literal form of the park’s idea of “restoring greenery.”

In summer the meadow has little shade, and the outline of the great zelkova’s shadow becomes sharp and dark. Hydrangeas bloom from mid-June to mid-July, mainly along the Hydrangea Road, and crape myrtle from late July to late September, bright against the blue sky. In Japanese it is written with characters meaning “a hundred days of red,” because it flowers for so long.

The Zanbori River, which flows through the park, belongs to the Tama River system. The ground is Tachikawa loam of the Pleistocene, and the soil is kuroboku, the black volcanic soil that suits plants. The park office’s documents even record the pedigree of the ground like this. The stable ground that once held up runways now holds up trees.

Then summer ends and October comes. In the most colourful season of the park’s year, the riddle of that square avenue is finally solved.