Tachikawa Souvenirs Guide: What to Buy, from Tokyo Sake to Paper

What to take home from Tachikawa: 59 specialities with the town’s seal of approval, from toe socks and paper bowls to aircraft-born beer and Tokyo’s sake hub.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Ask people what the souvenir of Tachikawa is, and not many can answer straight away. Even people who live in Tachikawa (立川), a city in the Tama area of western Tokyo, will probably fall silent for a moment. The station buildings and the department stores are full of famous sweets from all over Japan. But when it comes to something you can call Tachikawa’s own, confidence suddenly drains away. Mine did. I had heard that the local speciality was udo, a pale, crunchy mountain vegetable, but I did not have the courage to turn up at someone’s door holding a stick of udo as a gift.

In Japan, by the way, coming home from a trip without omiyage (お土産), souvenir gifts for family and colleagues, is close to a social offence. So the question “what do I bring back from here?” is a serious one.

Once I started digging, though, strange things kept turning up. Tachikawa does not have a single sake brewery on the list of members of the Tokyo Sake Brewers Association. And yet the office of that association, which brings together the breweries of all Tokyo, and a shop where you can taste and buy their sake, sit on the sixth floor of a building three minutes’ walk from the South Exit of Tachikawa Station. The head office of a company calling itself the “originator” of five-toed socks is in Tachikawa too, and a paper bowl that won the top prize at a world-famous German design award was born in a Tachikawa paper factory.

Why does Tokyo’s sake gather in a town that does not make any? In a town thought to have no specialities, what is being made, and what is being chosen? Using as my guide the products that the Tachikawa Tourism Convention Association has named “Tachikawa no Taikoban”, I set out to trace where Tachikawa’s souvenirs come from.

Tachikawa souvenirs start with “Tachikawa no Taikoban”: how the town picks its specialities

If you want a souvenir that really says Tachikawa, the surest guide is “Tachikawa no Taikoban” (立川のたいこばん). A taikoban (太鼓判), literally a “drum-sized seal”, is the Japanese for a firm seal of approval: to “press the taikoban” on something is to vouch for it wholeheartedly. The Tachikawa Tourism Convention Association describes the label as “the nickname for Tachikawa’s local specialities, packed full of Tachikawa’s charms”. These, then, are products the town has stamped its big seal on. Written in soft hiragana script rather than kanji, the word looks a little more relaxed.

Who does the stamping? Read the association’s call for entries and you see how the selection works. Products must be original and have a track record of being sold in Tachikawa. Food, drinks, prepared dishes and general goods can all apply. A judging panel looks at how “Tachikawa” the product is, how distinctive it is as a product, its quality and so on. To apply you must be a member of the association, with an annual fee of 10,000 yen. The judging itself costs nothing, and nobody is charged if they are not chosen. Products that are recognised get a push: sales at the city’s big events and in tents at Showa Kinen Park during its busy seasons, listings in the association’s and the city’s booklets, places on the pamphlet racks at stations, and the right to use the city mascot, Kururin. It is not a matter of simply putting things on a shelf; it is a system for the whole town to sell them.

In October 2025 the association produced a new leaflet introducing the Taikoban, featuring 49 products that had passed a strict selection. The leaflets were put on the racks at Tama Monorail stations including Tachikawa-Kita, Tachikawa-Minami, Tachihi, Tamagawa-Josui, Takahata-Fudo and Tama Center. In March 2026, three more products were recognised: the “〒190” T-shirt (190 is the start of Tachikawa’s postcode), the paper bonsai “kami-bonsai”, and five-toed socks. When I counted the products marked as Taikoban on the association’s souvenir pages in October 2026, there were 59.

The 59 are far more of a jumble than I had expected. Udo pie, a bento of branded pork, pudding made with ukokkei (silkie chicken) eggs, craft beer, herbal tea, Tokyo sake, a paper bowl, architectural-model kits, five-toed socks, a campfire stand, a dinosaur figure, T-shirts, a calendar of Showa-era photographs. I thought I was browsing the food section, and before I knew it I was standing in front of the shelves of a general store.

Products using Tokyo udo are of course included: udo pie, Sasaragi, and udo dressing. According to the association, the udo pie is a traditional product that carries on a recipe from an old-established Japanese sweet shop. Sasaragi is bite-sized sushi wrapped in bamboo leaves, with seasonal fish layered with Tokyo udo and tsukudani (sweet-savoury simmered relish). I told the story of the white udo in detail in the Tokyo udo article of this series, so I’ll leave it at that here.

Besides the Taikoban, there is also the “Tachikawa Official Souvenir Project”, which the association launched itself. Its first product is an assortment of baked sweets called “Tama to Boku FROM TACHIKAWA” (“Tama and Me”). The association describes it as sweets born from Tachikawa’s first ever “souvenir project”: baked goods from a locally loved Western-style patisserie, packed in a limited-edition box with a design based on the town that you can only buy in Tachikawa. Four kinds, twelve pieces. Among the places selling it are NewDays Tachikawa, the convenience store on the station’s second floor outside the ticket gates, and shops in the station building at the South Exit. You can buy it just before you board your train. For a souvenir, that matters a great deal.

Why does Tachikawa need a system like this? One number serves as an answer. According to Tokyo Metropolitan Government statistics, in the 2020 census Tachikawa’s daytime population was 207,832 and its night-time population 183,581. There are more than 24,000 more people in the day, and the ratio of daytime to night-time population, 113.2, is the highest of any city in Tokyo (Tokyo’s 23 central wards aside). Tachikawa is a town where people gather by day and go home at night. What do you put in the hands of all those people going home? The Taikoban, I think, are the town’s answer to that question.

Now, to the sake. Among the 59 is one particularly mysterious item: a set of sake from five Tokyo breweries.

The headquarters of Tokyo sake, in a town with no brewery: the Tokyo Sake Brewers Association and its “Tokyo Shuzo Set”

Open the Tokyo Sake Brewers Association’s pages and you find that, of the breweries making sake in Tokyo, one is in the 23 wards and nine in the Tama area: one in Ome, two in Fussa, two in Akiruno, two in Hachioji, one in Higashimurayama, one in Fuchu, plus the one in Minato Ward. There is also a brewery in Komae that is currently dormant. Search the list as you like; Tachikawa is not on it.

And yet the association’s address is 1-1-23 Nishikicho, Tachikawa, on the sixth floor of the Shuzo Kumiai Building, about three minutes’ walk from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station. On the same floor, the association runs a specialist shop for Tokyo sake, “Tokyo Kuramoto Dayori” (“News from Tokyo’s Brewers”). According to the association, the shop is popular because you can actually drink, try and buy, and it stocks hard-to-find limited editions, seasonal sake and gift sets. You can choose the size you like, from a one-cup jar through a 720 ml bottle to a big 1.8-litre isshobin. On the sixth floor of a building by the station, in a town without a brewery, sake from every brewery in Tokyo is gathered.

The Taikoban “Tokyo Shuzo Set” is a product of this association. According to the tourism association, it lets you compare the sake of five member breweries — Sawanoi, Tamajiman, Kasen, Chiyotsuru and Kinkon — in five 300 ml bottles. It is an original product only the brewers’ association could make. Look up the founding years on the brewery list: Toshimaya Shuzo of Higashimurayama, which makes Kinkon, was founded in Keicho 1 (1596), and Ozawa Shuzo of Ome, which makes Sawanoi, in Genroku 15 (1702). In one box you can buy in Tachikawa is sake from a brewery older than the Battle of Sekigahara, the 1600 battle that opened the way to the Edo shogunate. I walked the history of the two Fussa breweries in this series’ article on Fussa’s sake breweries.

The association tells an anecdote about the beginnings of sake brewing in Tokyo. As the city of Edo (old Tokyo) prospered, its people drank vast amounts of sake brewed in the Kansai region around Osaka and Kyoto, and money flowed west. The senior councillor Matsudaira Sadanobu lamented this, and in Kansei 2 (1790) he gathered eleven leading sake brewers of Edo, lent them 14,700 koku of shogunate rice, and had them brew 30,000 barrels of fine sake. That sake was sold directly to the public in Edo, under signboards. Making local sake to stop money leaving: the “buy local” campaign of some 230 years ago was in deadly earnest.

So, the mystery. Why is the association of Tokyo’s breweries in Tachikawa, which has no brewery? The association’s pages do not say. So from here on, this is my own reading. Nine of Tokyo’s ten working breweries are in Tama: Ome, Fussa, Akiruno, Hachioji, Higashimurayama, Fuchu. Mark them as dots on a map and Tachikawa falls somewhere near the middle. The city’s overview says that the Chuo, Ome, Nambu and Itsukaichi lines all run into Tachikawa Station, the Tama Monorail runs north–south, and Tachikawa Station is the transport hub of the Tama area. People can easily gather here from breweries far up the Ome Line or from the far end of the Nambu Line. Not a place where sake is made, but a place where sake is brought together. That, I suspect, has always been Tachikawa’s role.

There are other drinks sold under Tachikawa’s name. The Taikoban “Uemon” comes from grapes grown in an old orchard in the city. According to the association, the orchard is one of the oldest in Tachikawa, in business for more than 300 years since the early Edo period; it keeps pesticides to a minimum and grows grapes with seeds, because the seeds, it says, give wine depth. In the low-pesticide, herbicide-free fields live creatures you rarely see in a city, such as honeybees and moles. Grapes from a field with moles in it. It isn’t on the label, but it is probably the ingredient most worth boasting about.

There is beer too. Tachihi Brewery, in Takamatsucho, Tachikawa, makes beer under the TACHIHI name. The brewery describes its own history as “The craftsman’s soul, from aircraft to beer.” The Tachihi Group’s predecessor was Tachikawa Aircraft, which built aeroplanes in Tachikawa, and the spirit that refused to compromise on even a single part, it says, lives on in its brewing. According to the association, its pale ale won the top prize and a silver award in the Japan category of an international competition in 2022, and its pilsner won gold in the German-style pilsner category of an international beer competition in 2024. A beer descended from an aircraft company is flying at world competitions.

The other beer is “Shibasaki Session”, from a small brewery in Shibasakicho. According to the association, it was the first beer the brewery made when it opened in 2020, using citrus-scented hops and Norwegian yeast. The brewery’s name is “Sakamichi” — “Slope”. Its two owners had cycled up and down slopes all over Japan and the world, the association writes, and the place they chose as their destiny was Tachikawa. The city’s overview describes the town’s terrain as flat. Two lovers of slopes chose a flat town. Perhaps life’s uphill stretches are, after all, found on level ground.

Tachikawa souvenirs in numbers

• 59 — products: the “Tachikawa no Taikoban” I counted on the association’s pages in October 2026. From food to campfire stands; you can’t see the end of the shelf.
• 0 — Tachikawa breweries on the Tokyo Sake Brewers Association’s list. Its office is in Tachikawa all the same.
• 1596 — the year the brewery of Kinkon, in the Tokyo Shuzo Set, was founded. By Tachikawa Station you can buy sake older than Sekigahara.
• 3 — minutes on foot from the South Exit of Tachikawa Station to the Tokyo sake shop. From the ticket gate to a toast is not far.
• 113.2 — Tachikawa’s daytime-to-night-time population ratio: more than 24,000 extra people by day. That’s also the number of people taking a souvenir home.
• 1930 — the year the printing house that makes the calendar of Showa-era Tachikawa photographs began letterpress and lithographic printing.

After the drinks, I want to talk about small things you can carry home in your hand. Tachikawa’s workshops make paper and fabric that reach the world.

Paper, models and five toes: small things from Tachikawa’s workshops that travel the world

Fukunaga Shiko is a paper printing and processing company in Nishikicho, Tachikawa. According to its company history, it was founded in 1963 in Nishikicho 2-chome as Fukunaga Shiko-sho. For many years it worked as a factory printing and processing paper, and from 2006 it began planning and developing its own original products together with creators from many fields.

Its signature piece is “Kuuki no Utsuwa” — the “Airy Bowl”, literally “a vessel of air”. It is a paper bowl, released in 2010. According to the association, it is a paper vessel that you can freely reshape as though wrapping up the air, taking on different forms depending on how you open it out. It won the “best of the best”, the highest award, at the red dot design award in Germany, one of the world’s three major design prizes. The company’s history also records that in 2018 it exhibited the Airy Bowl and Terada Mokei at a design event in Switzerland and won the grand prix. From a Tachikawa factory, a bowl for holding air carried off European awards.

Terada Mokei is a collaborative project begun in 2011 with the architect Naoki Terada. According to the association, after releasing “1/100 Architectural Model Accessories”, sets of tiny figures and scenery aimed at architecture offices, it has produced series on world cities, sports, trees and more. You cut 1/100-scale people and trees out of paper and stand them up. The same company’s “Tortoise MEDAL” is a game in which you turn medals over as in the memory game Pelmanism, and win them if the numbers add up to ten; it won a Kids Design Award in 2017 and was chosen for GOOD TOY 2020. According to the company history, it has also opened its own shop next to its head office.

This company also runs the merchandise at the association’s shop in Showa Kinen Park, “TiSTORE”. According to the association, TiSTORE is inside the park’s Hana Midori Culture Center, and is the association’s new base for spreading information, stocking mainly Taikoban products. The shop was also designed by Fukunaga Shiko. It holds paper-themed workshops too. Note, however, that Taikoban products involving food and drink are not sold here. Go to the park shop looking for udo pie, and you’ll meet a paper bonsai instead.

The association’s description of that paper bonsai, “kami-bonsai”, says: “Take Japan home. Bringing Japan home.” It comes in four kinds — pine, cherry, autumn maple and kinzu (a dwarf citrus) — and needs neither scissors nor glue. It is about the size of a postcard and takes up no room. Reading that, I remembered photographs of Tachikawa Station in the days of the base. I’ll come back to them near the end of this article.

Fukunaga Shiko also makes paper goods based on the art of Faret Tachikawa, the open-air public art district outside the station’s North Exit. According to the association, its postcards of popular works capture their features with embossing and die-cutting, and part of the proceeds goes to restoring and maintaining the Faret Tachikawa artworks. Buy one postcard, and a sculpture that doubles as a bollard by the station lives a little longer.

After paper, fabric. Nishikicho in Tachikawa is home to the head office of Lasante, a five-toed-sock company. Its pages call it “the original five-toed-sock specialist”. It began in a room in the offices of a company in a seaside town in Wakayama that it describes as a pioneer of five-toed socks. The founder, who had been researching and developing five-toed socks since 1974, set up a sales company, and its shop opened in Tachikawa in 2003. The company name comes from the French la santé, “health”. The originator of the five-toed sock has a French name and lives in Tachikawa.

Working with the futsal team Tachikawa Athletic FC, this company made the Taikoban “3D Sports PRO Five-Toed Socks”. According to the association, they are five-toed socks for competitors, designed from top athletes’ movements and sensations during play, and they deliberately have no anti-slip grip, to increase the sense that foot and sock are one. Take away the grip, so as not to slip. I don’t quite follow the logic, but if professional futsal players say so, it is presumably so.

There is a metalworking company too. A Tachikawa metal-processing firm, sixty years in business, has used its specialist skills to make a campfire stand around the concept “fun to watch, soothing”. The brand is PINECOCO. According to the association, three series are on sale. The same brand also makes small wooden stands of the city mascot Kururin, from 330 yen. From campfire stands to mini stands, one workshop has a wide reach.

And Tachikawa has Kotobukiya, the maker of models and figures. Its head office is in Midoricho, Tachikawa; I wrote about its history in this series’ shopping and Manga Park articles. Several of the Taikoban are Kotobukiya collaborations. There is a precise figure, at about 1/18 scale, made by 3D-scanning the 8-metre Tyrannosaurus from the dinosaur show “DINO-A-LIVE”. The labels of the “Akatombo Cider” and “Hiko Cider” (“Flight Cider”), sold only at the Ground Self-Defense Force’s Camp Tachikawa, were supervised by Kotobukiya of Tachikawa. And the soft-vinyl figure of Udora, “Tachikawa City’s official almost-character” (a monster born of udo that narrowly failed to become an official mascot), is marked “[2024 harvest]”. According to the association, the new colour for the 2024 harvest is green. A toy with a vintage, like a vegetable. For a monster born from udo, the labelling is entirely correct.

Paper, cloth, iron, resin. All of them small enough to sit in the palm of your hand, or at most to be carried in two arms. Yet these small things have won German prizes, wrapped the feet of professional players, and shrunk a dinosaur to 1/18 of its size. Next, let’s look at products closer to the town itself. In anime, this town is known as “a certain municipality”.