Tachikawa Sports Guide: Things to Do for Fans, Runners and Walkers

Tachikawa’s public sports facilities: a town that names stations after gyms

Tachikawa has two stations named after gymnasiums: Izumi-Taiikukan Station and Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail (taiikukan, 体育館, means “gymnasium”). I explained where the station names came from in the article on the monorail, so I won’t repeat it. Here I want to visit the gymnasiums that lent them their names.

According to the city’s facility guide, Izumi Citizens’ Gymnasium is at 786-11 Izumicho, Tachikawa. It is a one-minute walk from Izumi-Taiikukan Station on the monorail, or you can take a bus bound for Murayama Danchi from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station to the “Izumi Shimin Taiikukan” stop. Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium is at 6-15-9 Shibasakicho. It is a three-minute walk from Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the monorail, or about fifteen minutes on foot from the South Exit of Tachikawa Station. On both pages the city asks people not to come by car. Like the arena, these are places you walk to.

Since April 2026 the two gymnasiums have been run by the same management company. According to its guide, Izumi has a 25-metre pool with seven lanes and is open from 9:00 to 23:00. A public gym where you can work out until eleven at night is a comfort to anyone coming home late from the office. Shibasaki has a seven-lane 25-metre pool too, plus an officially certified competition pool and a small 15-by-6-metre pool with a floor that rises and falls, so it can host swimming competitions. A pool with a moving floor: instead of the child growing to fit the water, the water’s depth adjusts to the child.

Counting the city’s list of sports facilities, I found 27. Two citizens’ gymnasiums, two athletics stadiums, eight baseball grounds, five tennis courts, a multipurpose sports ground, a futsal pitch, a gateball ground (gateball is a Japanese team game rather like croquet), plus the Rensei-kan martial-arts hall and a skatepark. Tachikawa Park Baseball Ground goes by the nickname “Kotobukiya Stadium”, and is open to hardball baseball, rubber-ball baseball (the softer-ball version most Japanese amateurs play) and youth baseball.

Tachikawa Park Athletics Stadium is in Nishikicho 6-chome, right beside the Tama River. According to the city, from 1 March 2026 it has been open free of charge to individuals from 9:00 to 17:00 on days with no group booking. The interesting part is the weekly schedule. Sunday to Wednesday are athletics-only days, and each throwing event has its own day: Monday is javelin, Tuesday discus, Wednesday shot put. From Thursday to Saturday the infield becomes a place for ball games, where you can play football or catch. On Monday morning javelins fly; on Thursday afternoon a ball kicked by a child rolls across the grass. Two faces of the same turf, by day of the week. No equipment is lent out, so you bring your own javelin. Picturing someone carrying a javelin onto a train made me a little uneasy.

The city’s athletics stadium has also hosted national competitions. According to a city report, in November 2024 the 12th Japan Modern Triathlon Championships were held at Tachikawa City Athletics Stadium and the swimming pool of Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium. Modern triathlon here means the Olympic modern pentathlon minus fencing and the obstacle course, three events in all. A “Tachikawa citizens’ quota” of 100 places was set aside for the city’s elementary and junior high school pupils, with free entry. The medals were presented by athletes who had represented Japan in the modern pentathlon at the Paris Olympics.

In November 2023 the 6th Mynavi Japan Skateboarding Championships were held at a privately run skatepark in Tachihi. The city, which backed the event, gave the top finishers extra prizes connected with Tachikawa: cookie medals shaped like the city’s mascot Kururin; goods featuring Udora, a character who almost became an official city mascot; and assortments of sausages made from Juton (柔豚, “tender pork”), a brand of pork raised by Furukawa Chikusan, a farm in the city. Only the winner and the runner-up got the sausages. Japan’s best skateboarder going home clutching a trophy and a pack of pork. Search the whole world and you won’t find many podiums like that.

The city also runs its own skatepark, the Tachikawa Chuo Park Skatepark. There are places to ride both privately run and city-run. A sport I had thought of as a young people’s pastime on a board has quietly become part of everyday life in Tachikawa.

A map of the Showa-era sports grounds: then and now

Lay the current list of facilities beside the city’s chronology, and you can see the order in which Tachikawa’s sports grounds were added, one by one. (“Showa” is the name of the Japanese imperial era from 1926 to 1989; Japanese records count years by era.) The chronology says that in Showa 26 (1951) the city keirin velodrome opened, in Showa 32 (1957) the city baseball ground was completed, and in Showa 34 (1959) the city athletics stadium received Class 3 certification for athletics. The line for Showa 39 (1964) reads, next to the opening of the Tachikawa Rensei-kan hall: “Tokyo Olympics held. The Olympic flame passes through the city.” The city has kept photographs of the torch relay running through its streets.

In Showa 48 (1973) the Tamagawa Ryokuchi riverside park was completed, and the pool at Mikagebashi Park opened. In Showa 55 (1980) the Citizens’ Gymnasium was completed; the chronology adds the note “now Izumi Citizens’ Gymnasium”. Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium was still to come, so back then you could presumably just say “the Citizens’ Gymnasium” and everyone knew which one you meant. In Showa 58 (1983) came the sumo ring at the Rensei-kan; in Showa 60 (1985), the first city junior high school sports tournament. In Showa 61 (1986), the chronology says, the “Tachikawa Marathon” became a race certified by the Japan Association of Athletics Federations. Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium did not open until Heisei 5 (1993).

A local community-information website, quoting a folk-history journal of the area, gives a brief picture of Izumicho around 1973, when the district name was fixed. The district had a city gymnasium, a junior high school and a high school; the rest was the site of the former airfield and the grounds of the Tachikawa Aircraft company, and not a single person lived there. At the edge of a large tract of land where no one lived stood just a gymnasium and schools. Today that district is also home to Tachikawa City Hall, which moved there in Heisei 22 (2010).

Back then there was no monorail station in front of the gymnasium. The Tama Monorail opened between Tachikawa-Kita and Kamikitadai in November Heisei 10 (1998). Today there is a station in front of that gymnasium, and the station is named after it. Its lights stay on until eleven at night, and it hosts professional futsal league games. On the neighbouring land, where no one used to live, an arena holding more than 3,000 spectators has gone up. From a town the Olympic flame passed through, sixty-odd years later, came an athlete who ran in a final at the world championships in Tokyo.

As I also wrote in the article on keirin, the city’s reports say that money transferred to the city from the profits of its keirin racing has gone into building Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium, the Central Library, and the school buildings and gyms of elementary and junior high schools. Money that a Showa-era town earned from bicycle races became a Heisei-era gymnasium, and today’s children swim in its pool.

Reading about the facilities, I remembered another number. How many people, actually, are moving their bodies?

Running by the Tama River, walking a flat town: residents’ exercise in numbers

According to the “Public Opinion Survey on the State of Sports Participation” published by the Japan Sports Agency in March 2026, 51.7 percent of people aged 20 and over do some sport at least one day a week, a figure that has stayed almost flat since 2022. The median time spent exercising per week is 69 minutes: 90 minutes for men and 59.8 minutes for women. Women in their 20s to 50s in particular manage only about 30 to 40 minutes a week, roughly half the figure for men of the same age. The generations most busy with work and child-rearing are the ones whose exercise time is squeezed hardest.

The same survey lists walking, exercises, training and climbing stairs among the most commonly done activities, and notes that around 90 percent of people do them alone. The leading form of exercise in Japan is walking, alone and in silence.

Tachikawa City has drawn maps for that solitary walker. The “Tachikawa Walking Map” has seven courses. Course A, for example, starts at Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium and loops via the monument marking the old Hino ferry crossing, the Tama River cycling road, the Nekawa Greenway and Fusai-ji Temple back to the gymnasium: 4.5 km, about 67 minutes. The times and calories are calculated assuming you walk at 4 km per hour and burn 30 kilocalories every ten minutes. Course A comes to about 201 kilocalories. A considerate map: you can decide in advance what you will eat at the end.

The map also promotes “+10” (purasu ten), adding about 1,000 steps a day, or roughly ten minutes of walking, and cites a government survey finding that only about half of Tokyo residents aged 20 and over reach their target number of steps. Tachikawa is an almost entirely flat town. The city’s own overview says the Tama River flows along the south of the city, the Tamagawa Aqueduct along the north, and the land is flat. Walking ten extra minutes in a flat town is, presumably, a little kinder than walking ten minutes in a hilly one.

For runners, the riverbank of the Tama River marks Tachikawa’s southern edge. City facilities such as Tachikawa Park Athletics Stadium, Tamagawa Ryokuchi Baseball Ground and the Tachikawa Park new-embankment sports ground line the river. Course A on the city’s walking map also follows the Tama River cycling road along the water. From Tamagawa Ryokuchi, chosen by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism as one of the “100 Views of Mt Fuji in the Kanto Region”, Mount Fuji can be seen to the south-west on fine winter days.

If you’re on a bike, there is a route to the north too, at Showa Kinen Park. According to the park’s official site, it has a cycling-only course of about 14 km inside the park, where you can ride without worrying about cars or pedestrians. Three cycle centres, at the Tachikawa, Nishi-Tachikawa and Sunagawa gates, have about 2,000 rental bicycles between them. But the park states plainly that the course is for bicycles only, and you cannot walk on it. Here, people who want to run can’t. Pedalling is the only option.

Athletes connected with Tachikawa: the 400m Japanese record began at Tachikawa Daiichi Junior High

Watching, running, using: to finish, I want to write about some of the people who set out from Tachikawa.

Tachikawa City has a page supporting Olympians, Paralympians and Deaflympians with ties to the city. One of them is Yuki Joseph Nakajima. According to the city, he went to Tachikawa Daiichi Junior High School. His personal best for the men’s 400 metres is 44.44 seconds, the Japanese record, set at the World Championships in September 2025. At those World Championships in Tokyo he finished sixth in the 400 metres. He also competed at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In September 2024 he paid a courtesy call on the mayor and talked about Paris and about his favourite places in his home town of Tachikawa. The fastest man in Japan over 400 metres started running in the schoolyard of a Tachikawa junior high.

The fencer Misaki Emura is on the city’s page too. According to the city, she belongs to a company based in Tachikawa, and won individual gold at the 2022 World Championships, the first gold medal in the history of Japanese sabre. She won individual gold again at the 2023 World Championships, and took bronze in the team event at the Paris Olympics. According to the Tachihi Group, the company she belongs to, she chose to become the first professional athlete in Japanese fencing when she graduated from university in March 2021. In October 2026, the group reports, she won gold in the women’s individual sabre and silver in the women’s team sabre at the 20th Asian Games. A swordswoman who has twice been world champion is attached to a Tachikawa real-estate company descended from a firm that built aircraft. Tachikawa business cards sometimes carry titles you would never expect.

There are more names on the city’s list: wheelchair rugby, alpine skiing, modern pentathlon, long-distance running, swimming, table tennis, football, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics, artistic gymnastics, basketball. Going back further, the list reaches all the way to the Rome Olympics. There is also an athlete who competed in track events at two Deaflympics. Far more people than I had imagined have run out into the world carrying the name of Tachikawa.

Now, back to the question I started with. Why do things so often start in Tachikawa?

The first reason is land. A runway can line up 10,000 people at once. On the site of an aircraft factory, a hall holding more than 3,000 spectators went up quickly and cheaply. A town that has wide, flat land from the outset has no trouble drawing a start line.

The second is the stations. The arena and the gymnasiums either have no parking or ask you not to come by car. People come anyway, because Tachikawa Station and the Tama Monorail bring them. Games are held where spectators can walk in.

The third is that local people cast the die themselves. The chamber of commerce and the shopping streets made a three-a-side team; a Tachikawa company built an arena and put its name on it; the city, the sports association and the chamber of commerce organise a race on a runway; professional teams pick up litter outside the station on a holiday morning. Rather than waiting for someone to come, they made the place first and announced themselves first.

A gymnasium built as a temporary structure may be in use for half a century. Tachikawa itself, I suspect, is made that way. A park grew on the site of an airfield, a beach appeared on the site of a factory, and citizens run on a runway. Things begun as temporary arrangements have, before anyone noticed, become the town’s real face.

On a March morning, 7,000 runners line up on a start line 40 metres wide. That one moment of silence just before the gun is probably no different from when the runway was there for aeroplanes.

Quiz answer

The answer is (C), the javelin. According to Tachikawa City, for individual use of Tachikawa Park Athletics Stadium, Monday is javelin day, Tuesday is discus day and Wednesday is shot-put day. No equipment is lent out, so you carry your own javelin there.

Before you go

• Arena Tachikawa Tachihi: 500-4 Izumicho, Tachikawa. One minute on foot from Tachihi Station on the Tama Monorail (four minutes by monorail from Tachikawa-Kita Station, which is next to the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station). There is no parking and no drop-off point for spectators. Check the official site for games and events: https://www.arenatachikawatachihi.com/
• Team fixtures: Tachikawa Dice https://tachikawa-dice.tokyo/ / Tachikawa Athletic FC https://tachikawa-athletic.jp/
• Tachikawa City Half Marathon: scheduled for Sunday 14 March 2027. Events, capacities, eligibility and entry on the official site: https://tachikawa-half.jp/
• Hakone Ekiden qualifier: Saturday 17 October 2026, from Camp Tachikawa to Showa Kinen Park (Inter-University Athletic Union of Kanto). Check the organiser’s guidance on watching: https://www.kgrr.org/
• Izumi Citizens’ Gymnasium (786-11 Izumicho, one minute on foot from Izumi-Taiikukan Station on the monorail) and Shibasaki Citizens’ Gymnasium (6-15-9 Shibasakicho, three minutes on foot from Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station): check hours, closing days and fees at https://tachikawa-sports.com/. The city asks visitors not to come by car.
• Free individual use of Tachikawa Park Athletics Stadium (6-29-62 Nishikicho): the event for each day and how to sign in are on the city’s page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/sports/1002923/1002944/1021320.html
• From Shinjuku: take the JR Chuo Line (Rapid) to Tachikawa without changing trains, then transfer to the Tama Monorail: Tachikawa-Kita for the arena and Izumi, Tachikawa-Minami for Shibasaki.
• Combine with: get off at Shibasaki-Taiikukan, walk the athletics stadium and the riverbank, and return to Tachikawa Station’s South Exit by the Nekawa Greenway, and you’ve covered the southern waterside in half a day (the route of the Nekawa and Tama River article). On an arena day, pair it with TACHIHI BEACH and LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi by Tachihi Station (see the Tachihi article), or, if you’re cycling, the roughly 14 km course in Showa Kinen Park.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for the trains and monorail, and check fixtures and opening days on the official sites before you go, since they change by season.

After the run, after the game: Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Whether you spent the evening shouting at the arena or the morning running on the Tama River embankment, the way home usually gathers at Tachikawa Station. Get off the monorail at Tachikawa-Kita, and the North Exit of the JR station is right there.

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

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30, so it is open whether the game ran late into the evening or you finished your run early in the morning.

For first-timers there is a trial yoga lesson for ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and mat rental included.

Pregnant guests cannot join 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.

• On the Shore: https://ontheshore.jp/
• Book a trial lesson: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

Sixty-nine minutes a week: the exact middle of adult exercise time, according to the national survey. Before you become one of the 11,000 people running on the runway, you could start by adding an hour on a third floor by the station.

Cover photo: Arena Tachikawa Tachihi seen from the pavement in front, its name displayed on the silver outer wall (Photo: Bject / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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