Tachikawa Sun Sun Road Walk: History, Festival and Winter Lights

Sun Sun Road is a 40-metre-wide, 550-metre-long “road” in Tachikawa that no car may enter. Its history, its trees, its festival and its 600,000 winter lights.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

At the North Exit of Tachikawa Station there is a “road”, 40 metres wide, that not a single car is allowed to enter.

Leave the station by the North Exit, cross the elevated walkway, and go down the stairs. In front of you a single road runs north, wide and dead straight. Overhead, the concrete track of a monorail covers it like a roof. Trees line both sides. You cannot see where it ends.

It is wide. You could fit an entire boulevard into it. And yet there is not one car. There are people walking, people pushing bicycles, people sitting on benches, and that is all.

The road is called Sun Sun Road. Everyone in Tachikawa (立川), a city in the western half of Tokyo, knows it. Far fewer people know that on paper it is a “city planning road”, that it has an official number, and that in the spring of 2003 it was formally “opened to traffic”.

To build a 40-metre road on prime land in front of a major station, and then forbid cars from using it — by the logic of commerce, that is an extravagance. Why did Tachikawa do it? And why is the road called “Sun Sun”? Carrying those two questions, I start walking north, in the monorail’s shadow.

What Sun Sun Road is: a 40-metre-wide, 550-metre-long “road”

First, the road’s papers.

According to “Tachikawa City 21”, a town-planning booklet published by the city, the official name of Sun Sun Road is “Tachi 8-1-1 Urban Axis Line” (立8・1・1号都市軸線). It begins at Midorikawa-dori Avenue and runs north alongside the Tama Toshi Monorail (多摩都市モノレール; in English, the Tama Monorail). Width: 40 metres. Length: about 550 metres. It was opened as a road reserved for bicycles and pedestrians on 5 April 2003 — year 15 of the Heisei era, as Japanese documents put it.

Those numbers in the name mean something, and the city’s 2004 “Guidelines for Town Development along the Urban Axis” explain them patiently. The first figure, 8, is the category: “special street = bicycle and pedestrian road”. The next figure, 1, is the scale: “road width = 40 metres or more”. So “Tachi 8-1-1” means, roughly, Tachikawa’s road number one in the class of roads that are for bicycles and walkers and are 40 metres wide or more. For a bureaucratic code, it is a rather proud way of introducing yourself.

“Urban axis” comes from the road’s city-planning name. Axis. This was a line drawn to be the spine of the town. But you cannot really call a road “the spine”, so the city asked the public for a nickname. According to the guidelines, 1,865 entries came in. The one chosen was “Sun Sun Road”.

Why “Sun Sun”? In Japanese, sansan (燦燦) is the word for sunlight pouring down brilliantly. Is that the idea? Or is it simply two suns side by side? The documents I read do not say. The monorail track covers it overhead; the road has more shade than sun; and someone named it “Sun Sun”. Whoever chose that name was quite an optimist. In winter, though, the name starts to shine in a different sense. I will save that for later.

The city’s booklet calls this road “the city’s symbol road”, and says that in season the city flower, the kobushi magnolia, blooms here along with other flowers, and that the road is a place where citizens rest and meet. The city profile at the back of the same booklet lists Tachikawa’s flower as the kobushi and its tree as the keyaki, the Japanese zelkova. Sun Sun Road is lined with zelkovas and has kobushi magnolias in bloom. The city tree and the city flower, together on one road.

So much for the road’s self-introduction. But was it drawn across empty land?

Drawing a spine across a former air base

Of course it was not empty land.

Both sides of Sun Sun Road were once Tachikawa Airfield, and after the Second World War, the US military’s Tachikawa Air Base. For foreign readers, this is the single most important fact about the modern city: for decades, a large slice of central Tachikawa was a military airfield, first Japanese and then American, and much of what you see north of the station today was built on land returned after the base closed. Other parts of this series walk through that history in detail; here I will only pick up what touches the road.

Just one picture of the old North Exit, from the Showa era (1926–1989), is worth setting down first. Tachikawa Monogatari, the newsletter of the city’s municipal history project, carries a photograph of the crossroads at Akebonocho 2-chome around 1952 — a little east of today’s Sun Sun Road, where the entrance to Faret Tachikawa now is. The caption explains that the main gate of the US Tachikawa Air Base faced onto it, and that signs aimed at American servicemen lined the street. In front of the North Exit stood souvenir shops for foreigners, with signs reading “Souvenir Store”.

It was also in the Showa era that the North Exit took on the face of a shopping district. According to a real-estate company’s history of the area, the Isetan department store opened its Tachikawa branch at the North Exit in 1956, and in fiscal 1972 the North Exit accounted for about 80 percent of the sales of the shopping streets in front of the station.

Then: beyond the department store at the North Exit lay the US air base. Now: in the same direction runs a 40-metre road that anyone may walk along. The only ones not allowed through are cars.

Back to the road. According to the timeline in the city’s booklet, the base was fully returned in November 1977. That year began a long discussion about how to use the vast empty site.

The timeline actually begins a year before the return. In November 1976, Tachikawa was designated a “core city” in the national government’s Third Capital Region Basic Plan. Even before the base came back, the state was already counting Tachikawa as one of the towns that would absorb people and jobs around Tokyo.

Read the timeline in order and you feel how long it took for this road to appear. November 1981: the Showa Kinen Park (国営昭和記念公園, Showa Memorial Park, a national government park) and the main roads around it are fixed in the city plan. October 1982: the Tokyo Metropolitan Government announces the “Tama Toshin Tachikawa (T.T.T.) Plan”. Three Ts. Presumably Tachikawa, Tama, and toshin, “city centre”. To put three Ts in one name, the metropolitan government must have been serious. October 1983: Showa Kinen Park partly opens. July 1989: three area redevelopment projects around Tachikawa Station are fixed in the city plan, and the following month the national government announces that the Local Autonomy College and other state institutions will move onto the former base.

Sun Sun Road was born from one of those projects, the “Land Readjustment Project for the Tachikawa Base Site and Related Districts”. According to the city, it was carried out as a land readjustment under the “special redevelopment project” scheme created in 1981 for the comprehensive redevelopment of existing urban areas in big cities. It was fixed in the city plan in May 1995 and approved as a project in March 1997. In between, in October 1994, the Faret Tachikawa (ファーレ立川) office district just to the east held its opening. In November 1998 the Tama Monorail began partial service between Tachikawa-Kita and Kamikitadai stations, and on 10 January 2000 the full line of about 16 kilometres, from Tama-Center to Kamikitadai, opened.

The booklet gives the project’s outline in numbers. Implementing body: the Urban Renaissance Agency. Area: about 58.8 hectares. Average land contribution ratio: about 22.5 percent. And the number of rights holders as of March 1997: thirteen landowners. Fifty-eight point eight hectares, and only thirteen owners. Nothing says “this used to be an airfield and an air base” more eloquently than that number. An ordinary land readjustment in an ordinary Japanese town would mean negotiating with hundreds, even thousands, of owners. If Tachikawa’s spine is straight, that is probably part of the reason.

In April 2003 the urban axis opened — twenty-six springs after the base was returned. The formal notice that the land readjustment was complete came three years later still, in December 2006.

The road was put to use the year it opened. The city’s 2004 guidelines include a photograph from the “greening festival” of 2003, the opening year, as an example of how the axis could be used.

The booklet says the space beneath the monorail was developed as the urban axis, a symbol road. The ground directly under a monorail track is usually hard to use for anything. Tachikawa took that space, kept cars out, and handed a 40-metre strip of it entirely to people on foot. A student report on urban case studies, published on a Chiba University website, cites this road as an example of making good use of the space under an elevated monorail.

The national government came to the roadside. On state-owned land along Sun Sun Road, a joint regional government office building went up. Nearby there are courts, and a cluster of research institutes that includes the National Institute of Polar Research, known for Japan’s Antarctic work. A spine was drawn across a former base, and the state, the city and the town slowly added flesh to it.

But the area around the spine was not busy from the start. During those empty years, the city drew a blueprint.

The 2004 blueprint: open-air cafés and “Tama’s only one”

In June 2004, the year after the road opened, Tachikawa adopted its “Guidelines for Town Development along the Urban Axis”. It is a document describing what kind of town the city wanted on both sides of the road.

The guidelines explain the axis’s position like this. To the south are the large station-front shopping complexes that draw crowds of shoppers. To the east is Faret Tachikawa, the business district. To the west spreads the greenery of Showa Kinen Park. Precisely because the axis sits between them, the city can build a town where bustle and greenery live in harmony. The guidelines describe the park as one visited by about 2.55 million people a year.

The guidelines then split the roadside into two zones: a lively “zone overflowing with fun”, and an “urban lifestyle zone” combining work, play and housing. On the park side to the west, a “green culture zone” was being developed at the time. For the fun zone, the guidelines said that, besides business, commercial and cultural functions, the city “strongly requests” open-air cafés along the street, shops selling local products and food, and amusement and sports facilities. The two photographs given as examples of open-air cafés were both taken in Daikanyama, in Shibuya ward. The page on the urban lifestyle zone shows Harumi Triton, Daikanyama Address and Yebisu Garden Place. In 2004, the officials of Tachikawa were looking at Daikanyama — one of central Tokyo’s most fashionable neighbourhoods — three times over. On housing, the guidelines add that care is needed for “a townscape that does not make you feel daily life”, with input from people such as architectural designers. A place to live that does not make you feel daily life. City-planning language sometimes drifts very close to a Zen koan.

The guidelines go further. They say it would be effective to place, at the far end of the axis, a “main facility that is Tama’s only one, found nowhere but Tachikawa”, to act as the heart of the bustle. (Tama, or the Tama area, is the western half of the Tokyo Metropolis outside the 23 central wards; Tachikawa is one of its hubs.) As an example of such a main facility, they named a venue that could hold theatre and live concerts.

They even thought about how to sell the land. Instead of simply selling state land to the highest bidder, the guidelines said, the city should consider a “business proposal method”: invite private companies to propose developments and hand the land to whoever offered the plan most in tune with the vision. The precedents cited were Rokko Island in Kobe, Tokyo’s Rinkai Fukutoshin waterfront, and Minato Mirai 21 in Yokohama. They also prepared for failure: fixed-term business land leases, and interim uses for land left unsold. Examples given were short-lived trendy shopping complexes like VenusFort on Odaiba, and temporary theatres like the “1000days Theatre”. Under the monorail in Tachikawa, the bureaucrats were dreaming of reclaimed land by the sea.

The picture did not become reality at once. The city’s town-planning page lists the history of the Ministry of Finance’s tenders for the state land along the road. June 2008, Blocks A and B: “no bid”. November: “no bid, not awarded”. October 2009, Block C: “no bid”. February 2012: “not awarded”. February 2013: “not awarded” again. I have rarely seen a government document list its swings and misses so honestly. In October 2010 the city passed an ordinance to attract companies to the axis. The tender for Block B was finally awarded in January 2015.

The booklet sums up what happened next in a single line: land along the road came to be used for a large furniture store, a hospital, a vocational school, a hall, a hotel and so on. In 2020, GREEN SPRINGS opened on the west side of Sun Sun Road. Inside it is TACHIKAWA STAGE GARDEN, a multi-purpose hall with about 2,500 seats, the largest of its kind in the Tama area. A venue for theatre and live concerts, at the end of the urban axis. The line written in the 2004 guidelines took sixteen years to arrive, in very nearly the shape described. Blueprints, it turns out, sometimes do get delivered.

So that is the shape of the road. What seasons pass across it?