Tachikawa Tachihi History Walk: Aircraft, a Beach and Things to Do

A walk through Tachikawa’s Tachihi area, the land of an aircraft maker that now owns a beach, a mall and an arena, chasing one character left in its name.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

The company that built 2,494 Hayabusa fighter planes now owns a beach.

There is no sea. The place is Tachikawa (立川), in the west of Tokyo. The company that once turned out aircraft by the thousand does not build a single aeroplane today. Instead it has sand, a shopping mall and an arena.

People in Tachikawa sometimes say their town has “nothing.” Just one more big station on the JR Chuo Line, they say. But take the Tama Monorail two stops north from Tachikawa, four minutes, and get off at a station called Tachihi. In front of you are a huge shopping complex and an arena, and next to them, a beach. You may not have a sea, but you can always bring in sand.

The name is written 立飛 and read “Tachihi.” I suspect a fair share of Japanese people seeing it for the first time read it “Rippi” instead. I am confident I would be in that share. Pronunciation aside, what caught my attention was the second character, 飛, which means “fly.” More than seventy years have passed since the company that owns this land assembled its last aeroplane. Even since it closed its last factory, more than a decade has gone by. And yet the character for “fly” survives, in the company name and in the station name. Why does a company that no longer flies refuse to let go of “fly”? With that question in my pocket, I walk out through the ticket gate.

Tachihi Station and the Tachihi area: in the middle of one company’s land

The first clue was surprisingly close at hand. The corporate history of Tachihi Holdings records that in November 1998, the Tama Toshi Monorail opened in part, and Tachihi Station and Takamatsu Station were built inside the grounds of the company’s Tachikawa Works.

A railway station, built inside one company’s premises. It is hard to believe at first, until you learn the scale of the company. The Tachihi group owns about 980,000 square metres of land, roughly one twenty-fifth of the area of Tachikawa City. The company itself describes Tachihi Station as standing “almost in the middle of our land.” From the moment I step off the train, I am standing in one company’s front garden. Quite a large garden.

The monorail company is clearer about where the station’s name comes from. According to the Tama Monorail’s station guide, the station was named Tachihi because it borders the former Tachikawa Airfield. The same guide notes that LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi opened beside the station on 10 December 2015. Between Tachihi and the next station, Takamatsu, there is a branch line to the monorail’s depot; the company’s guide places the branch at Takamatsu Station. The place where the trains of this road in the sky sleep at night is in this same area.

The planning rules shifted around the time the station arrived. In May 1995, part of the land around the monorail track was reclassified from an “urbanisation control area” to an “urbanisation promotion area,” and in June 2004 the whole of the works became an urbanisation promotion area, zoned as a quasi-industrial district. An urbanisation control area is land where, as a rule, the city is not supposed to grow. The station came first; permission to become a town chased after it.

The company had already been shifting from making things to renting out factory land. According to its history, it put up a rental building in the Sakae district in October 1985, closed its car repair workshop in June 1987, gave up all manufacturing and sales, rebuilt the old buildings of the works as taller ones, and moved more and more into property rental. Under the signboard of an aircraft company, the contents of the business quietly changed.

Beneath the monorail track runs a road called the Higashi-Odori Line. According to the history, it began as a road under the track running through the middle of the company’s premises, and it opened as a public road in March 2006. Around the same time, the land stopped being called the “Tachikawa Works” and became the “East District” and “West District.” That was the day the word “works” vanished from the map.

So what was made in those works? The story begins on the shore of Tokyo Bay.

A factory born in Tsukishima, moved to Tachikawa

The first line of the company history says that in November 1924, Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing Co. was founded to design, build and sell aircraft, and built a new factory in Tsukishima, in what is now Chuo Ward in central Tokyo. The company’s aircraft-making began in a downtown neighbourhood far from Tachikawa. (Today Tsukishima is better known for monjayaki, a runny griddle dish. Keep that in mind.)

Six years later, in March 1930, the company closed the Tsukishima factory and moved its works to Tachikawa.

Why Tachikawa? The history gives no reason. But according to the city’s account, quoted in material from the Tachikawa City Library, an airfield had already opened in Tachikawa eight years earlier, in 1922. Next to the factory there was a runway from which a finished plane could take off. That alone answers half the question. The other half, the price of the land and the weight of the company’s ties to the army, cannot be read from the documents in front of me.

Once in Tachikawa, the company grew fast. And that growth would show up in certain numbers.

The Red Dragonfly, the Hayabusa, and a plane that flew for 57 hours

In December 1934 the company built the army’s Type 95-1 trainer, nicknamed the Aka-tombo, the “Red Dragonfly.” The history records a cumulative total of 2,398 built. A trainer is a plane for learning to fly. That is 2,398 aircraft for people who wanted to reach the sky, rolled out of a factory in this town.

In July 1936 the company renamed itself Tachikawa Aircraft Co. It had put the name of the place where its factory stood into its own name. In 1943, under conversion production from Nakajima Aircraft, it built the Type 1 fighter, Models 2 and 3: the Hayabusa (“peregrine falcon”). The cumulative total was 2,494. Planes designed by another company were being built in Tachikawa’s factory. According to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, the company also built the “Type Ro transport,” a licence-built version of an American Lockheed airliner, along with reconnaissance planes and trainers. It had its own designs, took on other companies’ designs, and even built foreign aircraft. The factory was a mirror held up to whatever the times ordered.

Some odd aircraft came out of this factory too. According to the English-language encyclopaedia and other sources, a long-range aircraft known as the Ki-77 was sponsored by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, designed by an aeronautical research institute at a Tokyo university, and built by Tachikawa Aircraft. In July 1944 it is said to have flown 19 laps of a triangular course set over Manchuria, covering 16,435 km in a little over 57 hours. It is not an internationally recognised record. Even so, the picture of one aircraft going round and round the same triangle for two and a half days contains both comedy and obsession. On a 400-metre running track, it would be more than 40,000 laps. What the crew said first when they climbed out, the sources do not tell us.

In its message for the company’s centenary, the firm looks back on a time when it had built about 50 models and just under 10,000 aircraft, and when its total workforce numbered more than 42,000.

Then came September 1945. The history’s entry is short. With the end of the war, the business was closed, and the company’s facilities were requisitioned by GHQ, the General Headquarters of the Allied occupation. At the time the business closed, it had 42,332 people on its books.

More than 40,000 people working for one company. That is over a fifth of Tachikawa’s present population of a little over 187,000. Most of them must have lived in this town or near it. Crowds of people walking the same way in the morning. The lunch break. The road home in the evening. An aircraft town was also a town of people who built aircraft. On one particular day, those people lost their jobs. The number says nothing about the weight of that day. That makes it heavier still.

But the people who lost their jobs did not stop there. Let me lay out a few numbers first, then follow where those people went.

Tachihi by the numbers

• 1924: the year of founding. Born in Tsukishima, moved to Tachikawa at the age of five.
• 2,398: Red Dragonfly trainers built. The name still hangs on another signboard today.
• 16,435: the distance in kilometres the Ki-77 is said to have flown in circuits. About 0.4 of the way around the Earth, but all of it over the same triangle.
• 42,332: people on the payroll at the end of the war. Divide by the 3,000 maximum capacity of today’s Arena Tachikawa Tachihi and you get a little over 14 full houses.
• About 980,000: square metres of land the group owns today. Roughly one twenty-fifth of Tachikawa is the ground of one company.
• 935: the street number of both the beach and the shopping mall. The two live at almost the same address.

Once the company could no longer build aircraft, did it find anything to replace the work of 40,000 people? Its post-war history starts there.

The aircraft engineers turned to cars

The story of Tachikawa Aircraft sends out branches beyond the company’s own history.

According to the encyclopaedia, in 1947, two years after the defeat, former employees of Tachikawa Aircraft founded a company called Tama Electric Car. A web article in a Japanese car magazine tells the same story. Tamotsu Toyama, who had developed prototype military aircraft as head of Tachikawa Aircraft’s prototype works, and the engineer Jiro Tanaka were at the centre of founding Tokyo Electric Car, which changed its name to Tama Electric Car, then Tama Motor, then Prince Motor Company. The article says that the two light aircraft restored and shown to the public by Tachihi Holdings are linked, through the aircraft engineering of its predecessor Tachikawa Aircraft, to the Skyline and the Gloria, two of Prince’s best-known cars. The encyclopaedia adds that Prince Motor was absorbed into Nissan in 1966.

The same article names one more person. Tatsuo Hasegawa, who made his name as chief engineer of the first Toyota Corolla among other cars, also came from Tachikawa Aircraft, where he was chief designer of a high-altitude interceptor fighter. The people who once sat at the drawing boards of Tachikawa’s aircraft factory were, after the war, at the centre of the history of the Japanese car.

If people in Tachikawa find their town hard to boast about, they should remember this line. Some of the headwaters of Japan’s best-known passenger cars flow out of Tachikawa’s aircraft factory. Technology that was no longer allowed to fly chose to run on the ground instead.

And the company that stayed behind in Tachikawa? What did it make?

From washing machines to space: half a century of a company that did not fly

Read the post-war history and you see one company surviving by changing, again and again, what it makes.

In 1949, under a law on the reconstruction of companies, a “second company” was created with Tachikawa Aircraft’s physical assets as its capital. According to the history, it first went by the name Tachihi Industries and later became Shin-Tachikawa Aircraft. In 1952 this company completed the R-52 light aircraft, said to be the first domestically built aircraft of the post-war era. The next year came the R-53, the year after that the R-HM. The fire of aircraft-building had not quite gone out, however faintly it burned. According to the encyclopaedia, though, none of the three ever went into mass production.

At the same time, the second company began making things that had nothing to do with aircraft. In January 1955 it started producing Tachihi electric washing machines. Engineers descended from the company that built 2,494 Hayabusa fighters took on a new opponent: the family laundry. Anyone who once saw a washing machine marked “Tachihi” in a Showa-era home (the Showa era ran from 1926 to 1989) was watching a descendant of a fighter-plane factory spin. To young people today, Tachihi is probably just the name of a beach and a mall. The list goes on: heaters for factories, jet-engine parts, car elevators, two-level parking systems, parts for space rockets. From washing machines to space. Judging by the range of products alone, this was very nearly a shop that made anything.

The fire of manufacturing burned longer than you might expect. According to the history, the side of the business descended from the second company began making sheet-metal products in 1949 using equipment at places such as the Enoshima factory, which had escaped requisition, and in March 2007 it moved its Tachikawa manufacturing division to that Enoshima factory. In December of the same year, the Enoshima factory was certified under ISO 9001, the quality-management standard, and JIS Q 9100, the aerospace quality-management standard. Half a century after it stopped building aircraft, somewhere in this company there was still a factory entitled to call its quality aerospace grade. The Enoshima factory’s business ended in March 2013. Manufacturing descended from Tachikawa Aircraft continued until well past the middle of the Heisei era (1989–2019).

Meanwhile, the original Tachikawa Aircraft resolved in May 1955 to carry on as a company and renamed itself Tachihi Kigyo (“Tachihi Enterprises”). The history says that from this point its main business was renting out its facilities. Here the two characters 立飛 appear as a company name for the first time. 立 for Tachikawa, and 飛 for hikoki, aeroplane. That is how I read it, and the encyclopaedia also says the name is an abbreviation of Tachikawa Hikoki, Tachikawa Aircraft.

The later history of Tachihi Kigyo is rather charming too. In October 1961 it listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, built a new Kawasaki factory, and took on the role of selling the second company’s products. In November 1964 it opened the Tachihi Repair Center and began servicing cars and running a petrol station. A company that once built aircraft was now filling up the town’s cars. Somewhere, that line echoes the engineers who went off to build automobiles. The history goes on to say the petrol station closed in October 1984 and the car workshop in 1987.

There is one more line in the history that should not be missed. In November 1956, the second company formed a technical and management tie-up with Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries, today’s IHI. The company’s very first name had been Ishikawajima Aircraft Manufacturing. After a detour of more than thirty years, half of that name came back as a partner. Coincidence or fate? The history simply lists the facts and does not say.

The requisitioned land came back to the company over many years. In June 1973 the Tachikawa factory, today’s South District, was returned. In May 1976 the Tachikawa Works, today’s East and West Districts, came back and were rented out as warehouses and parking. And in November 1977 the return of all requisitioned assets was complete. Thirty-two years, counting from 1945. The factory land spent the time it takes a person to go from birth to the prime of working life in someone else’s hands.

The returned land was held by two separate companies. One rented out land; the other made things. They became one again only much later. In August 2011, the presidents of the two companies carried out a management buyout. The history gives the purpose as contributing to the regional economy through integrated development of property that had been split between two companies. In January 2012 the company delisted from the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in April the group came together under Tachihi Holdings as parent company.

The divided land now had a single owner with a single will. And the scenery by the station began to move.