Tachikawa History: The Samurai Clan Behind the City’s Name, a Walk

Was the “Tachikawa-ryu” born in Tachikawa? The city history’s answer

One of the things that made the Tachikawa name known nationwide has a rather alarming ring: the Tachikawa-ryu, a branch of esoteric Buddhism branded a “heretical cult” in the Middle Ages. Dictionaries describe it as a school formed by fusing Shingon esoteric Buddhism with onmyodo (Japanese yin-yang divination) and folk belief, and it has long been said to have taught sexual union as a secret means of attaining buddhahood in this very body.

Why “Tachikawa”? The best-known basis is a passage in a book called the Hokyosho. A monk of Daigo-ji named Ninkan was exiled to Izu for a crime and, to make a living there, taught Shingon even to laymen. A yin-yang diviner from a place called Tachikawa in Musashi Province came to learn from him, mixed it with onmyodo, and called it the Tachikawa school. This, the passage says, was the beginning of the heretical teaching.

A yin-yang diviner from Tachikawa founded a dubious sect. For a citizen, not the easiest story to boast about.

The city-history project tackled this question head-on. From October 2016, two special committee members of the ancient and medieval section, Kushida Ryodo and Kondo Yusuke, took charge of the research. In issue 17 of Tachikawa Monogatari (2024), they reported on its progress.

The two pointed out three problems with the Hokyosho. First, it was written in the Muromachi period, long after Ninkan was active in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, so its reliability is questionable. Second, it was written from a standpoint critical of the Tachikawa-ryu and is thought to be biased. Third, no Kamakura-period source mentions any “diviner of Tachikawa,” so its account cannot be corroborated.

On the other hand, there is not a complete absence of clues. A source preserved in the Kanazawa Bunko library, recording the lineage of Ninkan’s teaching, reportedly contains the note “Rennen of Tachikawa, Musashi Province.” Rennen is thought to be another name Ninkan used in Izu. Even so, the relationship between Ninkan, an exile in Izu, and Tachikawa remains unclear.

And the conclusion was this: at present, there is no clear historical evidence of a connection between Tachikawa City and the “Tachikawa-ryu.” In March 2022 (Reiwa 4), at an online meeting with the section head and others, it was decided not to publish a report on the Tachikawa-ryu, the two write. They even add that some may be disappointed by the conclusion that the “Tachikawa-ryu” has little to do with Tachikawa City.

City specialists spent more than five years investigating a dubious sect bearing the city’s name, stated plainly that “the connection is unclear,” and decided not to publish a report. Should Tachikawa’s citizens sigh with relief, or feel a little let down? I would like to take this episode as a story about Tachikawa’s integrity. Inconvenient legends and convenient ones alike: what cannot be verified is written down as unverifiable. That, I think, is the dignity of a city history.

Issue 19 of Tachikawa Monogatari also traces Ninkan’s life. Ninkan was the son of the Minister of the Left, Minamoto no Toshifusa, and an orthodox esoteric monk trained at Daigo-ji. In 1113 (Eikyu 1), he was caught up in an alleged plot to assassinate Emperor Toba and exiled to Ohito in Izu (today’s Izunokuni City, Shizuoka). The following year, a report reached the capital that Ninkan had killed himself by leaping from a rock. Yet the entry for 1129 (Daiji 4) in the same diary says that Ninkan had been pardoned and was to be summoned back to the capital. A man supposedly dead was pardoned seventeen years later. Kondo, who wrote the article, follows the local town history in preferring to think that Ninkan attempted suicide but survived, spent seventeen years in Izu and returned to the capital. The real man saddled with the infamy of founding a heretical sect was much plainer, and much more to be pitied.

Incidentally, the Tachikawa-ryu school of rakugo (traditional comic storytelling) is read “Tatekawa,” according to an encyclopedia’s disambiguation page. That is yet another matter entirely, unrelated to esoteric Buddhism. Considering that the medieval Tachikawa clan seems to have called itself “Tatekawa,” the two characters 立川 have travelled a long way, depending on how you read them.

That is enough of the detour. Back to 1590. The fate of the Tachikawa clan was decided on a mountain in Hachioji.

The fall of Hachioji Castle and the road to Mito: the scattering of the Tachikawa clan

In the Warring States period, the Tachikawa clan served the Hojo clan of Odawara. Noritake Yuichi, a committee member of the city-history project’s ancient and medieval section, traces the family’s fate afterwards in issue 10 of Tachikawa Monogatari.

Tracing the genealogy of the Tachikawa family that served the Mito domain, its direct ancestry can only be followed back to Tachikawa Noto no Kami, who served Hojo Ujiteru, lord of Hachioji Castle. Noto no Kami’s son, Kunai, became a ronin, a masterless samurai, after Hachioji Castle fell in 1590 (Tensho 18). Then in 1618 (Genna 4), he relied on Nakayama Nobuyoshi, son of Nakayama Ienori, once a senior retainer of Ujiteru, who had become a chief retainer of the Mito domain, and entered Mito’s service.

According to an encyclopedia’s entry on Hachioji Castle, when a huge Toyotomi army attacked on the 23rd day of the 6th month of 1590, the lord, Ujiteru, was at Odawara Castle, and among the senior retainers defending the castle was Nakayama Kageyu Ienori. The castle fell in a single day. So Kunai, 28 years later, turned to the son of a man who had fought in that castle. After his lord’s house was destroyed and a long life as a masterless samurai, he found a post by following ties back to the same old castle. Even a Warring States samurai’s job hunt needed connections.

The Mito branch of the Tachikawa clan lasted about 150 years after that. But in 1768 (Meiwa 5), under Tachikawa Shigefusa, the family was punished with banishment and died out. The Kamakura-period documents handed down in the house passed to the family of Suwa, a village doctor, into which Shigefusa’s daughter had married. In 1814 (Bunka 11), Komiyama Fuken, a Mito samurai who collected old documents and compiled gazetteers, recorded copies of nine documents in his gazetteer Suifu Shiryo. But the whereabouts of the originals remained unknown for a long time.

The originals were in another house. Apart from the family that served the Mito domain, the Tachikawa clan had a branch that had earlier become retainers of the Satake clan of Hitachi-Ota, stayed on in Hitachi-Ota and returned to farming. It later became clear that the originals of the documents Fuken copied had been handed down in this Hitachi-Ota family. The city library’s research guide even lists a book titled The Tachikawa of Nishinaka, Hitachi-Ota. Among the fields of Ibaraki, the Tachikawa name lived on.

Spear commissioners of Iwatsuki: the “Tachikawa” who fought in Saitama

The Mito family was not the only one to scatter.

According to Noritake, in the Warring States period, among the Iwatsuki-shu, the retainer band of the Iwatsuki Ota clan based at Iwatsuki Castle (in today’s Saitama City), later absorbed into the Hojo’s vassals, the names of four men appear in Hojo sources: Tachikawa Shikibu no Jo, Tachikawa Tozaemon no Jo, Tachikawa Iga no Kami and Tachikawa Yamashiro no Kami. Noritake calls them the “Iwatsuki Tachikawa.” Since members of the Koma family of Takahata-go, right next to Tachikawa-go, were also among the Iwatsuki-shu, he thinks it highly likely that the Iwatsuki Tachikawa also came from Tama District.

Shikibu no Jo and Tozaemon no Jo appear in sources from about 1571 (Genki 2) to 1577 (Tensho 5), after which they are replaced by the names Iga no Kami and Yamashiro no Kami. The two pairs are thought to be the same men, renamed after receiving provincial titles from the Hojo. In peacetime they served as storehouse commissioner, construction commissioner and crop-inspection commissioner. Keeping the tax-rice storehouses, directing building works, estimating harvests. Today, an official combining finance, construction and agricultural policy.

A Hojo vermilion-seal order dated the 13th day of the 7th month of 1577 is a famous source showing how the Hojo organised their forces. It sets out, for the Iwatsuki-shu’s deployment, the units by weapon and the commissioner in charge of each, totalling some 1,580 men. In it, Tachikawa Tozaemon no Jo serves as commissioner of small banners and of watch-fires, while Tachikawa Shikibu no Jo serves as commissioner of spears, of watch-fires and of the baggage train. The spear unit, with some 600 men, is the largest in this formation.

The duties of the small-banner commissioner are written down too. At the signal to march, gather the soldiers carrying small banners, and during the march keep them going “without letting them speak”; in other words, no talking. Count the banners, and report if any are missing. Even Warring States marches had someone in charge of banning chatter. Six hundred spears and some 120 small banners advancing in silence. At the side of that column stood a man bearing the Tachikawa name.

Descendants of that line have been found too. The genealogy of the Saido family of the Iwatsuki-shu records that one daughter became “wife of Tachikawa Iga no Kami” and bore Tachikawa Iwami no Kami. Iwami no Kami appears in the Edo-period gazetteer Shinpen Musashi Fudokiki as the founder of Hosho-in in Kamiya village, Adachi District (today’s Konosu City, Saitama). Hosho-in was abandoned and only its Yakushi hall remains, but the city-history survey confirmed that the hall still holds the memorial tablet of Tachikawa Kanbei, Iwami no Kami’s great-great-grandson. It was further learned that descendants of Iwami no Kami live in Konosu City, and two death registers from that household newly revealed the posthumous Buddhist names of Iga and Iwami, among other things.

Noritake writes that confirming descendants beyond Mito and Hitachi-Ota is one of the city-history project’s major achievements. However, no genealogical link has been confirmed between Tachikawa Iga no Kami and the Tama Tachikawa clan who handed down the Tachikawa Documents, and the mystery remains. The integrity of not forcing an answer is here too.

You may, by chance, meet someone with the surname Tachikawa in Saitama or Ibaraki. The chance that their family’s death register connects, somewhere, with the bed of the Tama River is not zero.

Homecoming after 700 years: how the Tachikawa Documents came back

Now, back to the documents handed down in Hitachi-Ota.

In 2000 (Heisei 12), Tachikawa Akira, a descendant of the Hitachi-Ota Tachikawa family, donated the documents to Tachikawa City: 14 documents mounted on two scrolls. Nine of them were the originals of the documents Komiyama Fuken had copied into Suifu Shiryo. The other five were not originals but copies, yet they were copies of Kamakura-period documents that had never been known before.

The story does not stop there. The following year, 2001 (Heisei 13), three original Kamakura-period documents were found in the home of Tachikawa Akiko, another descendant of the Hitachi-Ota Tachikawa. They turned out to be the originals of three of the five copies handed down by Tachikawa Akira. The copies came home first, and the real documents they were copied from turned up a year later in another house. Paper that had been handed down in two separate households came together again as a single bundle in the land of the name, nearly 700 years on.

Tachikawa City designated the nine documents held by the museum as municipal tangible cultural properties in 2001 (Heisei 13), and added the three privately held documents to the designation in 2017 (Heisei 29). Conservation work was carried out in fiscal 2018 (Heisei 30). According to the city’s newsletter, the nine had been backed with paper and mounted as scrolls, but crudely, leaving folds and damage. The conservation used a method called leaf-casting, in which paper fibres suspended in water are poured into the missing areas, and removing the old backing made it possible to record, for the first time, the kao, stylised signatures, written on the backs of the documents.

Noritake sums up the documents’ value in one sentence: in Tachikawa, and indeed in Tokyo as a whole, where almost no coherent body of samurai-family documents survives, this group of documents occupies a unique position as an extremely valuable resource. In Tokyo, there are almost no cases of a Kamakura-period warrior family’s documents surviving as a set. One of those rare few belongs to the family that bears the Tachikawa name.

Seen from Showa-era Tachikawa, this homecoming is close to a miracle. At the time of the old History of Tachikawa City, published in 1968 (Showa 43), the whereabouts of the original Tachikawa Documents were still unknown. The only clue was the nine copies that Komiyama Fuken had written into Suifu Shiryo in the Edo period. The documents of the family that gave the city its name were known in those days only as copies on paper. Now the originals, conserved, are in the museum’s storeroom. The authentic brushstrokes that Showa-era local historians could not read are printed in photographs in the Reiwa-era city history.

In another issue, the city’s newsletter also writes that it is remarkable that documents written some 700 years ago have been passed down to the present, and that even though the Tachikawa clan once left the land of Tachikawa, the documents have come back. The clan itself did not return. But the paper the family wrote did. Today it sleeps in the Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore, in a storeroom with controlled temperature and humidity.

As I wrote at the start, you will not meet a household of Tachikawa clan descendants walking around Tachikawa. But the memory of the family that gave the city its name went round Mito, Hitachi-Ota, Iwatsuki and Konosu, and came back to Tachikawa after 700 years. Tachikawa, sometimes called an unremarkable town, may in fact be the town in Tokyo that received the latest-arriving letter home.

Quiz answer

The answer is B, Hitachi-Ota. According to the city-history project’s commentary, apart from the family that served the Mito domain, the Tachikawa clan had a branch that became retainers of the Satake clan, stayed on in Hitachi-Ota and returned to farming, and the original Tachikawa Documents were handed down in that family. Tachikawa Akira donated them in 2000, and the following year three more originals were found in the home of Tachikawa Akiko. The Mito family died out in 1768, and the Konosu family descends from the Iwatsuki Tachikawa.

Before you go

• Fusai-ji Temple (the reputed site of the Tachikawa clan residence): 4-chome Shibasaki-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. According to Tachikawa Monogatari, about 700 metres west of Shibasaki-Taiikukan Station on the Tama Monorail; you can also walk from the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station. The grounds belong to the temple, so observe temple etiquette and walk quietly. Check with the temple before visiting whether, and when, the National Treasure six-sided stone pillar can be viewed.
• Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore (立川市歴史民俗資料館): 3-12-34 Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. It holds the Tachikawa Documents. They are not necessarily always on display, so check exhibitions, opening days and hours on the city’s facility page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisetsu/1008065/1008098.html (Japanese)
• Route: The city’s walking course “Old Villages” starts at the South Exit of Tachikawa Station and takes in Suwa Shrine, Fusai-ji, the Museum of History and Folklore and more. Map on the city’s official page: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004848/1004889.html (Japanese)
• To combine with: Below the terrace where Fusai-ji stands runs the Ne River green path, and beyond it the Tama River. You can walk the riverbed where the Battles of Tachikawara were fought along the route in this series’ “Ne River and Tama River” story. Suwa Shrine in Shibasaki-cho features in the “Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine” story. If you want to go further, there are the ruins of Hachioji Castle (Hachioji City), the castle of Hojo Ujiteru, whom Tachikawa Noto no Kami served.
• To learn more about the Tachikawa clan: The city library’s research guide recommends Chusei Bushi Tachikawa-shi Kankei Shiryoshu: Tachikawa Monjo (Tachikawa City Board of Education, 2010) and the Shinpen Tachikawa Shishi, Shiryo-hen: Kodai/Chusei (both in Japanese). Issues 5, 10, 13, 17 and 19 of the city-history newsletter Tachikawa Monogatari can be read on the Comprehensive Database of Archaeological Site Reports in Japan: https://sitereports.nabunken.go.jp/ja/article/121454 (Japanese)
• Getting there: From Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line west to Tachikawa. Carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO; it saves buying tickets if you switch to the Tama Monorail.

After walking 700 years, by the North Exit

Head back from the Shibasaki terrace to the station and go straight through to the North Exit. From rice-field deeds of 700 years ago to a Warring States march and the long journey to Mito and Hitachi-Ota, your mind has walked a long way today. Your legs have done their share too, on the slopes of the terrace.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, on the 3rd floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebono-cho, Tachikawa, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a lava-stone hot yoga studio where you practise in a room laid with lava-stone plates. There is also 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, with no difference by day of the week, whether you are on your way back from looking at old documents or about to start a morning round of temples.

A trial yoga lesson costs ¥1,980 (tax included), with two bath towels, one face towel and a mat rental included, so you can come with nothing but yourself. 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.

• Studio website: https://ontheshore.jp/
• Book a trial lesson: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

Even the soldiers told to keep quiet by the small-banner commissioner must have let out a long, deep breath at the end of the day.

Cover photo: Fusai-ji Temple in Shibasaki-cho, the Zen temple said to have been founded as the Tachikawa clan’s family temple (Photo: Nesnad / CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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