Tachikawa History: Why Tokyo’s First IKEA and Cinema Complex Came Here

Tokyo’s first IKEA, its first cinema complex, Isetan’s first branch: why do they all land in Tachikawa? A walk through company histories, papers and plans.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tokyo’s first IKEA was built not in Shibuya, not in Shinjuku, but in Tachikawa (立川). Tokyo’s first cinema complex was born at Tachikawa Station’s North Exit too. And when Isetan, the great department store of Shinjuku, opened its first branch after the Second World War, the town it chose was Tachikawa.

Look into the shops and facilities that were “first in Tokyo”, and for some reason the name Tachikawa keeps coming up. It sits towards the west of a metropolis where 14 million people live, out in the Tama area, the long western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards. It is roughly the point where someone riding the Chuo Line out from the centre starts to feel they have come a fair way.

At first I assumed it was chance. A plot of land happened to fall empty; a shop happened to arrive. That, I thought, was all there was to it. But when I laid a passage from Isetan’s company history beside a geography paper from more than half a century ago and a list of IKEA’s stores, chance stopped covering it. Tachikawa seems to have something like a fixed route, a regular landing strip, for new things entering Tokyo.

Why, in a city as huge as Tokyo, do the “firsts” gather in a town out west? I decided to look for the answer by following the reasons companies wrote down, the numbers scholars measured, and the planning documents of the national and Tokyo governments.

Why does Tachikawa have so many “Tokyo firsts”? First, let’s count them

This series has already gathered up Tachikawa’s “firsts” once (see Tachikawa’s Japan firsts). Here I will only line them up again briefly.

In Showa 4 (1929), according to the city chronology, Japan’s first scheduled air service began between Tachikawa and Osaka. (Showa is the imperial era that ran from 1926 to 1989; Japanese local records count years by era, so I give both.) In 1947 Isetan opened its first branch in Tachikawa, and the shop drew attention as the first department store anywhere along the Chuo Line. In 1956, at the North Exit, a grocer called Inageya (稲毛屋) introduced self-service and became the first supermarket in “Toka”, the part of Tokyo outside the 23 wards. In 1965 the first traffic consultation office in Toka opened. In 1994 came Cinema City, Tokyo’s first cinema complex. In 2007, the first ecute, a shopping zone inside a JR station, which went so far as to open shops outside the ticket gates. In 2014, the first IKEA in Tokyo. The following year, the first LaLaport, a large shopping mall, in the whole Tama area opened in front of Tachihi Station.

Lined up like that it is quite a show, but it needs caveats.

First, not every Tokyo “first” is in Tachikawa. Tokyo’s oldest Costco, for example, is not in Tachikawa but in Machida, the Tamasakai warehouse, which opened in 2002. Second, the title of “first” itself sometimes wobbles. The encyclopaedia entry on cinema complexes notes that cinemas calling themselves “Japan’s first cinema complex” existed in Komaki in Aichi, in Omori in Tokyo, and in Kawasaki. Three Japan’s-firsts. Depending on how you count, “firsts” turn out to be surprisingly easy to produce.

Even so, Tachikawa’s list of firsts shows a pattern. Each one is the moment when something that until then existed only in central Tokyo, or only outside Tokyo, entered Tokyo’s suburbs for the first time. A department store branch, a supermarket, a cinema complex, IKEA, LaLaport. When something new comes into Tama from outside Tokyo, or from the centre, its first landing point is often Tachikawa.

Why? I set up four hypotheses. Wide, flat land of a kind the centre no longer has. A distance of about 30 kilometres from central Tokyo. A place where Tama’s railways tie together. And a town temperament used to welcoming what comes from outside. But before testing them, there was a document I wanted to read first. A company that had actually chosen Tachikawa as its “first shop” had written down its reasons itself.

1947: why Isetan opened its first branch in Tachikawa

The encyclopaedia entry on Isetan Tachikawa, citing Isetan Hyakunenshi (the company’s hundred-year history), describes the situation just after the war like this.

After the war, Isetan’s Shinjuku store was requisitioned by GHQ, the Allied occupation headquarters. To make up for its limited trading, Isetan opened small shops in various places. The Tachikawa shop was one of them. It opened in October 1947 by the South Exit of Tachikawa Station, along the tracks between what are now Shibasaki-Taiikukan and Tachikawa-Minami stations on the Tama Monorail. It was a two-storey wooden building clad in corrugated tin, with a total floor area of 23 tsubo, or 76 square metres. (A tsubo is the traditional Japanese unit of floor area, about the size of two tatami mats.) That is about the size of one family flat. What it sold was stationery and office supplies, to customers who were mostly students.

The memorable first branch of one of Japan’s great department stores was, in other words, a stationery shop. Clothing was added little by little afterwards, so presumably the company tested the waters with pencils and notebooks first.

And then the key part: the reasons. The company history explains in three phrases why Tachikawa looked promising. Tachikawa city lay at the centre of the Santama district (the three Tama counties, an old name for the Tama area), whose population was growing remarkably after the war. It had many branch offices of government agencies. And there was a large US military base, to which a great many workers commuted. So, it says, Tachikawa was coming to meet the conditions of a promising commercial location.

Reading this passage surprised me a little. Of the four hypotheses I had set up at the start, three were already written in a department store’s company history as reasons for opening a shop 79 years ago. Being the centre of Santama: the “junction”. Branch offices of the national government: “something the state put there”. The US base: “something that came from outside”. The reasons Tachikawa attracts firsts were apparently already visible just after the war to people with a good nose for business.

The stationery shop’s sales grew steadily. In February 1952 it moved into a rented two-storey wooden house at the North Exit, with 166 tsubo, or 547 square metres. Small as it was, the company history says, it drew attention as the first department store along the Chuo Line. In April 1956 it rented a reinforced-concrete building with one basement floor and five floors above ground in Akebonocho 2-chome and began trading as a full department store. It had two elevators, still a rarity in the district, and they got customers talking. In 1959 a rooftop restaurant with a view opened in the tower on the roof, and the view became famous.

Back then, in Tachikawa, riding an elevator was a small event in itself. Looking out from the restaurant above the department store at the flat town, the base beyond it, and on clear days the line of mountains: that was probably the luxury of a holiday in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Today, Isetan Tachikawa stands where you can walk straight in from the North Exit along the elevated pedestrian deck. The current store, opened in January 2001, has 37,500 square metres of sales floor, 2.8 times the previous store, and roughly 490 times the first little shop. A store that began with a shelf of pencils came this far in a little over half a century.

There is one more line in this company history that should not be missed. In September 1970 Isetan Tachikawa moved into a building with two basement floors and eight floors above ground and a total floor area of 22,000 square metres, built in Akebonocho 2-chome by a local merchant house, Suzuki Shoten, and named after the firm (金辰ビル). A local shop put up the building, and a Tokyo department store moved in.

In fact this pattern, “the locals build, Tokyo moves in”, is exactly what a geographer had written down as a feature of Tachikawa more than half a century ago.

The locals build, Tokyo’s shops rent: Tachikawa through a geographer’s eyes in 1968

In 1968 the Geographical Review of Japan (Chirigaku Hyoron), the journal of the Association of Japanese Geographers, published a paper titled “The increase of buildings in the cities of Tokyo’s western suburbs”. Its author was Koichi Nakazawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Educational Research. Using fixed-asset registers and interviews, he examined how multi-storey buildings had multiplied around the stations and shopping districts of eight cities: Hachioji, Tachikawa, Mitaka, Koganei, Fuchu, Chofu, Kodaira and Kunitachi.

According to the paper, Hachioji and Tachikawa were early: buildings began to multiply in earnest in Hachioji from around 1958, and in Tachikawa a little later, from around 1960. Mitaka, Fuchu and Koganei started after that.

The interesting part is the difference between Hachioji and Tachikawa. In Hachioji, local shops expanding their original trade and building on their own plots stood out: kimono shops, clothing shops, confectioners, china shops. Local shops trading in local buildings. Of Tachikawa, on the other hand, the paper says this: that businesses advancing from the centre came early, and that ownership of the land and the building was often separate from the management of the retail business. That, it says, is why there were many mixed-use buildings.

The notes put it more concretely. The land and the building belong to powerful local merchants or landowners, and a department store or quasi-department store advancing from the centre rents space in it. Exactly the same shape as Isetan moving into the Suzuki Shoten building.

Insurance companies come into it too. Branch offices of life and fire insurers had moved into buildings early in Hachioji, but a little later branch-level offices suddenly multiplied in Tachikawa. According to the interviews, several of the life insurers’ branches in Tachikawa had previously been in Hachioji and were moved and reopened in Tachikawa. The paper sums up that the spread of insurance companies in Tokyo’s western suburbs was organised with Tachikawa as the primary base and the other cities as secondary bases. A Hachioji resident reading this paper might feel a little complicated about it.

Here I saw a clue for my fourth hypothesis. Perhaps Tachikawa had a habit of the locals preparing the “vessel” first, to receive what came from outside. The landowner builds, and the Tokyo shop rents. Department stores and insurance companies alike enter Tachikawa first, then spread to the other towns of Tama.

The same shape appears in the cinemas. According to Tachikawa Billboard, a record of Tachikawa’s film culture, the Cinema City company began in 1951 by renting the Tachikawa Central Theatre at the North Exit, which local shopkeepers and residents had put money into. That landlord-and-tenant relationship, it says, continues today. Beneath Tokyo’s first cinema complex, too, there was a local landlord.

But preparing a vessel is not enough to bring Tokyo’s shops. However fine the vessel, nothing starts unless the outside has a reason to want to go to Tachikawa. From here I will look at Tachikawa from the side of the companies opening shops, testing the four hypotheses one at a time.

Reason 1: wide, flat land the centre no longer has

The first hypothesis is the easiest to grasp. Land.

According to Cabinet Office materials, Tachikawa Airfield was fully returned (by the US military) in November 1977, and the state-owned land handed back at that point came to 453 hectares. There are not many towns in the Greater Tokyo area where that much flat land, in one piece, came back within walking distance of the station. Showa Kinen Park (Showa Memorial Park), the disaster-response base, Faret Tachikawa and later IKEA all stand on that land. I have written about it several times in other parts of this series, so here I will just leave the number.

What I want to check here is whether the “Tokyo first” shops really were looking for wide land.

Read the history of IKEA’s Japanese stores in order in the encyclopaedia entry, and you can’t help laughing. Japan’s first store, opened in Funabashi in 2006, was built on part of the site of a former indoor ski slope. The Kohoku store, the same year, on the former site of a car dealer’s base. The Kobe store in 2008, on the site of a former amusement park. The Tsurumi store in Osaka, on reclaimed land that had been earmarked for a home-improvement centre. And in 2014, IKEA Tachikawa, opened as the seventh store, was built on state land acquired on the site of the former Tachikawa base. A ski slope, a car dealer, an amusement park, an airfield. IKEA seems very fond of wide land left behind after something has gone.

Conversely, IKEA’s first city-centre store in Japan opened in 2020, in Jingumae in Shibuya Ward. A store shaped like a huge warehouse cannot get into the city centre. To get in, it had to change the shape of the store itself. So Tokyo’s first IKEA came not to the centre but to a Tama town where wide land had fallen vacant. That much the documents more or less support.

I should say, though, that I could not confirm the announcement in which IKEA itself explained “why Tachikawa”. What remains in the press coverage from the opening is that the store promoted being easy to reach by train, and that in a survey of people living nearby many answered that they were short of storage, so the storage department was made about twice the size of the existing stores’. The Scandinavian company had properly researched even the state of Tachikawa’s cupboards.

Cinema complexes took the same road. According to the encyclopaedia entry on cinema complexes, when the modern multiplex arrived in Japan in the 1990s, they were mostly placed along arterial roads in the suburbs. The Ebina cinema opened in 1993 by Warner Mycal Cinemas, which led the early days, was also inside a suburban shopping centre. The same entry says that in the old downtown districts, where cinemas used to line the streets, land was expensive and making a profit was thought difficult. The new kind of cinema entered Japan from the suburbs first.

In Tachikawa’s case, land readjustment overlapped with this. (Land readjustment is the Japanese planning method of pooling and redrawing plots to make room for new roads and buildings.) According to Tachikawa Billboard, in 1992 the large land readjustment at the North Exit and the plan for Faret Tachikawa meant that the three cinemas in that area would also move into buildings, and Cinema City, Tokyo’s first cinema complex, was born. The huge job of reorganising the land happened to coincide with the arrival in Japan of a new form of cinema. The year after Ebina, as if following it, Tokyo’s first cinema complex lit up in Tachikawa.

In 2015, in front of Tachihi Station, named because it adjoins the site of the former Tachikawa Airfield, the first LaLaport in the Tama area opened. There is wide land, and new suburban-style shops come to it. Reason 1 can be confirmed fairly clearly in the documents.

But wide land exists in other suburbs of Greater Tokyo too. Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa have no shortage of former sites. So why do Tokyo’s “firsts” come to Tama, and within Tama, to Tachikawa? On the next page I want to start with distance.