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

Reason 2: about 30 km from central Tokyo, “just the right distance away”

The second hypothesis is distance.

The most memorable explanation of the distance between Tachikawa and central Tokyo came from an essay that the executive director of the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry contributed to a Chuo University publication in 2001. Tachikawa, it said, lies about 30 kilometres from the city centre at Marunouchi, and about 30 minutes in travel time from the Shinjuku sub-centre: a “semi-suburban” business core city, so to speak. Not suburban, but semi-suburban. That delicate phrase captures Tachikawa’s position well.

This “just the right distance away” has been named again and again in national and Tokyo government plans.

According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s history of its urban development, in its 1982 long-term plan, “My Town Tokyo”, the Tokyo government aimed for a “multi-core urban structure”: correcting a structure concentrated on a single point at the centre, and spreading business functions to the sub-centres and to Tama’s “cores”. The places designated as Tama’s cores were Hachioji, Tachikawa, Machida and others. The national government moved too. In Studies in Regional Science, the journal of the Japan Section of the Regional Science Association International, there is a record of a symposium reported by Naotake Togo, who had served as deputy director-general of the Tokyo government’s Urban Planning Bureau. According to it, the national Capital Reconstruction Plan of 1985 set out a policy of switching from dependence on a single pole, the ward area of Tokyo, to a structure of multiple cores and multiple zones. It decided to develop nine “business core cities”, including Tachikawa, Hachioji, Yokohama and Omiya, to take in business functions. This approach was built into the Fourth Basic Plan for the National Capital Region the following year.

In the same record, the Tokyo side goes a step further about what it hoped for from Tama’s cores. These cores, it says, should not merely be developed as places to receive business functions; as wide-area centres of daily life, they should be equipped with a combination of commercial, cultural and information functions, and play the role of an engine pulling Tama towards self-reliance. To that end, it says, the Tokyo government had drawn up a comprehensive development plan for the Tachikawa and Akishima area and was working to realise it. Unusually for an official document, there is real warmth in it. In a town expected by name to provide “commerce” and “culture”, department stores later gathered and Tokyo’s first cinema complex was born. Did the plan make the town, or did the town catch up with the plan? Probably both.

A distance of 30 kilometres from the centre is also a yardstick in urban planning research. A 2010 study by Ai Kondo and colleagues in the Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan examined railway interchange stations within a 30-kilometre radius of the middle of the Yamanote Line. The stations that handled more than 250,000 passengers a day in fiscal 2004, the paper says, were scattered mostly among the stations of business core cities, such as Yokohama, Kawasaki, Tachikawa and Omiya, and the stations on radial trunk lines. On the 30-kilometre ring stand the big “next centres” of Greater Tokyo. Tachikawa is one of them.

From here on, this is my own reading.

Draw a 30-kilometre circle around central Tokyo on a map, and most of the ring passes over Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa. The only place the ring runs through Tokyo itself is Tama, out west. When a new kind of suburban shop enters Greater Tokyo, its first store is usually built in a suburb outside Tokyo: IKEA’s Funabashi and Kohoku, the cinema complex in Ebina. And when the same type of business looks for its “first in Tokyo”, the only place on the 30-kilometre ring that belongs to Tokyo is Tama.

In other words, big “Tokyo first” stores come to Tama almost structurally. The administrative boundary called Tokyo pushes the suburban “firsts” west. On this reading, it also makes sense that Tokyo’s first Costco went to Machida rather than Tachikawa. Machida, too, was one of Tama’s cores.

Then, within Tama, why Tachikawa? For that, the third hypothesis is needed.

Reason 3: Tama’s junction — 113.2% and about 4.27 million people behind it

According to the city of Tachikawa’s overview, Tachikawa Station is served by the JR Chuo, Ome, Nambu and Itsukaichi lines, and the Tama Monorail links it north and south. The city itself calls Tachikawa Station a transport hub of the Tama area and describes the town as the Tama area’s commercial centre. In fiscal 2024, the average number of passengers boarding at Tachikawa Station per day was 154,091, the most of any station in the Tama area.

How many people are there behind this station? In the preliminary 2025 national census results published by the Tokyo government, the population of Tokyo’s cities outside the wards was 4,217,852, and of its counties (gun), 53,156. Together, about 4.27 million. Nearly 30 percent of Tokyo’s population lives in Tama. A number of people that rivals a whole prefecture spreads out west of the 23 wards. If a company opening its first shop in Tama were looking for the entrance, where would it choose?

Geography answered that more than 30 years ago. In 1993, Chiri Kagaku (Geographical Science), the journal of the Hiroshima Geographical Association, published Hiroki Yamashita’s paper “The growth of peripheral core cities in the Tokyo metropolitan area”, which compared where listed companies had placed their branches and sales offices, using company yearbooks for 1975 and 1985. According to it, by 1985 branches of construction and manufacturing companies had come to be placed in large numbers not only in prefectural capitals but also in regional centres one level down, such as Tachikawa and Atsugi. The paper calls Tachikawa the junction of the railway network in the Tama district. For branches of finance, insurance and real estate, too, central functions were concentrating rapidly in Hachioji after Omiya, and then in Tachikawa and Atsugi.

There is a passage about Tachikawa in this paper that made me laugh a little. It says: “despite the handicap of having no prefectural government office”. Of course Tachikawa has no prefectural office; it is in Tokyo. But to the scholar’s eye, Tachikawa apparently looked almost like a central city that had missed out on becoming a prefectural capital. The paper concludes that access to markets and customers is a necessary condition for opening branches. If a company puts its first office in Tama, it puts it where Tama’s people can most easily gather. Common sense, backed up by statistics.

How easily people gather also shows in the gap between daytime and night-time population. In the Tokyo government’s figures from the 2020 census, Tachikawa’s daytime population was 207,832, while 183,581 people lived there. The ratio of daytime to night-time population was 113.2, the highest of Tokyo’s 26 cities. According to a 2017 article presenting figures from RESAS, the national regional economy analysis system, in a ten-year tally from before the wave of large store openings, the total employee income of people living in Tachikawa was 475.8 billion yen, while the employee income of people working in Tachikawa was 627.5 billion yen. The difference: 151.7 billion yen. That is how many more people from other towns work in Tachikawa. Daytime Tachikawa runs on people borrowed from all over Tama.

The “centre of Santama” that Isetan’s history described was still alive, just as written, in statistics half a century later. Wide land might be found in other towns. Every town in Tama has the 30-kilometre distance. But a place where four railway lines and a monorail cross, and where this many people gather by day, Tama has only one. Reason 3 is what turned Tachikawa from “one of the towns in Tama” into “the entrance to Tama”.

Tachikawa’s “Tokyo firsts” in numbers

• 23 — tsubo. The size of the first shop Isetan opened in Tachikawa in 1947. A department store’s first step was a shelf of stationery.
• 453 — hectares. The state land returned in 1977. A wide runway for “firsts” to land on.
• 7 — IKEA Tachikawa’s place in the order of IKEA’s stores in Japan. Many of its seniors stand on the sites of former ski slopes and amusement parks.
• 37.5 — kilometres. The rail distance from Tokyo Station to Tachikawa Station. Not too far, not too close.
• 113.2 — percent. Tachikawa’s daytime-to-night-time population ratio in 2020, first among Tokyo’s 26 cities. By day, Tachikawa has some 24,000 more people than at night.
• 3 — the number of cinemas that called themselves “Japan’s first cinema complex” (those listed in the encyclopaedia). Firsts sometimes split.

Traveller’s detour quiz

In 1947, what did the first shop Isetan opened at the South Exit of Tachikawa Station mainly sell?

1. Kimono (B) Stationery and office supplies (C) Souvenirs for American soldiers

The answer comes near the end of this article.

Reason 4: a town used to new things arriving from outside

The last hypothesis is the hardest to check in documents. The town’s temperament.

Tachikawa is a town that began by welcoming what came from outside. An airfield opened in 1922, and in 1927 a Soviet goodwill aircraft flew in. According to the city chronology, that was the first foreign aircraft to come to Tachikawa; more followed, and Tachikawa Airfield became an “international airport”. After the war it became a US military base, and Tachikawa Monogatari (Tachikawa Stories), the newsletter of the city’s history compilation project, writes that the area around the base became the front line of American culture. Of a photograph of the Christmas decorations at Tachikawa Station in 1950, the same newsletter writes that the Santa Claus decorating the station and the transport aircraft symbolise it.

New ways of selling came from outside too. Of the self-service that Inageya adopted in 1956, the company history of Inageya says it was a method only just introduced to Japan at the time, and goes on to say the company then expanded its stores using American chain stores as its model. North of the station was a base where people from that model country worked.

But here I have to be honest. The explanation “new shops gather because the town is used to things from outside” is my own reading; no company announcement or paper says so. What the documents confirm stops just short of that. Isetan’s history gave the existence of the US base, and the number of people commuting to it, as a reason for opening the shop. The 1968 paper wrote that in Tachikawa, businesses advancing from the centre came early, and that local landowners and merchants often built buildings that Tokyo shops then rented. Cinema City began as the tenant of a theatre funded by local shopkeepers.

Beyond that is a traveller’s guess. The locals welcome what comes from outside, as landlords. If the shop they welcome takes root, the next one finds it easier to come. As that experience builds up over decades, perhaps both the town and the companies opening shops develop a kind of instinct: “try new things in Tachikawa first”.

Of course, Tachikawa has not always welcomed what came from outside. There were years when the town of Sunagawa was shaken by the fight over the expansion of the base, and the city’s history newsletter does not look away from the darker sides of a base town either. Welcoming was never easy. Even so, the town has turned what it welcomed into part of itself. IKEA stands on the site of the base, and Tokyo’s first cinema complex was built in the area where a former silent-film narrator had set up his cinemas. That deftness, I think, really is a talent of this town.

Was the western corner of Tokyo ever a corner?

Let’s go back to the first question. Why, in a city as huge as Tokyo, do the “firsts” gather in a town out west?

The answer the documents confirm is this. There was wide, flat returned land of a kind the centre could not offer. The national and Tokyo governments have named Tachikawa as one of “Tama’s cores” and a “business core city”, to take a share of the centre’s work. Four railway lines and a monorail cross here, making it the entrance for Tama’s roughly 4.27 million people. And Isetan opened its first branch here because it was the centre of Santama, because it had many government branch offices, and because so many people commuted to the US base.

Some answers remain my own reading. Of the 30-kilometre ring around central Tokyo, only Tama belongs to Tokyo, so the “Tokyo first” of a new suburban-style shop is structurally pushed out to Tama. And a town temperament of local landlords welcoming what comes from outside makes it easier to draw “firsts” in. These, I would like each reader to check for themselves.

When I had finished, I noticed a hasty assumption of my own. The city’s overview describes Tachikawa’s location as “almost at the centre of Tokyo, towards the west”. It was my eyes, looking at the map from the side of the 23 wards, that had taken it for a western corner. Tokyo keeps going a long way west of Tachikawa. Seen from Tama, Tachikawa is not a corner but the middle.

Back then, Isetan’s first shop was a 23-tsubo tin-clad hut at the station’s South Exit. People commuting to the base and students came to buy pencils and notebooks. Today, cross the deck at the North Exit of the same station and you find that department store with 490 times the floor space, Tokyo’s first cinema complex, and, a walk of about ten minutes away, Tokyo’s first IKEA. There cannot be many towns where you can walk around a set of Tokyo firsts in half a day.

From Shinjuku it is a single ride on the Chuo Line. From Kawasaki, just ride the Nambu Line to the end of the line without changing. Come once, on a weekend, and check with your own feet the place where Tokyo’s “firsts” came down to land. Stand at the North Exit and look around, and you will see at least one thing that was not there before.

New things in Tokyo did not always come from the west. It is just that, on their way into Tokyo, a great many of them first stepped off in Tachikawa.

Quiz answer

The answer is (B), stationery and office supplies. According to Isetan Hyakunenshi, as cited in the encyclopaedia, the Tachikawa shop opened at the South Exit of Tachikawa Station in October 1947 was a two-storey wooden building clad in corrugated tin, with 23 tsubo of floor space, and it sold stationery and office supplies to customers who were mostly students. Clothing increased only later.

Before you go

• Walking the “Tokyo firsts”: from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station, step out onto the elevated pedestrian deck; Isetan Tachikawa is connected to the station by the deck. Cinema City’s Cinema One is about 5 minutes’ walk from JR Tachikawa Station and about 3 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail (according to the official site). From there, head north through the Faret Tachikawa district: IKEA Tachikawa is about 10 minutes’ walk from the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station and about 7 minutes from Takamatsu Station on the monorail. On the way back, take the monorail to Tachihi Station for the first LaLaport in the Tama area.
• Getting there: Tokyo Station to Tachikawa Station is 37.5 km, about 40 minutes on the Chuo Line Special Rapid (according to the city of Tachikawa). From Shinjuku, take the JR Chuo Line to Tachikawa without changing trains. From Kanagawa, the JR Nambu Line links Kawasaki Station and Tachikawa Station with no change.
• IKEA Tachikawa (6 Midoricho, Tachikawa): official site https://www.ikea.com/jp/ja/stores/tachikawa/ . The official site recommends public transport because of traffic congestion in the area. Check opening hours on the official site.
• Cinema City: https://cinemacity.co.jp/ (check showtimes and prices on the official site)
• Isetan Tachikawa: access on the official site https://www.mistore.jp/store/tachikawa/access.html
• LaLaport Tachikawa Tachihi: https://mitsui-shopping-park.com/lalaport/tachikawa/
• The city chronology with Tachikawa’s one-line “firsts”: https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/shisei/gaiyo/1005930/1005948/1005965.html
• Combine with: in the morning, look for street art in Faret Tachikawa at the North Exit; from lunchtime, Isetan and Cinema City; in the afternoon, walk to IKEA. If you still have energy, go on past IKEA to Showa Kinen Park and measure the size of the returned land with your feet.
• General tips: carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO for trains, buses and the monorail, and check opening days on the official sites before you go.

After walking the “firsts”, back to Tachikawa Station’s North Exit

Walk around the North Exit following Tokyo’s “firsts” and your feet get more tired than you expect. The flat road from the station’s North Exit to the former base is surprisingly long.

A one-minute walk from the North Exit of JR 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 there is time to drop in whether you finished your shopping in the morning or are coming out of a late screening.

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. On a day when you are not carrying a flat-pack box, you can come empty-handed.

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, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself. She holds Eiken Grade 1 and a perfect TOEIC score, once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and lived in Alaska for three years. If you don’t speak Japanese, just mention it when you book.

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

Seventy-nine years ago, in front of this town’s station, a Tokyo department store took its first step with a 23-tsubo shop. A first time can always be small.

Cover photo: Tachikawa Station’s North Exit at night, with the lit-up Isetan Tachikawa beyond the pedestrian deck (Photo: Hector Martin / CC BY-SA 2.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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