Tachikawa from Yokota Air Base: A Weekend Guide and Things to Do

Stationed at Yokota? The base was born in 1940 as an annex of Tachikawa’s airfield. Take the Ome Line for a weekend of parks, art, Antarctica and ramen.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

There is a street address in Tachikawa that no Tachikawa resident can visit. According to the encyclopedia’s entry on the Nishisuna-cho district, the whole of Nishisuna-cho 7-chome lies inside the grounds of Yokota Air Base. A block of the city, with a Tachikawa postcode, behind a fence. Fussa City’s own table of the base’s land agrees in its dry way: of Yokota’s roughly 7.136 square kilometres, 0.29 square kilometres are provided by Tachikawa City.

So here is a small puzzle for anyone stationed at Yokota. Some days, on some corner of the flight line, you may already be in Tachikawa. Yet most people who live on the base know Tachikawa only as the big station where the Ome Line ends, the place you pass through on the way to Shinjuku. You have, in a sense, been living in the back garden of a town you have never been introduced to.

I would like to make the introduction. Not with a list of attractions, but with the papers that tie the two places together, and then with a weekend. The papers say something surprising: Yokota did not merely end up next to Tachikawa. It was born as Tachikawa’s child. And the weekend says something else: that a city a quarter of an hour’s ride from Ushihama can stand beside central Tokyo without apologising.

For years, people from the Yokota community have been coming to Tachikawa. This is written for the ones who have not come yet, and for the ones who have but never asked why the town feels oddly familiar.

Is Yokota in Tachikawa? The 0.29 square kilometres

Start with the map. Fussa City lists the municipalities that host Yokota Air Base: Fussa, Tachikawa, Akishima, Musashimurayama and Hamura cities, and Mizuho town. Five cities and one town. Fussa provides 46.5 percent of the land, 3.317 square kilometres, which is about a third of Fussa itself. Tachikawa’s 0.29 square kilometres is 4.1 percent of the base and 1.2 percent of Tachikawa. A small share. But a share.

Tachikawa’s piece sits on the city’s western edge, in Nishisuna-cho, “West Sand Town.” The city’s own walking guide for that district contains a quietly remarkable sentence. Shinmei-sha, a village shrine founded around 1718 as the guardian of Nakazato Shinden, a farming settlement carved out of wild land in the Edo period, used to stand at the western end of the village. It was moved to its present site because of the expansion of Yokota Air Base. A god that had stayed put for some two and a half centuries packed up and moved to make room for a base. Even the gods, here, had to adjust to the neighbours.

There is also a railway station with a Tachikawa address on the base’s eastern side. Seibu Railway’s official page gives Seibu-Tachikawa Station’s address as 1-21-2 Nishisuna-cho, Tachikawa. The encyclopedia lists it as the station for Gate 17, the East Gate, which it also names as the entry gate for the Sakura Festival. The gate’s station, at least, has a Tachikawa address.

That is the geographical answer to the opening puzzle. The historical answer is more interesting, and it starts eighteen years before Yokota had its name.

Yokota and Tachikawa: born in 1940 as Tachikawa’s annex

The Tachikawa City Museum of History and Folklore gives four reasons why the army built an airfield here. It was close to the capital. It had wide, flat land with no houses. It had a railway. And the weather was good. Construction was decided in the autumn of 1921, and in November 1922 the army’s 5th Air Battalion arrived. In July 1929 Japan’s first scheduled civilian passenger service flew from Tachikawa to Osaka. By the 1930s Tachikawa was being called “the capital of the sky.”

A capital needs suburbs. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s survey of US bases in Tokyo states it plainly: in 1940 the Army’s Tama Airfield was established as an annex of the former Army Tachikawa Airfield, and in 1942 the Army Air Testing Department was placed there, where new and prototype aircraft were flight-tested. The Fussa Tourism Association tells it the same way: in 1940 Tama Airfield was built as an annex of the Imperial Army’s Tachikawa Airfield.

An annex. The word means a building attached to a bigger one. Yokota, which Fussa City describes as the largest US Air Force base in Japan outside Okinawa, and the home of the headquarters of US Forces Japan, began life as Tachikawa’s spare room.

Then came 1945. Fussa City records that US forces entered on 6 September 1945 and took over the field, whose runway was then about 1,300 metres. The name came next, and it came, of all things, from a map. Fussa City says the base was formally opened on 15 August 1946 and was called Yokota after the word “YOKOTA” on a map drawn by the US Army’s Far East map service. The Tokyo government’s document explains the word: in October 1945 the runway was extended on requisitioned land, and the field was named “Yokota Airfield” after a place name in what was then Murayama village, today Musashimurayama City. The base took its name from a neighbour’s hamlet. It is a little like a house whose nameplate carries the surname of the family next door.

Meanwhile, the parent did not retire. Tachikawa Air Base, the US base on the old Japanese airfield, became the leading transport hub of the Far East. The city’s history newsletter says it was a hub for the US Military Air Transport Service (MATS), and that from 1956 military transport previously handled at Haneda was also received at Tachikawa’s terminal. The encyclopedia’s entry on the airfield gives an average, at the peak, of about 2,300 take-offs and landings a month. For a while, a great deal of America’s traffic in and out of the Far East passed through Tachikawa, and Yokota grew up next to it with a longer and longer runway. By 1960, the Tokyo document says, Yokota’s runway was 3,350 metres. It still is.

The day the planes moved west

How did the child end up with the parent’s planes? The paper trail is unusually precise.

In 1972 the Japanese government answered a written question in the House of Representatives about Tachikawa Air Base, and attached the US press release that had started it all: Release No. 69-54, dated 3 October 1969. It announced that flying operations at Tachikawa were expected to end in the near future, after most of the base’s flying units and flight activity had been transferred to the United States or to Yokota. The reason given was the cut in military spending announced in August by Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird and the President’s announcement of a 10 percent reduction in overseas personnel. The 815th Tactical Airlift Squadron, with its C-130 Hercules transports, would be withdrawn. Air America would gradually move its operations to Yokota. Several squadrons would be assigned to Yokota, including personnel attached to the 610th MASS there.

Fussa City’s chronology puts the result in one sentence: at the end of 1969, as flying stopped at Tachikawa Air Base, airlift units such as the C-130s moved to Yokota, and the next year the Air Force’s largest transport, the C-5A Galaxy, began operating there. In November 1974, the headquarters of US Forces Japan and the Fifth Air Force moved to Yokota from the Fuchu Air Station.

And Tachikawa? On 30 November 1977, Tachikawa Air Base was fully returned to Japan. The land became Showa Kinen Park, a national disaster-response base, a district of research institutes, a library and a city hall. The parent handed its aircraft to the child, and became a park.

Put the dates side by side and the relationship is hard to describe in any other way. 1940: Tachikawa gives birth to an annex. 1969: Tachikawa’s transports move into the annex. 1977: Tachikawa’s own fence comes down. If you are stationed at Yokota, a good part of your base’s story was written a few stops down the Ome Line.

Yokota and Tachikawa by the numbers

• 1940 — the year Tama Airfield, today’s Yokota, was built as an annex of Tachikawa Airfield. Yokota is younger than Tachikawa’s airfield by eighteen years, which in family terms makes it the late child.
• 0.29 — square kilometres of Yokota Air Base provided by Tachikawa City. Small enough to miss, large enough to have moved a shrine.
• 3,350 — the length of Yokota’s runway in metres, finished by 1960. Tachikawa planned to lengthen its own runway and never did. The child got the long legs.
• About 2,300 — average monthly take-offs and landings at Tachikawa at its peak, according to the encyclopedia. Roughly one every nineteen minutes, day and night.
• 69-54 — the number of the 1969 press release that ended flying at Tachikawa. Few press releases end up attached to a parliamentary answer.
• 14 — minutes from Ushihama to Tachikawa on a Saturday-morning rapid train in JR East’s current timetable. About the time it takes to drink one can of vending-machine coffee slowly, if you are the slow type.

The wanderer’s quiz

At Showa Kinen Park, on the site of the old Tachikawa Air Base, the 106 ginkgo trees along the formal canal are clipped flat into neat boxes. Why?

• A. To stop the trees dropping too many smelly ginkgo nuts on the path
• B. Because of an aviation height limit set by the runway next door
• C. To echo the shape of the old base hangars

The answer comes near the end.

The Ome Line from Fussa, Ushihama and Haijima to Tachikawa

Now the practical part. The JR Ome Line starts at Tachikawa. According to the encyclopedia, the Ome Railway opened the line from Tachikawa to Ome on 19 November 1894, and Haijima and Fussa stations opened that same day. Ushihama came later and in a hurry: as military facilities went up around Tama Airfield, the army ordered a temporary stop to be opened, which began on 1 March 1943 and at first sold tickets only to military personnel holding season passes. Ushihama was a base station before there was a base called Yokota.

On the line, the order of stations heading into Tachikawa runs Fussa, Ushihama, Haijima, Akishima, Nakagami, Higashi-Nakagami, Nishi-Tachikawa, Tachikawa. I checked JR East’s official timetable for Saturdays and holidays valid in October 2026. A few examples from a single morning:

• A rapid train leaves Fussa at 09:08 and Ushihama at 09:10, and reaches Tachikawa at 09:24.
• A local train leaves Fussa at 09:17, Ushihama at 09:19 and Haijima at 09:22, and reaches Tachikawa at 09:34.
• An Ome Special Rapid leaves Ushihama at 09:44 and reaches Tachikawa at 10:01, then carries on to Shinjuku, arriving at 10:29.

Timetables change, so treat these as a sense of scale, not a plan. The useful patterns are these. On the trains I checked, even the rapid and Ome Special Rapid trains stopped at every station between Fussa and Tachikawa, so you do not need to worry about which train to take for this stretch. In Ushihama’s timetable, trains marked for Tachikawa terminate there; the others run on into central Tokyo on the Chuo Line. And several of the through trains are listed with Green Car unreserved seats, the double-deck first-class cars; they cost extra on top of the fare, so check JR East’s rules before you settle in upstairs.

Two stations on the way deserve a note.

Haijima is where your weekend can branch. Seibu Railway’s station page lists transfers here to the JR Hachiko, Itsukaichi and Ome lines, and its own Haijima Line runs east to Seibu-Tachikawa and then Musashi-Sunagawa. Musashi-Sunagawa matters: it is the station for a shrine you will meet on Sunday.

Nishi-Tachikawa is one stop short of Tachikawa, and the park is right outside. According to Showa Kinen Park’s access guide, the Nishi-Tachikawa Gate is about two minutes’ walk from the station. A family coming from Fussa can reach a 180-hectare park without changing trains.

Riding like a local

A few habits make the ride easier. None of this is special to Tachikawa; it is simply how trains around Tokyo work.

• Carry an IC card such as Suica or PASMO. One card covers the JR lines, the Seibu line, the Tama Monorail and local buses, so you do not have to puzzle over fare charts at every gate.
• Keep it quiet. Since 1 October 2015, JR East and 36 other railway operators in the Kanto, Tohoku and Koshinetsu regions have used one shared message: near the priority seats, turn your phone off when the train is crowded; elsewhere, set it to silent mode and refrain from calls. In practice, carriages are hushed. Children are children, and nobody expects silence from a toddler; adults, though, are expected to keep their voices down.
• Carry some cash as well as cards. It is sensible to have yen on you, especially for small shops, shrine counters, festival stalls and the ticket machines that many ramen shops use. If you are unsure, ask before you order.
• Check the last train. Tachikawa’s evenings are lively, but the Ome Line home is not all-night. Look up the time before the second round.