Tachikawa (Former Tachikawa Airfield) about 60 years ago and today

History of Tachikawa (Former Tachikawa Airfield)

North of Tachikawa Station there is a single lot, long from north to south. The west half is lawn, woods, and ponds, and the east half is blocks lined with government buildings and tall towers, and between them a single runway still runs north and south. This was once Tachikawa Airfield. The urban planning master plan of the City of Tachikawa records that an airfield was set up here in 1922 because there was a railway, it was close to the capital, and the land was flat. Until an airport was built at Haneda it was also used for civil aviation, and Tachikawa was for a time called "the capital of the sky". The paved surface on the east side of that airfield, where airplanes stood in rows, appears at the center of the aerial photograph.

From the army to the US military

The railway came before the airfield. In 1889 the Kobu Railway opened between Shinjuku Station and Tachikawa Station and the north exit of the station opened; the Ome Railway came in 1894, the Nambu Railway in 1929, and the Itsukaichi Railway in 1930, and Tachikawa became a town where tracks gathered. The airfield was placed north of that station. In the aerial photographs too, the southern end of the base and the bundle of station tracks are only one band of town apart.

From the late 1920s, the airfield became a base of the army, and military facilities and airplane factories increased around it. After the war it was requisitioned by the US military and became Tachikawa Air Base, and people who worked at the base and shops serving American soldiers gathered around the station. When the US military planned in 1955 an expansion that would extend the runway north, the Sunagawa Struggle by opposing residents broke out. The plan was abandoned in 1968, and the following year flights of US military aircraft stopped. In the meantime, in 1963, the City of Tachikawa and Sunagawa Town merged, and the city's area took almost its present shape. The city's materials record that the land on the north side bought up for the expansion was left unused for a long time even after the plan was dropped.

The 1961-69 photograph shows this base while it was still operating. A long, narrow band runs north and south through the left side of the frame, and beside it several white cross-shaped airplanes line up their wings. At the center a wide gray paved surface opens up, and several aircraft are parked there as well. On the east edge of the pavement, many long buildings with gabled roofs stand in parallel, and at the upper right of the frame, buildings with large white roofs that look like warehouses form a cluster. Outside the base, the station tracks run east and west in a bundle in the lower part of the frame, and a town of small roofs packed eave to eave lies both south and east of them. In the middle on the right, a stadium with an oval track can be seen. The size of the grain of the ground inside and outside the base differs: inside is wide pavement and long buildings, and outside is filled with fine rows of houses.

Pavement without airplanes

In the 1974-78 photograph, not a single airplane can be seen. The band on the left remains as one dark line, and the paved surface at the center is surrounded by dry brown ground and has turned faint in places as if peeled. The long buildings on the east edge and the cluster of warehouses at the upper right are in the same positions as in the previous era. According to the city's materials, the move of the US military to Yokota Air Base was announced, and in 1977 Tachikawa Air Base was fully returned. The photograph of this era captures the airfield that was no longer used, around the time of the return.

In the 1979-83 photograph, yellow, withered grassland covers most of the center, and only the outline of the pavement remains as faint lines. Around the warehouses at the upper right, countless white dots are scattered. They appear to be rows of parked cars. The use of the returned land was decided in a national report in 1979, which divided it among a national government park, a wide-area disaster prevention base, and town development. In 1983 the national Showa Kinen Park partly opened.

In the 1984-86 photograph, the left side of the frame moves first. On the band on the left, white dividing marks line up, and beside it a building with a large white roof that looks like a hangar and a wide, neatly divided parking surface appear. Farther left, at the edge, park paths curve around a pond, which shows that work on the park is advancing. The grassland at the center is still wide and empty, with only one reddish-brown square surface added at the southern end. In the 1987-90 photograph, a cluster of buildings and traces of construction appear toward the west of the center, and work on the vacant land has begun.

A town built on the site of the capital of the sky

The grassland at the center has become, as of 2026, a grid of blocks, and large buildings with white roofs and mid-rise towers line up lot by lot. Along its east edge a single street extends north and south, and tall buildings overlap more thickly as it nears the station. The thin line over this street appears to be the track of the Tama Toshi Monorail Line, which opened along its whole length in 2000. National government agencies moved onto the site one after another, and the redevelopment of the Tachikawa Base Site Related District created Faret Tachikawa, a block of offices and shops.

The left half is covered with the greenery of the park whose construction had begun in 1984-86. The pond at the left edge still remains in the same shape, and woods with dense crowns fill the area around it. The runway has not disappeared either. The band on the left still extends north and south with its white marks, and the large roofs that look like hangars line up in the same place. The city's materials write that the Tokyo Fire Department and Camp Tachikawa were placed at the wide-area disaster prevention base, and that building heights in the surrounding districts are limited under the Civil Aeronautics Act. Only the runway keeps its direction from those days, squeezed between the blocks and the park.

There is one more way the past remains that is easy to miss. The row of long gabled buildings that lined the east edge of the pavement in 1961-69 appears in the same direction in 1974-78 and in 1987-90, and in today's photograph too, long, narrow buildings with white roofs stand in parallel on the east side of the monorail street. Both the number of buildings and their spacing are much like those in the days of the black-and-white photographs. The cluster of warehouses at the upper right also continues as a corner lined with large roofs, even as the color of the roofs changed and some were replaced by new buildings. During the decades in which the grassland at the center changed into blocks, the row on its east edge hardly lost the shape it had in the days of the base.

The airfield site was divided into three parts, the park, the disaster prevention base, and the town, and each changed its look at a different speed. The oval stadium in the middle on the right and the bundle of station tracks in the lower part of the frame appear in the same places in every era from 1961-69 on, showing that the framework of the town outside the base did not move.