Stars & Stripes August 28, 1977
Like An Old Soldier – Tachikawa Just Fades Away
By: Hal Drake
An American community on the edge of western Tokyo quietly died this weekend,
a victim of history and changing times.
Tachikawa AB was empty but hardly desolate. Flowers still bloomed around long
blocks of attractive houses and duplexes, triplexes and quadruplexes. Many lawns
were as neatly clipped as GI haircuts, left that way by Americans who loved their
little America and kept it conscientiously spotless.
There were even a few diehard picnickers near the boarded up BX and the old
theater that was as cavernously vacant as the thing it had once been – a wind tunnel.
For 32 years, Americans had lived here in a miniature town that might have been
imported whole from rural Iowa or southern Illinois – first as occupiers of a
conquered country, then at the sufferance of former enemies who became firm but
conditional friends.
Times had changed and the Japanese wanted Tachikawa back as a condition to
continued American presence elsewhere. So the last Americans moved out in
melancholy procession, moving into newly built houses at nearby Yokota AB or the
Tower Apartments that take up altitude instead of space. Many were disdainful
of their new home, feeling they were trading a small, friendly town for an
impersonal metropolis.
One recent Saturday, retired Army 1st Sgt. Patrick TYRRELL, a maintenance man for
the Japan Regional Exchange, sat in the bar of a club run by Veterans of Foreign Wars
Post 9794 – “The best damned watering hole in the Far East,” its members proclaimed it. There was an 1890’s period piece nude on the wall and the
companionable atmosphere of a truck stop or a neighborhood bistro. Now,
furniture was being carried out and salvageable fixtures were carefully being
removed.
“I got to tear it down, and it’s tearing my heart out to do it,” mourned Tyrrell. He
was waiting for sundown and a Milky Way of fireworks that would herald the end of
something, a fiery farewell to the Japanese-American Friendship Festival, a 22 year
old tradition that was being run for the last time.
Since 1955, the gates had been thrown open for two days to swarms of Japanese.
Americans donned kimono and tried their sincere if awkward best to master the
intricacies of Japanese dance. There was always the glittering canopy of fireworks
and the combined atmosphere of a Japanese festival and an American Fourth of
July.
“Always so much happy,’ said 67 year old Mrs. Yuko SHIRAKAWA. “Now gone. No
more.”
“Nothing at Yokota,” said Sgt. Jim SWAFFORD. “No trees, parks, picnic grounds or
anything. Just a big city.” Others echoed him.
Tachikawa had all of these sorely missed things. It also had 10 clubs, three swimming pools, two base exchanges, a Masonic Lodge and a Roxy sized movie
house that was a tribute to ingenuity. Outside the chain link fencers that protected
the base but did not insulate it, five towns and one fair sized city survived, then
thrived, because of a sportive conqueror who was spender, protector and friend.
Now, just outside the old main gate that fed traffic into Tachikawa City, the Arai
Tailor Shop that specialized in form fitted fatigues had that long shut down look.
The old Club Sunset, where a giggling hostess gulped down high priced drinks as if
they were colored water. The Last Chance Bar was sealed by a rusty padlock. The
Club Esquire still was there, at least the building was, with a new front and a timely
change of name.
“All the leaves are brown,” blared a radio from a vegetable shop, a song that told of
changing times and things that had passed on. Beyond the busy little shops were
tall department stores and expensive restaurants – none of the relic signs, with
comically misspelled English, to beckon American business.
But the city is a thing alive. The base, as far as the vanished Americans are concerned, is a lifeless shell.
There no longer is the ascending roar of gigantic transport planes cutting contrails
toward the Korean and Indochina Wars, toward disaster victims who stood on their
rooftops above a flood, toward even besieged and divided Berlin. That all ceased
in 1969 when the base became a housing area and began to die.
At house 3799 on the west side of the base – the side last occupied by Americans -
a backyard fenced by a hedge and spruce trees was a gone-to-seed jungle with an
empty bottle of barbeque sauce thrown under a bush and a once well swept side
walk caked with a moonscape of dried mud. Signs named some of the last residents
of other homes. Capt. J.M. Stamp left well tended shrubs at 3790, but they were
quickly being engulfed by weeds.
A single red flower on a stalk that looked like fern, grew beside a telephone pole
near another house. It looked like someone’s private and sentimental project -
perhaps tended by the hands of a child.
It was all so different......a long time before.
Norman A. SAPIRO, an engineer with the 475th Air Base Wing, got here in 1947.
“Monstrous” bomb craters still pocked the base, lately taken over from the Imperial
Japanese Army Air Corps in an emotionless exchange of documents between an
American colonel and a tired Japanese general. This had been the “Wright Field of
Japan,” a place where aircraft like the Hayabusa fighter plane had been built and
tested. As such the base had magnetized flocks of American bombers that left it
looking like the face of a dead planet. The town had caught a distressing number of
near misses.
Kenjiro KURODA, now elderly and retired, would work for Sapiro 30 years, leading
the first American convoy from distant Haneda into Tachikawa because he alone
knew the way. Hired as an interpreter after passing an insultingly simple test in the
language he had mastered in college, Kuroda admits today that food and survival
weren’t his only motives in going to work for Americans.
“I wanted to protect the Japanese, to get close to Americans and stop them in
whatever way I could from doing the awful things I had seen our troops do in
China,” he said.
He was surprised to learn that Americans could be hanged for such behavior. His
employers were firm but lenient occupiers.
At Tachikawa, it was cautious standoff, then friendship, often beginning with the
kind of one-professional-to-another relationship Sapiro developed with Kuroda,
a trained engineer himself, on difficult jobs like the Wind Tunnel Theater.
“It had been the largest wind tunnel in the Far East and was just sitting there, still
intact, when the base needed a movie house,” Sapiro recalls. “Well the acoustics
had to be good, and .......”
It was a landmark until July 29, 1977, when the doors were locked after the last show
Charles Bronson in “From Noon Till Three.”
The old Japanese airfield would become the largest logistical base in Japan. After
the Korean War broke out, housewives drove husbands to the flightline, the same
way homemakers in other places dropped their spouses off to catch a morning
commuter train. By nightfall, pilots and crewmen in the “commuter war” were back
in a contained and imported American community to eat dinner at home, take in a
movie or sternly ponder report cards – perhaps to tell of being shot at.
Another war, further away, would touch the base more lightly – except for the
haggardly overworked doctors and nurses who handled an onrush of Tet Offensive
wounded at the base hospital.
Tachikawa AB became a city beside a city. The town itself recovered and expanded
because of American presence, even if there were sometimes raw spots in the
relationship. The Japanese government tried to answer an American request to
extend the north end of the runway into Sunagawa, a 300 year old farming community founded by a fabled samurai. It resulted in rioutous fighting and a
standoff the farmers finally won.
Lt. Col. Loren F. BJORNSON, the last senior officer to command the base, left in June, feeling satisfied that he wouldn’t have to “bury” the place he had served
three tours in. Two of his children were born here, and he had flown the last
transport out Dec. 1, 1969.
The task of burial fell to Capt. John F. VERETENNIKOFF, who sat in a seat once
occupied by generals, in a flightline building that was 50 years old and marked by a
stone monument commemorating a visit by Emperor Hirohito in the days he was
an aloof godhead seldom seen outside his palace.
An up-through-the-ranks mustang, Veretennikoff recalls passing through Tachikawa
when he was a buck sergeant in 1957.
“I saw this base thriving, and now I’m watching it die,” he said. “I never thought
I’d be sitting here, in this chair, in this building, doing this.”
One of his last acts was a courtesy call to the east side of the base, which was long
ago abandoned by Americans and is now used by Japan Ground Self-Defense
Force troops who fly light planes and helicopters.
Maj. Yoshitoshi SUZUNO, the public affairs officer, took Veretennikoff through a
small, unfinished museum that will show, through photographs, model aircraft and
many relics, the three lives of Tachikawa AB – how it passed from Japanese hands
into American ones, then back to the Japanese.
“It opens Sept. 27, and I think a lot of your people would be interested in seeing it,”
Suzuno said. “After all, they were here for such a long time
