Musashi-Koganei Station (RotW)

RotW is my Railways of the Warrior project. Visiting all the Japanese train stations with Fuji in the name & the 12 castles with the original keep still standing wasn’t enough to satisfy my love of lists, so now I’m working through all the stations with Musashi in their name.

Click this link for more info.

Name in kanji : 武蔵小金井
Kanji meaning: little gold community
Station opened : 15th January, 1926
Trainlines: Chuo
# Passengers daily : 60,000
Distance from CityHillsAndSea HQ: 84km
Located in: Koganei, Tokyo

Things to Do

A fifteen minute walk north of the station will take you to the historical Koganei Bridge. Nowadays it’s just a regular road bridge across a small river. However, there has been a bridge here for quite a while – see this site for some imagery & facts from the past (all in Japanese.)

Just across the road from the bridge is Koganei Park, a beautiful open space with gorgeous cherry blossom trees, an old steam locomotive and some other park type things.

It’s also home to the Edo Open-air Architectural Museum.

All About Musashi-Koganei Station

The modern day Musashi-Koganei station isn’t all that old. It has that arching curve that seems so popular with station designers in the 21st century but doesn’t really do much for me. Then again, I’m happy that you can get a good view of the Azusa express services barreling on through:

I feel like these kind of stations are going to look dated rather fast, instead of becoming a beloved part of their environment… but what do I know? People said the Eiffel Tower was hideous.

This version of Musashi-Koganei dates back to around 2007, when the tracks were elevated. If we’re being honest, it’s not like the pre-2007 version was an architectural inspiration – you can see it over at retro-station.jp

I got my snaps of the station and then set off to the park. I wanted to get a look at the steam locomotive there (previously on City Hills And Sea) and was hoping that the architectural museum being closed wasn’t true … Sadly it was. (One of my more realistic life goals is to have a bathroom mural like the one preserved in the museum – I instead just made do with the virtual tour here.)

The pandemic also meant that the usual cherry blossom viewing parties – with people getting boozed up on picnic rugs under the trees – were on hold. There were signs up, and security guards patrolling to make sure nobody had any plans for some revelry on the grass. It was raining though, so it wasn’t a particularly taxing task.

The guards apparently didn’t mind – and the rain hadn’t stopped – a little classical performance by a trio under the trees. Quite the treat to have some cello & some singing in the outdoors. It more than made up for the museum being closed.

(Even if the first performance was of ‘A Whole New World‘ from Aladdin which always gets stuck in my head. For weeks.)

Station Rating

The station area, just like Musashi-Sakai, seems to go out of its way to prove that everywhere is slowly dissolving into a dull homogeneous blur of ABC Mart, Uniqlo, Starbucks et al. On the other hand, Koganei park is fantastic and a real pleasure to walk around, particularly in cherry blossom season – although I’d have had more fun if it hadn’t been raining.