Musashinodai 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.

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Name in kanji : 武蔵野台
Kanji meaning: plains + pedestal
Station opened : 31st October, 1913
Trainlines: Keio
# Passengers daily : 25,000
Distance from CityHillsAndSea HQ: 77km
Located in: Fuchu, Tokyo

Things to Do

In the immediate vicinity of this station you won’t find much – not even a park, which, as I’m sure you are aware, is very unusual for a Musashi.

You can find Musashinomori park, home to Ajinomoto Stadium and where the Olympic cycling race begins, after a bit of a walk up the main road back in the direction of Tokyo.

This park is right next door to Chofu airport, a military base in World War 2 – there are a couple of concrete aircraft hangars once used to hide planes during the war still remaining.

If you’re a fan of 80’s comedy franchises that outstayed their welcome, you can also visit the national & metropolitan Police academies on your way here.

Finally, I didn’t venture all the way there but there is a little folk park to the east of the airport, on the other side of the Nogawa river which is also home to a kofun – the ancient tombs that unexpectedly seem to pop up in Musashis with nearly as much frequency as parks.

All About Musashinodai Station

Musashinodai is almost directly west of central Tokyo as the crow flies, a little bit north of the Tama river. It’s not outwith the realms of possibility you could walk all the way here from Kawasaki, past the four Musashis of the Nambu line, although I’m not sure why you’d want to.

A further connection to previous Musashis lies in the possibility of being able to arrive here by heading south from Musashi-Sakai on the Seibu line, getting off at Shiratodai and walking on down a bit.

Musashinodai itself is another sleepy little station serving a small suburb in Tokyo without very much happening – in fact, possibly the least exciting Musashi in a while.

There was a fair bit of creativity involved in coming up with things to do, but a fifteen minute walk up past the two police academies, then the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies brought me to the end of the runway of Chofu airport, where one kind of bird swam around a pond:

… and a different kind reconnected with the land it had left:

It’s a really lovely park, lots of open space and families out enjoying the weather. It also features an entirely different kind of hangar than you might expect:

As the Allies stepped up their bombing of Tokyo and the Japanese military found themselves running low on planes and the materials to make them, these concrete hangars were built to try to offer some shelter to some of the aircraft that were based here.

It was somewhat surreal to imagine the former life of this park, sitting here as I was on a peaceful sunny day with the smell of cut grass in the air and the occasional guttural roar of a strimmer in the distance.

I wonder what people 80 years from now will get up to in this park.

Station Rating

Musashinomori park has some really cool links to WWII history; it’s fun to watch the planes at Chofu airport… the thing is though, Tobitakyu station is probably the closest access point for those activities – so I can’t really give Musashinodai a whole bunch of credit here, I’m afraid.