Autumn Light-up at Showa Kinen Park [SPOT REPORT]

On Friday (November 25th) we visited Showa Kinen Park (昭和記念公園) in Tachikawa (Western Tokyo) for their autumn light-up event. The event is running from November 3rd to 27th, 2022, and might be over when this article goes online, however, it might still be an inspiration for a visit next year.

Our main aim was the Japanese Garden. Even though the ginkgo avenue also had a light-up, I saw on Instagram beforehand that the yellow leaves were mainly gone already, so we didn’t want to waste time on this.

For the Japanese Garden light-up, you had to buy an additional ticket, next to the 450 yen park admission. Tickets were available online for 1.000 yen (you receive a QR ticket by email), and at the park gate on the day they cost 1.200 yen.

The light-up started from 16:30, running until 20:30 with the park closing at 21:00. Access is best from Nishi-Tachikawa Station for the nighttime event, because the other gates are closed from 16:30. On weekends the Sunakawa gate is opened, too. If you don’t want to walk too much, there are small shuttle buses running every 15 minutes for 300 yen.

For a Friday night, the Japanese garden was not too crowded, but still, there were quite a lot of people. I can imagine it is quite packed on weekends. Next to the colorful autumn leave which are lit up around the pond, they have an installation of wagasa (paper umbrellas) and fuurin (windchimes) which is really nice and gives this event a little extra touch. Our stroll around the Japanese garden – with taking a lot of photos – took us nearly 1.5 hours.

Even if the light-up event is ending on 27th November, you still can enjoy the autumn leaves during the daytime – especially at the Japanese garden, because some seemed to just have started turning red (they had a nice graduation of green – orange – red). Depending on the tree, some were already losing their leaves at peak, but some even still were green.