A tall, slender broadcasting tower, Sky Tower Nishitokyo, marks this part of the Musashino plain from miles away, and if you have been riding the Venus Line in the mountains of Nagano all day, it is the first sign that home is close. Tanashi is the eastern half of Nishitokyo city, a quiet suburb of houses, small shops and parks on the Seibu line, west of central Tokyo, where Shin-Ōme Kaidō and Ōme Kaidō run arrow-straight across the flat land towards the city.
Those straight roads are old. The Musashino plain was a dry upland of grass and woods until the Edo period, when the Tamagawa Jōsui, a canal dug in 1653 to bring drinking water from the Tama River to Edo, made settlement possible. The canal still runs a few kilometres south, shaded by cherry trees and zelkovas; the novelist Dazai Osamu drowned in it in Mitaka in 1948, and its banks are now a walking path, lovely in early April.
Tanashi itself is home to the Tama Rokuto Science Museum, whose planetarium is one of the most advanced in Japan, and the Musashino woodland survives in patches around shrines and in the Koganei park nearby, where an open-air museum of old buildings rescued from the city stands among the trees.
The final stretch home from Nagano usually comes in on the Chūō expressway and then along Shin-Ōme Kaidō or Ōme Kaidō, flat, wide and slow, with lights every few hundred metres and trucks heading for the city. It is easy riding, but fatigue is the enemy here. Pull over at a konbini for something cold before the last few kilometres; they are on every corner, and so are fuel stations and family restaurants open late into the night.