Kakomap

Places that used to be sea. Trace reclaimed land through aerial photographs and maps

Toyosu, Minato Mirai, Port Island, Rinku Town. Places that were sea surface or sandy beaches in the aerial photographs of the 1940s became, through reclamation, towns lined with stations and high-rise buildings. From Tokyo Bay to Ise Bay, Osaka Bay, and Hakata Bay, this article traces, together with the records of elevation and land prices, the moments when land appears on the sea as you step through the eras.

An elevation comparison. Read low towns and high towns from the terrain

Universal City is at the bottom at -0.2 m, and Hokusetsu Sanda New Town is at the top at 189.5 m. If you line up the locations on Kakomap in order of elevation, the low side divides into reclaimed land and former factory sites, and the high side into new towns made by cutting hills. This article reads ups and downs and even breaks at water surfaces in the two cross-section graphs, east-west and north-south, and traces the differences in how towns were born through the numbers.

Towns born by cutting away mountains. Traces of new town grading

Senri-Chuo, Myodani, Tama Center, Tama Plaza, Makomanai. The grading that cuts hills to make flat ground was a single civil engineering work that included even where the cut earth and sand went. This article lines up the bare ground under grading left in the aerial photographs, the steps of elevation in the four directions, and where the soil carried to the sea in Kobe went, and traces how the towns opened on the hills came to be.

Towns born on former rail yard sites, seen in aerial photographs

Umeda, Suita, Nagamachi, Shizuoka, Okayama, and Shiodome. The rail yards that sorted freight cars kept appearing in aerial photographs as blanks that people could not enter, even though they lay right beside stations. With the abolition of yard-based freight car regrouping in 1984 as the turning point, this article traces location by location the change in which those blanks are replaced by skyscrapers, hospitals, and parks.