Land readjustment at Sendai Station East Exit: until the east side of the tracks became large blocks

Published: November 1, 2026 / About 10 min read

The east side of the tracks at Sendai Station turned into large blocks several decades later than the west side. If you step through the aerial photographs of Sendai Station East Exit in order of era, you can read the order in which wide straight streets were laid out first on the west and later spread to the east. The west redrew its roads through a postwar reconstruction project approved in 1947, and the station front on the east was rebuilt through two land readjustment projects approved in 1973 and 1988. This article lays the years of approval and replotting disposition of each project over the photograph eras and checks which stage of the work each photograph shows.

1945-50: the line between burned and unburned ground

The part that burned in the 1945 air raid was the center of the city, and the damage that the City of Sendai's materials give comes to about 12,000 houses. In the photograph of this era, the west of the tracks shows up white with only the courses of the roads standing out, while the east is filled dark with small grains of roofs.

If you read the white side as the burned city and the dark side as the town that escaped the fire, the starting point of the later projects is all in one photograph. The boundary is the tracks themselves, and the texture of east and west divides sharply across the station yard. The finer points of the photograph are left to the description on the spot page; here the article follows only the difference between east and west.

The reconstruction project and the west side in 1961-69

Looking up the postwar reconstruction project in the City of Sendai's list of projects gives an area of 291.1 hectares, approval on October 21, 1947, and replotting disposition in 1975. The approval and the replotting disposition are 28 years apart, and the 1961-69 photograph shows the latter half of that period. The Shinterakoji project had just been approved on August 12, 1960, so the same photograph also falls in the early part of that work.

In this era, a grid of straight, wide streets can already be read west of the tracks. The east, by contrast, keeps a pattern of fine roofs that cannot be told apart from 1945-50. The reversal, in which the burned side gained wide roads first and the side that escaped the fire was left behind holding its old roads, takes visible form for the first time in this photograph.

Strip-shaped lots and roads 7 m wide

The shape of the old town on the east is known from the City of Sendai's page introducing the second project. The lots carried over the layout of the castle town and took long, narrow strip shapes, and many lots at the back did not touch a road. There were two main roads linking east and west, each about 7.0 m wide, and cars could travel on them in one direction only.

The small grains of roofs on the east of the photograph can be read as narrow-fronted lots lined up along the roads. Compared with the streets on the west, which cut large blocks, the very unit in which the land was divided differed between east and west.

The project years laid over the photograph eras

The projects that redrew the roads around Sendai Station are listed below by the years of approval and replotting disposition, with the photograph eras that fall between them. Eras that straddle either end of a period are not included.

If you read the table down, you can see that of the two projects that handled the east front of the station, only the first has photograph eras falling in the middle of its work. The second was approved after 1984-86, and the photograph as of 2026 shows the area after its replotting disposition was finished. In other words, the photographs can follow the start and the middle of the first project, and the result of the second.

The number of years from approval to replotting disposition is 28 for the postwar reconstruction, 24 for Shinterakoji, 18 for East No. 1, and 27 for East No. 2. The year 1975, when the reconstruction project on the west reached its replotting disposition, is two years after the approval of East No. 1, so the work on the east began moving just as the work on the west was being wrapped up. Shinterakoji at 60.4 hectares, East No. 1 at 55.8 hectares, and East No. 2 at 45.3 hectares, which the city groups as "the Sendai Station East District," add up to 161.5 hectares, a little over half the 291.1 hectares of the reconstruction project on the west.

The first project under way in 1974-78 and 1984-86

The Sendai Station East No. 1 Land Readjustment Project handled the side nearer the station; it covered 55.8 hectares, was approved on August 24, 1973, and finished its replotting disposition in 1991. The 1974-78 photograph was taken only a few years after the approval, and while the photographs are now in color and the rooftops of buildings on the west stand out white, the pattern of roofs on the east shows no visible change.

In 1984-86, the composition of the photograph shifts greatly. The Tohoku Shinkansen opened between Morioka and Omiya in 1982, and this photograph adds a thick black arc of an elevated structure passing through the station. Right beside the station on the east, a green square plaza and a larger building appear, and from the timing, the work of the first project appears to have begun to show in the photograph. The lines of the streets on the west have not moved since 1961-69.

Roads more than tripled their share in the second project

In the 45.3 hectares that continue to the northeast of the first project, the Sendai Station East No. 2 Land Readjustment Project was approved on April 1, 1988. The project is carried out by the City of Sendai. The district lies east of the Tohoku Main Line, with National Route 45 as its northern boundary, Tsutsujigaoka Park as its eastern boundary, and the East No. 1 district as its southern boundary. It involved moving 1,068 houses, planned for a population of 4,980, and reached its replotting disposition in 2015. The large number of houses to be moved shows in figures that the work drove new roads through a district where strip-shaped lots stood side by side without gaps.

Setting the figures before and after the readjustment side by side shows the scale of the rebuilding. After the readjustment, the Motoderakoji-Fukumuro Line, 40.0 m to 46.5 m wide, was run through the district for about 1 km. Until then, travel between east and west had relied on two one-way roads about 7 m wide, so the width of the main road grew to about six times.

The share of roads rose from 9.32% to 31.96%, more than three times. In length as well, 5,510 m became 10,147 m, close to double. With parks going from 1 to 10, a unit of blocks divided by roads and parks entered a district where lots had been packed along narrow roads. The city names as the purpose of this project making "the Sendai Station East District," which combines East No. 1 and Shinterakoji on the Wakabayashi Ward side, into a place with the functions of a single unified city area. The town east of the station has thus replaced the framework of its roads by stacking neighboring projects at staggered times.

East and west side by side by era

In the table, the shape of the lines in the west column does not change from 1961-69 on, while the east column is rewritten in the later eras. The east column starts to move away from "the same as before" at the 1984-86 row, after the work of East No. 1 began. In the photograph as of 2026, the east too is filled with large buildings and straight roads running vertically and horizontally, and the fine pattern of roofs from 1961-69 has almost disappeared.

Other cases where the back of a station changed

Utsunomiya Station East Exit faces the same way as Sendai in having its old center west of the station, but the land readjustment project east of the station, carried out from 1968 to 1979, drew its grid not over houses but over the fields east of the station yard. Takasaki Station East Exit is a case where the fields east of the station yard were replaced by houses era by era. At Asuto Nagamachi, south of Sendai, a land readjustment project of 82.0 hectares rebuilt the land of a rail yard beside the tracks, taking from its approval on May 2, 1997, to its replotting disposition in 2013.

The east exit seen through elevation and official land prices

The elevation at the center of the Sendai Station East Exit location is 35.5 m; the measuring point to the west is also 35.5 m, the north 35.0 m, the south 33.9 m, and the east 32.6 m. Of the five measuring points, only the east, at 32.6 m, is below 33 m, but the difference from the west is only 2.9 m, and the height of the ground does not differ greatly between the two sides of the tracks. The difference in the shape of the town between east and west comes not from the terrain but from whether the area burned and from the different timing of the projects.

The standard site of the official land prices (Chika Koji) is a residential lot in Odawara Yuminomachi, Miyagino Ward, 987 m from the center. The prices per square meter are listed every three years, within the range up to the 2026 publication.

Compare east and west on the spot page

On the spot page for Sendai Station East Exit, switching back and forth between 1945-50 and 1961-69 shows the period when the grid was drawn only on the west. Next, going back and forth between 1974-78 and 1984-86 lets you compare the time just after the approval of the first project with the view in the middle of it, when the arc of the elevated structure was added, and finally the photograph as of 2026 lets you check the grid on the east after the second project was finished. If you switch while comparing with the years in the project table, you can tell which stage of the work each photograph corresponds to. Hamamatsu Station, Himeji Station, Toyama Station, and Takamatsu Station in old photographs also sums up how to read photographs around stations.

The prices in this article are actual examples at each point in time and do not reflect market prices after the article was written.