Higashi-Shizuoka (Former Shizuoka Rail Yard) about 60 years ago and today

History of Higashi-Shizuoka (Former Shizuoka Rail Yard)

Finding this land on a map is easy. Toward the east of the city area of Shizuoka, a single long, narrow band runs east to west. Its width is narrow, and only its length stands out. This shape was not decided by anyone's taste; it is the very condition that the work of rearranging freight cars imposed on the land. To break up trains and put them back together, you need a surface that is flat, straight and, above all, long. Put in a curve and you cannot see along it; put in a gradient and the cars start moving on their own. This area, where the Shizuoka Rail Yard was placed, met all three together. The elevation is 10.4 m at the center of the location, 11.4 m at the western measuring point and 9.4 m to the north, gently higher to the west. The tilt of the plain made of sediment carried by the Abe River shows directly in the sequence of values.

Before the railway came, this vicinity was fields spreading between the castle town of Shizuoka and the port of Shimizu. The old place name Naganuma, which remains on the north side, suggests that it was low land with a lot of water. The district name Magarikane, where the reference point for land prices is, is also an old name for this area. The name Higashi-Shizuoka is much newer, given when a station was built on the former site. Just lining up the old and new place names brings into view the order of this land's history.

Placed midway along the Tokaido

The location of a rail yard is settled as a question of where to intervene along the long line of the Tokaido. This spot is almost midway between Tokyo and Nagoya, and close to both the city of Shizuoka and the port of Shimizu. Inserting the work of regrouping freight cars by destination around here suits cargo heading east as well as cargo heading west. In addition, because it was a little off the center of the city area, a long, narrow site could be secured in one piece. A long surface for the railway was prepared outside the bustle of the town.

The work of a rail yard is to break up freight cars received at stations one car at a time, rearrange them by destination and make them up into other trains. It needs many tracks of each kind: tracks to receive arriving trains, tracks for sorting, and tracks to send off the trains made up. As the number of tracks grows the width spreads, and unless each one is long, a long train cannot be held in its entirety. The land must offer length rather than area. That is why, even after it finished its role, the former site remained not as a square but in the shape of a band.

The oldest photograph available at this location is from 1945-50. The surroundings are still mainly fields, with a fine grid of lots spreading out. Through it, many thin lines pass east to west in a bundle. Freight cars appear dotted between the lines, and the thickness of the bundle changes from place to place. Both the grid of the fields and the bundle of tracks are made of straight lines, yet the fineness of their mesh is completely different.

1961-69, which serves as the baseline for comparison, coincides with the period when this place was busiest. The sidings are used to their ends, and in many places the bundle of lines looks thick with rows of freight cars. Around it the grid of fields begins to break down, and housing and factories move in. It is an era in which the inside of the land does not move and only the outside is repainted.

If you switch to 1974-78 and 1979-83, urbanization of the surroundings goes further. The roads become wider, and the roofs no longer match in color or shape. Even so, the inside of the band remains a surface of tracks, and the line of the boundary can be seen clearly. On the railway side, however, change had already begun by this time. The handing over of cargo was moving to trucks, and the method of regrouping freight cars one by one no longer paid off in either speed or labor.

The year regrouping stopped

In 1984, Japanese National Railways ended the transport system built around regrouping freight cars. The tracks for sorting lost their purpose, and the work of the Shizuoka Rail Yard broke off here. At this location, interestingly, the photographs are missing an era exactly at that point. The one provided after 1979-83 is 1987-90, and the several years spanning the shift fall into a gap in the aerial photographs. The moment of change itself is not shown, yet if you switch between the two photographs before and after in succession, you can see at a glance what happened.

The 1987-90 photograph shows the traces of pulled-up tracks and cleared land. It takes the form of a long, narrow vacant lot running east to west that has appeared within the city. This narrowness made it hard to decide the next use. There is a sizable area, but because the width is not enough, one large lot cannot be taken. If it is divided finely, the line cutting off north-south movement remains in place. Unless the roads crossing the tracks and even the position of a new station are considered together, not a single lot can be moved. The years of blank grew longer by the measure of that difficulty.

The station and facilities come first

The land began to move at the end of the 1990s. In 1998 Higashi-Shizuoka Station opened between Shizuoka Station and Kusanagi Station on the Tokaido Main Line, and an entrance and exit for people was created in the middle of the long, narrow land. In the following year, 1999, the prefecture's large cultural facility GRANSHIP opened in front of the station, designed by the architect Isozaki Arata. The order adopted was to place a building that draws people and the station first, and fill in the surrounding lots afterward. In 2003 the City of Shizuoka and the City of Shimizu merged, and in 2005 it became an ordinance-designated city, with this area positioned as the city's eastern gateway.

The shape of the band also invited an unexpected use. Because the uses of the lots were not decided right away, wide flat land was left open as a venue for events. In the early 2010s, a standing figure modeled at full scale on a robot that appears in an anime was placed on the former site, and there was a period when visitors from far away got off at the station. Rather than filling the land with permanent buildings, the form of using the open surface each time continued for a long time on this land.

The outline of the band that remains

In the photograph as of 2026, large buildings line up at and around the station, and roads and plazas now cross the band. Even so, the long east-west outline has not been lost. When mechanically matched against the 1961-69 image, the image texture value has increased from 7.3 to 39.8, more than fivefold. On the other hand, the mean pixel difference stays at 16.1. The surface where fields and tracks lay side by side and the surface where buildings and paving lie side by side are close in average brightness. The change appeared not in light and dark but in the fineness of the frame.

The reference point for land prices is a residential site in Magarikane 6-chome, about 230 m from the location. Values can be referred to from 2019, starting at 341,000 yen per square meter in 2019-20, holding at 336,000 yen in 2021-23, 342,000 yen in 2024, and 362,000 yen in the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). As values for a residential area in the period more than 20 years after the station was built, they line up in a gently rising shape.