Kaihimmakuhari about 60 years ago and today

History of Kaihimmakuhari

The sea at Makuhari was shallow far out. When the tide went out, a surface of sand appeared far offshore, and it was a sea where people digging for shellfish could walk. In the 1961-69 aerial photograph, streets appear only in the upper right corner of the frame, and the rest is a gray water surface all over. The blocks lined with high-rise buildings and the platforms of the Keiyo Line are, in this photograph, at a position in the middle of the shallow sea.

A shallow sea where the tide goes out

In the oldest photograph, from 1945-50, roughly the lower left half of the frame is not available and is left blank in pale gray. On the side that is shown, the land is only the upper right corner. The shoreline crosses the upper right of the frame diagonally, and inside it rows of houses like fine grains cluster densely. A white line that looks like an old highway runs parallel to the shoreline, and the settlement clings to both sides of it. On the sea side, traces where the tide swept the sand remain as thin stripes in many layers. Here and there on the water, shadows like long, narrow black boxes float in groups of a few. The upper left corner is covered by white clouds, and the sea surface below it cannot be read.

The stripes of sand show up this clearly because the water is shallow and the relief of the seabed becomes the image directly. This sea, with tidal flats and sandbars continuing far offshore, was long used as a place for digging shellfish and growing nori seaweed. The 1961-69 photograph captures a great deal of that use. Small white dots are scattered across the whole water surface, forming several diagonal bands running from northwest to southeast. Each one is a thin stake, and they form rows at equal intervals because they are equipment that people set up in the sea. From the arrangement of these dots it can be read that there were lots on the sea as well.

If you look closely at the same 1961-69 photograph, bright land with edges cut in straight lines juts out on the southwest side of the urban area in the upper right. It is a square lot projecting into the sea, and a large building, several empty lots and a dark cluster of woods lie inside it. Work to fill in the shore had already started, and this photograph captures the moment when that first lot was placed. In the lower left corner one section of the photograph is also missing, but since the missing part is on the sea side, it does not get in the way of reading the shore.

The order in which it became land

The 1974-78 photograph is in color, and the area of sea shrinks all at once. Everything from the upper half of the frame to the center has changed into land, a mottled flat ground mixing brown bare ground, withered grassland and hollows where water remains. Many straight roads dividing the lots have been drawn, and the outlines of square blocks have formed. Even so, almost no buildings can be seen. In the center, the white line of a seawall runs diagonally from northwest to southeast; the water on its sea side is greenish and cloudy, and the land side has the color of dry soil. A shallow body of water not yet filled in lies outside the seawall. In the lower right of the frame, a band of reddish-brown soil that looks freshly piled continues to the water's edge, and white waves strike it. The reclamation advanced step by step to the southwest. The tone of color changing in steps at the seams of the tiles shows that each photograph was taken at a different time.

By 1979-83, the water surface is pushed into the lower left corner of the frame. The whole reclaimed land has become dry land, and grid-like streets run from end to end. Inside the blocks it is still brown empty land, with lots where grass grows and lots that have been leveled flat alternating. A wide straight road runs diagonally from northwest to southeast, and on its sea side another thin straight line runs parallel. Toward the upper left of the frame there is a long, narrow site where many tracks are bundled together, a cluster that reads as a facility for lining up and keeping rolling stock. From the shore, two short jetties project into the water. The only buildings that catch the eye are a group with orange roofs toward the lower right, and the order is clearly recorded: the streets came first and the buildings later.

The blocks rise up

It was the railway that decided the order in which the town opened. The Keiyo Line was extended and Kaihimmakuhari Station opened in 1986, and in 1989 the large exhibition facility Makuhari Messe opened. The 1987-90 photograph captures the time around then. Partway along the tracks running diagonally through the center of the frame a long, narrow structure can be seen, and on its southwest side the blocks that were empty land are beginning to fill with buildings. A building with many large white roofs in a row and a structure with a round outline line up on the side near the sea, and box-shaped buildings and paved parking lots spread around them. Mid-rise buildings and wide parking lots have also appeared on the northeast side of the tracks. Even so, the left half of the frame is still brown empty land, showing that the town would still need time to be completed.

In the photograph as of 2026, high-rise buildings stand in a cluster on the southwest side of the tracks. Rectangular blocks aligned in the same direction line up, the streets between them are wide, and bands of green run through them. On the side near the sea there is a baseball stadium with a round roof, and the earth color of the field peeks out inside the ring. To its northeast, long, narrow large roofs shaped like upturned kamaboko fish cakes continue over several buildings. The white-roofed buildings that appeared in 1987-90 have been carried over as they were. Most of the left half of the frame is gray pavement, with parking lots filling whole lots and parks laid out with lawns and trees placed alternately. A sandy beach continues long and narrow along the coast, and the two jetties seen in 1979-83 remain in the same positions.

The height of the piled soil is quite even at this location. The measuring point placed in the center of the blocks is 3.7 m, the point toward the east is 5.3 m, and the point toward the south is 3.4 m. The method of building, making a single flat surface that stays within 3 to 5 m on top of the sea, can be seen from the numbers as well. On flat land low above sea level, it is worth opening the hazard map published by the City of Chiba lot by lot to check where and how much water is expected.

The record of land values remains outside the reclaimed land. A residential site in Makuhari-cho 1-chome, about 1.2 km inland on the side of the Sobu Line, was 166,000 yen per square meter in 2009. It fell to 147,000 yen in 2013, turned upward from there, and is 190,000 yen in the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). It is not the value of the new city center's blocks themselves, but it gives a guide to how land on the side of the old settlement left behind the reclaimed land moved after the station and the town were built. The word kaihin (kaihin means seaside) in the station's name points directly to how this land came to be. If you switch through the five eras in order, the length of time it was sea and the shortness of time since it became land appear side by side.