Lazona Kawasaki about 60 years ago and today

History of Lazona Kawasaki

When you leave the west exit of Kawasaki Station, a wide roofed passage extends northwest, and beyond it large buildings surrounding a courtyard line up. This surface, where shoppers come and go without a break, was for a long time a site partitioned by walls and gates. If you advance the aerial photographs from the oldest era, rectangular buildings aligned in the same direction form rows on the west side of the station and keep appearing in the same position across six eras up to 1987-90. The rows disappear from the FY2007 photograph on.

A station placed on the low ground of a river mouth

The highest measuring point is 4.5 m to the north, and the lowest is 1.6 m to the east. The center at 2.8 m, the south at 1.8 m and the west at 1.7 m fall in between, and however the five points are combined, the spread does not reach 3 m. There is no relief that could be called a slope. It is low ground where sand and mud carried by the Tama River near its mouth were laid down in thin layers, and the slightly higher north is the side near the river. The place name Kawasaki is said to derive from an expression for land jutting out at the tip of a river. A post town was placed on the south bank at the Tama River ferry crossing, and the highway between Edo and the Tokaido crossed the river here. Its position exactly midway between Tokyo and Yokohama became, in a later age, the very reason for the railway.

In 1872, Japan's first railway, linking Shimbashi and Yokohama, opened, and a Kawasaki stop was placed partway along it. Flat land could be obtained in one piece, the river and the port were close, and large amounts of freight could be shipped out by rail. There are not many places where the conditions for building factories come together like this. The grain of the town differs west and east of the station because the east side is a town of townspeople continuing from the post town, while the west side is a row of large sites that came later. A railway laid to carry gravel from the Tama River also came in from the north side of the station to the west in the late 1920s.

Six eras in which the rows of buildings appear

The black-and-white 1945-50 photograph is coarse-grained, and the details of the roofs cannot be followed. Even so, the composition can be read. The railway runs diagonally through the frame from the lower left to the upper right, and slightly above the center the lines are bundled wide and parallel. In the upper right a large river draws an arc, and a white riverbed appears widely. A bridge crossing the river can also be seen. On the west side of the station there is a large lot where rectangular buildings line up in an orderly way, with a grain completely different from the dense cluster of fine buildings around it. In the upper left, rectangular lots of farmland still remain, and coarse surfaces standing out white are dotted here and there across the urban area from the center to the lower right.

By 1961-69, the farmland in the upper left has been almost entirely replaced by the urban area. The bundled lines in the station grounds are thicker still, and on the site west of the station the rows of buildings have become dense, with the edges of the site standing out clearly as a square. Along the river in the upper right, a wide flat surface has formed outside the embankment, and in the middle right two facilities with oval courses appear side by side. One appears to have a diagonal mark inside its ring, and the other has a thin, tight edge. Above the center there are a building with a roof a size larger than its surroundings and a square lot, and it can be read that on land without valleys or slopes, uses that need width could be placed anywhere. The grain of the alleys in the urban area is fine, and among it the factory site remains as a large square. This photograph shows clearly that the inside of the gates was not part of the town.

1974-78 is the first color photograph. The color tone differs greatly across three rows of tiles, and because only the middle row leans toward yellow-green, the seams of the photograph look like a horizontal line. On the factory site, green and gray roofs are lined up, and ocher bare ground and thin lines can be read within the grounds. Southeast of the station there is a corner where long, narrow buildings with white roofs are grouped together. Baseball field lots have been put into the riverbed in the upper right, and the shape of the courses of the two ovals in the middle right can also be made out. The lower half of the frame is an urban area with roofs of mottled colors, mixed with many roofs larger than their surroundings. It is an arrangement where homes and small workplaces are intermingled, and it does not form orderly rows like the site west of the station.

1979-83 appears in faded brown overall, and the composition has hardly changed from the previous era. The factory is still going, and the rows of buildings and the bare ground within the grounds are as they were. By 1984-86 the roofs look blue-green, and a large white box-shaped building appears near the station. In 1987-90 a building standing out above the surrounding roofs has risen east of the station, and a dark shadow falling at its foot can be read in the photograph as well. Meanwhile, on the factory site, the bare ground between the buildings has widened from the previous era.

From the closing of the factory to the opening of the commercial facility

The factory at the west exit of the station was already here as the Kawasaki Works of Tokyo Electric Company when, in 1939, Tokyo Electric Company and Shibaura Engineering Works merged to form Tokyo Shibaura Electric. It later became the Horikawa-cho Works. Toshiba closed this factory in 2000, and until June 2001 it also kept its registered head office here.

For the Horikawa-cho district of about 11.7 hectares, where operations had stopped, the City of Kawasaki set a district plan and guided the use of the land by dividing it into three blocks: commercial, residential and office. The construction period was from April 2005 to August 2006 for the commercial block and from December 2004 to March 2007 for the 34-story residential tower, and the commercial facility opened on September 28, 2006. The office block started construction later, in July 2011, and the construction period for its 15-story building ran until March 2013.

The inside of the gates becomes town

It was Toshiba's factory that occupied this site. As electrical machinery production was divided among various places in Japan and overseas, a wide piece of land became vacant right in front of the station. It rarely happens in a city that a flat surface a few minutes' walk from a station comes up in one piece. Here a concert hall opened in 2004, and in 2006 a large commercial facility opened, and land that had been inside the walls changed into a place anyone can pass through. Even so, the outline of the site has not disappeared. Its different way of connecting with the surrounding streets has been carried over into the layout of the new buildings.

In today's photograph, not a trace of the rows of buildings remains. West of the station a large building holding a courtyard has been placed, and next to it buildings taller than their surroundings line up. Toward the southwest, a wide, flat green and brown surface remains as a rectangle. Only the bundle of lines in the station grounds runs diagonally in the same direction as in the old eras, and on the riverbed in the upper right several ocher fan shapes of baseball fields can be counted. The two ovals in the middle right have kept their outlines while the buildings around them were replaced. Groups of tall buildings have also increased in the upper left, and from the lower left through the bottom row an urban area with no visible gaps continues. Tall buildings stand only in the bands on both sides of the tracks, and away from them the heights of the roofs are even. If you follow the official land prices (Chika Koji) up to the 2026 publication for a residential site in Saiwai-cho 2-chome, per square meter they were 565,000 yen in 1989, 590,000 yen at the peak in 1991, 287,000 yen at the bottom in 2005, and 522,000 yen in 2025. In the 2026 publication it is 552,000 yen. It is land whose value swung with a drop of a little over 300,000 yen from 590,000 yen in 1991 to the bottom in 2005, and a recovery of about 230,000 yen from there to 2025. The distance to the observation point is about 520 m.

Traces remain in the way the roads bend. The roads that traced the edge of the site remain without matching the angle of the surrounding streets, and the direction of the passage leading northwest from the station also follows the position where the gate once stood. On flat low ground, the power of the terrain to decide the shape of a town is weak. Here the river, the railway and one large site that kept occupying the same place across six eras up to 1987-90 have decided the shape of the lots.