Komatsu Station Area about 60 years ago and today

History of Komatsu Station Area

A thick elevated band running north to south shows clearly in today's aerial photograph of Komatsu Station. It is the track of the Hokuriku Shinkansen, which opened on March 16, 2024. On either side of that band, the fine grid of the old city area spreads to the west, and large buildings and wide open land spread together to the east. In the old eras, a row of factories with long roofs lined up against the east of the station, and a sheet of rice paddies lay beyond them. Factories, paddies and the Shinkansen: the east side of the station is land that has changed its appearance in these three stages.

The gateway to a factory town

Komatsu is the land where Komatsu, the company known for construction machinery, was born. According to Komatsu's corporate history, in January 1917 Takeuchi Mining opened the Komatsu Iron Works and began making machine tools and mining machinery for its own use. In May 1921 the iron works split off and became independent, and Komatsu Ltd. was established. In May 1938 it opened the Awazu Plant, and in August 1951 it moved its head office from Komatsu to Marunouchi in Tokyo, but the company's history describes the City of Komatsu as "the birthplace of the company."

The 1961-69 photograph records the appearance from the period when the factory was still running east of the station. The tracks pass north to south through the position of the station, and a large factory site with long, narrow roofs lined up in many parallel rows lies right to the east of them. The rows of roofs are aligned in the same direction as the station platforms, and south of the factory a white, flat open space spreads out. The west side of the tracks is a contrast: a city area packed with small roofs in a fine grid of streets occupies most of the left half of the frame. In the middle on the left, an oval stadium and a round facility stand side by side. The station was placed at the boundary between the city area to the west and the factory to the east.

Beyond the factory, the right half of the frame is rice paddies where rectangles of light and dark line up in order. A white, bright, straight road cuts diagonally through those paddies from the lower left to the upper right. While the ridges between the paddy lots are aligned almost east-west and north-south, only this road is drawn at an angle unrelated to the lots, cutting the pattern of paddies diagonally. Here and there among the paddies, clusters of houses surrounded by trees are scattered and connected by narrow roads. East of the tracks, the pattern of paddies begins as soon as you leave the factory site, and the rows of houses hardly spread at all.

The east side filling up

The factory east of the station increases its number of white roofs in the 1974-78 photograph, and even the southern part, which was open land in 1961-69, has been filled with buildings. Rows of houses also begin to connect along both sides of the straight diagonal road, and the paddies on the east side of the station are being trimmed little by little from along the road. The clusters of settlement that were surrounded by trees among the paddies in 1961-69 have new roofs attached around them, and their outlines are starting to blur. Even so, wide paddy lots remain in the right half of the frame, and the eastern edge of the city area still stays just beyond the factory. The band at the bottom edge of the frame, unlike the other, yellowish parts, appears in a purplish tone, and it takes in the rows of houses of the city area continuing to the southwest. This band shows that the grid west of the tracks extends beyond the frame.

There are no ups and downs around the station, and the city area, the factory and the paddies all lie on the same low flat land. To learn how flooding spreads on low land like this and the routes for evacuation, the City of Komatsu's hazard map is a clue.

The era of the former site and the elevated tracks

The former factory site gained a new role in 2011. On May 13, 2011, Komatsu opened Komatsu no Mori on the former site of the Komatsu Plant to commemorate its 90th anniversary. On March 22, 2014, Science Hills Komatsu, which combines a science museum with a base for promoting industry, held its grand opening at a position within walking distance of the station's east exit. The section east of the station that the rows of parallel roofs had occupied changed in this way into a place for a park and public buildings.

The form of the railway changed greatly in March 2024. According to the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT), the approximately 125 km between Kanazawa Station and Tsuruga Station received approval of its construction implementation plan in June 2012, construction began, and it opened on March 16, 2024. The Hokuriku Shinkansen was extended from Kanazawa Station to Tsuruga Station, and Komatsu gained a Shinkansen station. At the same time, the conventional line that had run through the station, between Daishoji Station and Kanazawa Station, became a line of the IR Ishikawa Railway. The thick band running along the tracks in today's photograph is this Shinkansen's elevated structure, passing from top to bottom of the frame at the same position as the tracks of the old eras.

In today's photograph, east of the station, not a single row of factory roofs remains where the parallel roofs lined up in 1961-69. Instead, large buildings and wide open land and paved surfaces in well-defined lots line up. Outside the factory site too, rows of houses continue without a break toward the east. Along the road running east to west just south of the station, large white buildings with blue roofs and wide parking lots with white lines continue almost to the right edge. Paddies remain on the right side of the frame and at the bottom edge: brown paddy lots at the upper right and in the middle of the right edge, and dark green paddies together from the middle of the bottom edge to the lower right, so that the pattern of paddies has retreated to the edges of the frame. The stadium on the left shows a red running track in the same position, and the round facility north of it has also not changed its place from 1961-69 to today's photograph. The fine grid west of the tracks has also hardly changed from 1961-69, and the change over more than half a century is concentrated almost entirely on the east side of the station.

At Tonomachi 2-chome, about 868 m from the station, the land price of the residential area stood at 134,000 yen per square meter in 1992, 1993 and 1994, and this is the highest up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). The lowest up to the 2026 official land prices was 42,500 yen in 2019. After that, with a year of a slight fall in 2021 in between, it has risen every year from 2022 to the 2026 official land prices.