Former Kurashiki Tivoli Park (Former Kurabo Kurashiki Mill) about 60 years ago and today

History of Former Kurashiki Tivoli Park (Former Kurabo Kurashiki Mill)

Leave Kurashiki Station by the north exit, and a commercial facility with a large roof and a lawn plaza continue in front of you. Trace this flat corner back through the aerial photographs, and a considerable area of the frame is replaced by a pattern of thin stripes. The stripes are the ridgelines of sawtooth roofs, from the era when a large spinning mill stood just north of the station. The place name Kurashiki comes from kurashikichi, storage places where tribute rice and other goods were moved from boats onto land and stored. The city area spreads over low, flat ground created by land reclamation by drainage (polder) in the early modern period, and water transport and the gathering and distribution of cotton formed the framework of the town. When the center of gravity of industry moved from the trade in cotton to machine spinning, having a sizable piece of flat land just north of the station became a direct strength as a factory location. This means the factory occupied the corner closest to the station for a long time.

The great striped roofs

The 1945-50 aerial photograph is monochrome, with coarse gray grain. Slightly above the center of the frame, a large whitish rectangular mass lies east to west. Inside the mass, evenly spaced thin horizontal lines run densely, and these are the ridgelines of the roofs. The mass is divided in two by a passage between them, and the western one is a step longer. West of the site, a section continues where small buildings of the same size line up in a grid. They are rows of houses placed as if in attendance on the factory, aligned even in the direction of their roofs. Around them are still field lots, with thin farm roads forming a geometric pattern. Toward the lower right of the frame many tracks run east to west in a bundle, and the station grounds spread long and narrow. South of the tracks, dark, grainy rows of houses are packed without gaps, and in the very middle of them a small hill covered with trees rises. East of the hill there are still field lots, and the city area breaks off here. The white great roofs of the factory, the pale grid of the fields and the dark density of the old city area appear divided into three levels of brightness within one photograph. Just south of the hill there is one smaller roof with the same stripes as the great roofs, suggesting that spinning had put down roots in various parts of the town.

Step the era forward to 1961-69, and the whole frame sinks into darkness and the grain becomes even coarser. Even so, the stripes of the great roofs are not lost, and the outlines of the two masses stand out if anything more clearly. The grid of houses to the west increases its number of buildings, and houses have also moved into lots that were fields. Toward the south of the factory, trees and smaller buildings gather, suggesting that inside the site there was a section with a different role. The station grounds are busiest in this era, with sidings lined up in many layers. This is the appearance of the time when they also held tracks for freight.

Arrangements inside the wall

In the 1974-78 photograph, color appears. However, though it looks like a single photograph, it is actually a mosaic joining several photographs of different tones. The yellow at the upper left is the strongest, the lower left has a pale reddish tint, the right half is greenish, and the seams run in straight lines. Even so, the stripes of the great roofs remain clearly slightly above the center, and the number of ridgelines has not changed from the previous era. The change is in the surroundings. To the west and south, houses have moved into the field lots, and buildings begin to line up along the thin roads. On the north side large surfaces of fields still remain together in yellow, and the way the colors divide shows that urbanization advanced from the south side of the factory. The tracks cross the center of the frame diagonally and split into several lines in the station grounds. The green of the hill is even deeper at the lower right, with roofs packed without gaps around it.

The clearest of the four eras up to 1983 is the 1979-83 photograph, in which the ridgelines of the roofs can be counted one by one. Two things show themselves only in this era. South of the great roofs there is a long, narrow rectangular water surface shining blue. It is a swimming pool. To its east a wide flat area of bare earth opens with rounded edges. It is thought to have been a sports ground. A place for working and a place for exercising fit inside a single wall. This photograph shows that the factory was not one section of the town but a small town in itself.

An amusement park in front of the station

The factory ended its operations in the 1990s. A sizable vacant lot appeared in front of the station, and there, in 1997, Kurashiki Tivoli Park opened, borrowing the name of a Danish amusement park. It was a park with rows of towers and gabled buildings, where illuminations lit up after sunset. However, the business did not last long, and it closed at the end of 2008. That is a little over ten years counted from its opening. It was a rather short stay compared with the years the factory operated.

After the great roofs

In 2011 a commercial facility opened on the former site. In today's photograph a large box-shaped building with a parking lot on its roof sits left of the center of the frame, and a white polygonal roof spreads to its east. A band of trees runs between the two buildings, and the south side has become a plaza of lawns and paths. The area where the sports ground and the pool appeared in 1979-83 has been carried over as it is into a plaza where people gather. Not a single stripe of the sawtooth roofs remains.

The station side has also changed its appearance. The grounds that were filled with many sidings have been reduced in today's photograph to platform roofs and a few tracks, with buildings placed on the leftover width. The grid of houses that was west of the factory has become a residential area where the colors and directions of the roofs are all different, while keeping the shape of the lots in places. The same company's brick factory from its founding period remains at the edge of the Bikan Historical Quarter, and since 1974 it has been used as a facility for lodging and culture. The station front, where the factory buildings were replaced by a park, and the edge of the Bikan Historical Quarter, where the factory buildings survived as factory buildings: even for former sites of the same company, the ways they remain are exact opposites.

Even when the height figures are lined up, they show no ups and downs in the terrain of this area. The central measuring point is 4.8 m and the lowest, the east side, 2.9 m, a difference that does not reach 2 m. The north and west fall in between. Because it is not land where you feel a slope, you cannot see from the figures alone where rain and river water head. That is the job of the official hazard map published by the City of Kurashiki.

The land price observation point is in a residential area of Hiyoshi-cho, about 620 m from here. Per square meter, the record begins at 61,500 yen in 1983. Up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), the highest year is 1995 at 126,000 yen; from there it fell to 83,800 yen in 2011, and was 106,000 yen in 2025. In the 2026 official land prices it is 110,000 yen. The difference from the bottom is about 26,000 yen. The opening of the amusement park falls midway down the decline after the high year, and the year of its closing overlaps with the very end of the fall.