Maihama about 60 years ago and today

History of Maihama

When you go out through the ticket gates of Maihama Station, the ground underfoot is flat as far as you go, with no hint of a slope at all. If you switch through the aerial photographs in order from the oldest, the reason becomes clear. Photographs from seven eras remain for this area, but in the three oldest, the land itself does not appear where the station is. The lower half of the frame is the shallow sea of Tokyo Bay, with only thin channels branching across a washed-out white water surface. Rather than tracing the history of the land, you end up looking in order from before the land was born.

The delta and the tidal flats

Through the middle of the frame, from north to south, a wide, brightly shining channel meanders down. It is a branch of the lower Edo River, and this water surface is the border between Tokyo and Chiba. In the photograph from around 1936-42, the flow splits in two around a tongue-shaped sandbar, and inside the sandbar you can see thin, curving channel lines and unevenness that looks like marsh. Orderly lots of farmland have not yet been laid out. Wherever you look, there is no grid of streets, no straight seawall and no band of railway anywhere. Along the upper left and the top edge of the frame, long, narrow strips of farmland line up, and a block where houses are packed densely along the strip-shaped land divisions lies in the upper right. Land was only at the top edge of the frame.

The settlement that opened early east of the river made both the river and the sea the places of its livelihood. Sediment carried by the Edo River built wide tidal flats at the river mouth, where shellfish were gathered, and the grounds for growing nori seaweed spread in the shallow sea. The 1945-50 photograph shows this well. On the water surface in the right half of the frame and in the lower left, groups of thin lines like spread-out bamboo blinds are lined up regularly. They are rows of branches and nets set up for nori. Ripple patterns in the sand can also be read around them, showing that the water is very shallow. In this era the upper half of the sandbar has been arranged into lots that look like farmland, while the lower half remains sand and tidal flats crossed by a mesh of channels. Note that in this era the lower third of the frame is outside the area photographed, and beyond the diagonal border it is painted pale gray.

Polygons drawn by seawalls

In the 1961-69 photograph, only the upper half is an old photograph, and below that it becomes an almost uniform gray sea surface. Because the seam shows as a horizontal line, it is clear at a glance that the upper and lower parts were taken at different times. The old part shows the long, narrow lots in the upper left, the wide dark flow running down the center, the mesh of channels and reed beds on both sides of it, and the dense settlement extending diagonally in the upper right. And in this era, one thing appears that was not in the earlier photographs. In the lower right of the frame, in the sea, two lots enclosed in squares by straight embankments line up diagonally. The inside is a mottle of whitish sand and water, which reads as a state in which only the enclosure has been finished first. Reclamation first fixes the shape with seawalls and then puts sediment inside. That very first move is caught in the photograph.

The reclamation off Urayasu was carried out in two phases from the 1960s into the 1970s. The background was that the livelihood that had depended on the sea could no longer be continued, and the fishing rights were given up in stages. In the 1974-78 photograph, the result takes up most of the frame. Polygons enclosed by straight seawalls are set in the sea, and the inside is a patchwork of the green of grass and the brown and gray of bare ground. There are almost no buildings, and no streets have been drawn. A thin, straight channel passes along the north side of the polygons, and north of it the existing town continues. A block where white rectangular buildings stand in rows lies on the right, showing that industrial land close to the inland side had started moving first. Faint diagonal lines remain inside the polygons and seem to be traces of channels from before the reclamation.

An ellipse drawn on the ground

When you bring up the 1979-83 photograph, the outline of a large ellipse is drawn on that flat land. Along the outer line the prepared surface has been leveled brightly, and the surroundings are still bare ground and grassland. In the same photograph, a wide elevated road crosses the northern edge of the reclaimed land diagonally and passes off to the upper right. The river running down the center is a muddy brown water surface, with a straight bridge across it. This ellipse was not a building but the shape of a site secured first for what was about to be built.

In 1984-86, the inside of the ellipse fills up. Groups of white buildings, ponds, curving paths, a prepared surface laid out in a ring and the green of planting can be read, and a circular structure can also be seen on the northern edge. Northwest of the ellipse a wide surface lined with parallel stripes appears, and you can tell that it is lots for parking cars. In 1983 Tokyo Disneyland opened. However, the southern half of the reclaimed land is still, in this era, wide bare ground and grassland the color of dead grass, with only the straight seawall cutting its edge.

In the 1987-90 photograph, the paving around the ellipse has spread further, and in the southwest corner an area with white buildings, ponds and curving structures has formed. On the northern edge, a straight structure runs alongside the elevated road. In 1988 Maihama Station opened, and the reclaimed land became a place you could reach directly by train. Even so, open land remains in the southern half of the frame and toward the east, apart from green square lots. More than ten years after the seawalls closed, the land has still not been used up.

The remaining bare ground and today's face

In today's photograph, almost the whole of the polygons is in use. Inside the northern ellipse, hills of dark green, groups of white buildings and ring-shaped paths line up. Tokyo DisneySea, opened in 2001, is in the southern half, where a mountain-shaped structure and a large water surface can be read. Along the western shore several tall buildings stand together, and on the east side a wide parking lot, box-shaped buildings, and sports grounds with what looks like the brown infield of a baseball field and a red running track line up. On the northern edge you can see the white roof of the station and the thin line of a track curving from it toward the parks. The area of the square enclosures floating in the sea in the 1961-69 photograph has become, in this photograph, a block lined with the long buildings of warehouses and factories, and the traces of the enclosures cannot be made out.

The place name deserves a mention too. The place name was decided later than the land. The name Maihama is said to have been given after Miami Beach in the United States. A place that had been sea needed a name only after the reclamation was finished and it was divided into lots as a town. To someone who has looked through the photographs in order, the order in which the name is newer seems, if anything, natural.

The numbers also confirm that you meet no slope as you walk. Among the measuring points of the cross-section, the south at 3.2 m is the highest, the center 2.6 m, the west 2.5 m and the east 2.1 m, and going north it drops to 2 m. Wherever you take it, the difference is only a little over 1 m, and the whole is a flat surface close to sea level. Because this is land made by reclamation and lies at the mouth of a large river, it is worth knowing how this land is treated when water comes. The hazard maps published separately by the City of Urayasu and Chiba Prefecture summarize the assumed depths of flooding and the approach to evacuation.

The movement of official land prices (Chika Koji), for its part, is not flat. At the residential land in Maihama 3-chome, about 576 m from the location, the record of official land prices continues from 1993. The starting year, 1993, is 512,000 yen per square meter, and this is the highest value up to the 2026 publication. From there it went into decline, recovered for a while from 2004 to 2008, then fell again, hitting the bottom up to the 2026 publication at 305,000 yen in 2013 and 2014, and in 2025 it came back to 463,000 yen. In the 2026 publication it is 467,000 yen. Over a little more than 30 years it lost about 40%, and it has won back about three quarters of the fall. A town was made on land that had been sea, and the price of that town goes up and down. Looking at the seven eras in a row, you can see that all of this happened within the same single frame.