Nagoya Port Garden Pier about 60 years ago and today

History of Nagoya Port Garden Pier

Garden Pier lies at the water's edge at the head of Ise Bay, where you have gone all the way south through the urban area of Nagoya. When you open the aerial photographs of this location, the lower half of the frame is a wide water surface, and long, narrow piers jut out into it. The land side is filled without gaps by roads and buildings, and the boundary between water and land is drawn straight everywhere. A natural shoreline remains nowhere. The new paddy fields (shinden) added toward the offshore since the Edo period and the port channels dug at the end of the Meiji era made this straight outline.

A port dug off the new paddy fields

The shallow sea that spread south of Atsuta has been changed into paddies little by little since the Edo period. The work of enclosing an area with levees to stop the tide and making the dried surface into paddies was repeated toward the offshore, and the edge of the land moved south year after year. The land gained this way lies just above sea level. The ground is 1.8 m at the center of the location, 2.1 m in the north, 2.3 m in the east, 2.2 m in the west, and finally 3.8 m in the south. None of the five measuring points reaches 4 m, and the difference between the highest, the south, and the lowest, the center, is only 2 m. It is a surface to which the word relief does not apply.

The condition of being shallow and low suits paddies but does not suit large ships. So from 1896 work began to dig channels toward the offshore, and the port took shape by the method of piling the dug-up sediment on the shore to make piers. After it opened as a port in 1907, the work of deepening the channels and extending the piers became the history of the port as it was. The straight shores in the photographs are traces both of digging and of piling.

Jetties like the teeth of a comb

The 1945-50 black-and-white photograph shows the era when the port existed only for cargo. At the lower center of the frame, three or four narrow jetties jut from the water's edge toward the sea, lined up like the teeth of a comb. White, long, narrow buildings sit on the jetties. These are buildings called transit sheds, used to store cargo for a while, and on the water between them thin shadows that look like ships are tucked in. It is the form of a landing pier extending straight out to sea, and the width of a jetty is only about that of one building. In the lower left there is one more block, an angular square pier.

The left half of the same photograph has a surface of a completely different tone. Long, narrow lots with fine parallel ridges continue from the top edge to the middle, looking like stripes. It is a land division that looks like either paddies holding water or lots for taking salt, and it resembles neither the grid of the town nor the straight lines of the port. From the center of the frame upward, dense grid blocks of houses spread out, and a wide white road crosses them diagonally. On the upper right and the right edge there are large buildings and dark waterways, and the face of the factory side is already complete.

In 1961-69 the look of the jetties changes. Their positions are the same three, but the outlines of the buildings on them have been tidied, and the size of each building has visibly increased. Several ships are scattered on the water near the bottom edge, and the dug-in water surface at the center right is packed with countless small dot-like boats. Meanwhile the striped lots fade. White lots and buildings mix in, and gray surfaces of flat graded land appear, with straight roads drawn into them. In the lower right corner square lots line up in an orderly way, forming a fine grid that looks like surfaces for storing materials.

The piers become square

From 1974-78 the photographs are in color. The jetties are still three narrow ones, and the large roofs on them show gray-white. Warehouses with greenish roofs gather on the pier in the lower left, and its tip is held by a seawall drawing an arc. In the lower left corner narrow landing piers line up like a comb, with small boats moored with their bows aligned. The band of a wide road crossing the frame east to west has newly been added. It is not found in the same position in 1961-69, and it passes as if cutting through the grid of the town. Note that in this photograph only the right third and the bottom band have a tone tilted toward blue, and one seam runs vertically and one horizontally.

In the 1979-83 photograph, the shape of the piers itself changes. The narrow jetties have been filled in on their east side. The two on the left remain narrow, but the gap that was to their east has become a square, wide, flat piece of land, with a large bright white roof on top. The reclamation process of filling the space between the sea surface and the jetties to make one continuous surface appears as it is in one photograph. A looping access section has been added to the east-west road band, showing that it is a road passing at a raised level. In the lower right, fine brown square lots line up in an orderly way. They look like basins filled with water, a land division that looks like a place for floating timber.

Toward a shore where people gather

In the 1987-90 photograph the water shows blue-green, and you can see down to the details. On the reclaimed pier a large white roof and white structures that look circular or oval line up, and buildings and wide paving have been laid out around them. White ships come alongside the two narrow jetties remaining on the left, and on the pier in the lower left the blue roofs have visibly increased. Two or three bridges span the dug-in water at the center right, and the east-west road crosses the dug-in water and runs out to the right. This is the era when a shore that handles cargo and a shore where people gather began to line up in the same frame.

In today's photograph, the weight of that pairing has been reversed. On the sea there are almost no ships. A building with a light-blue roof stands on the pier at the lower center; a landing pier and white ships have been placed to its south, and a round structure and a green lot that looks like lawn to its east. This is the look after an aquarium opened in 1992 and this area was laid out as a shore where people gather. If you switch the eras, you can see at a glance that the water's edge, which was a row of jetties in 1945-50, has become one surface with wide paving and greenery.

Even so, many things have not moved. The arc-shaped seawall that holds the tip of the pier in the lower left has hardly changed shape since it appeared in 1974-78. The mooring in the lower left corner where small boats line up like a comb and the canal running north to south at the center left are also in the same positions. The change is in the lower right, where the fine square lots disappeared and were replaced by large white buildings and wide paving. The change in how cargo is stored shows as a difference in the coarseness of the lots.

The record through which land values can be followed is at a residential area in Koei, about 700 m inland from the shore. 210,000 yen per square meter in 1994 is the start of the record, and at the same time this is the highest value up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). From there it fell over more than 20 years, with small rebounds in 2007 and 2008 in between, and hit the bottom up to the 2026 publication at 124,000 yen in 2018 and 2019. In the 2026 publication it recovered to 156,000 yen, but it does not reach three quarters of the starting year. The time when the face of the port moved from cargo to a shore where people gather and the curve of the value of residential land do not mesh.

All five measuring points on this surface fall below 4 m, and this bears on how this land is read. The hazard maps published by the City of Nagoya and Aichi Prefecture show by zone how far water is assumed to come in a storm surge or an earthquake. If you find the same place on those maps before following the edges of the piers in the photographs, the meaning of the straight shores starts to look different.