Port Island about 60 years ago and today

History of Port Island

If you open the 1945-50 aerial photograph, the frame is filled almost entirely with gray water. About forty percent at the lower right was out of reach of the photography of the time and remains blank white, and only a handful of small white ships and a single thin, long streak appear. This is the sea off Kobe Port, where ships wait offshore. From this photograph you cannot read that this would later be given the town name Minatojima and become an artificial island with the Rokko Mountains at its back. In Kobe the mountains press close to the sea, and the flat land that can be spread out behind the port is scarce. The circumstance that there was no choice but to go offshore if the port was to be enlarged can be sensed from the breadth of this water. The brightness of the water changes at each seam, and fine black dots are scattered too. It is a frame made by joining old photographs.

Lines drawn on the sea

If you switch to 1961-69, human hands enter the water. A thin white line appears that bends at the lower left of the frame and extends straight from there to the upper right. The outline of the island was drawn first on the sea, and this line comes to almost the same position as the southern shore of the island in the 1984-86 photograph. It was in 1966 that the City of Kobe began work on the offshore reclamation. The method adopted was to carry in earth and sand produced by cutting the hills of Suma on the west side of the city area, so that the scars where mountains were cut became residential areas and the carried earth and sand became land on the sea. It was an arrangement for making two pieces of land with one project. Around the line, white ships that look rectangular are still floating here and there. At the left edge of the frame several line up with space between them, and the feel of an anchorage of ships waiting for cargo remains.

An inlet left unfilled

The 1974-78 photograph shows the middle of the work in its most cluttered form. Along the western edge of the island a quay wall already runs, long, narrow warehouses form a row, and outside them many cargo ships are moored alongside. On the other hand, the inside of the island is whitish bare ground, with only faint lines of roads dividing lots visible. In the middle a water surface not yet filled bites in like an inlet, and seawall lines extend toward the southeast offshore, so you can read the procedure by which land was made in order from the inside of the enclosures. Toward the west, several round storage tanks line up in a white cluster. At the upper right of the frame there is another long, narrow pier separated by a waterway, filled with rows of transit sheds and flat cargo-handling areas. At the northern end the approach of the road crossing over from the mainland draws an arc, showing that the framework of the island was set in place first.

The exposition and the new transit system

By 1979-83 the inlet has disappeared, and in the center of the island a line drawing a rectangle with rounded corners goes around the blocks. In the open land inside it, small groups of buildings with colored roofs are placed, mixed with the sand of the preparation and materials. 1981 is a turning point for the island. The first phase of the reclamation was completed, the Port Liner, a new transit system linking the mainland and the island, started running, and the exposition Portopia '81 was held. The Kobe Ohashi Bridge, linking the island and the mainland, had been completed in 1970, and its approach comes into the top edge of the frame.

A flat area packed densely with grains of color spreads inside the western quay wall. Because squares of the same size appear lined up, it is thought to be a yard where containers are lined up. At the eastern end a band of green space comes in, and on the southeast side a band of white prepared land with newly placed soil extends. The pier at the upper right is also almost filled with warehouses. Each time you switch eras, the white bare ground is replaced in turn by darkish roofs and gray paving.

In 1984-86, tall buildings stand in rows in the central lots, casting dark shadows at their feet. The area that had been the exhibition site has been replaced by blocks of hotels, halls and housing, and the groves of the park have grown round. In the center a shape that looks like a plaza combining a circle and an ellipse appears, with green placed here and there around it. At the lower left of the frame the thin line of a breakwater extending long and away from the island also comes in. On the band extending to the southeast of the island, red cargo-handling equipment lines up at even intervals, and it has started working as a quay for handling containers. Even so, outside the southern edge is still dark sea, and the island is divided into land and water along the diagonal of the frame.

An island with two grains

In today's photograph, that diagonal is buried within the town. With the second phase of reclamation, which advanced from the late 1980s, the island extended south and became lots where large buildings line up at generous intervals. It is an area where research facilities, university campuses and hospitals gather. If you compare it with the finely cut blocks of the northern half, the width of the roads and the grain of the sites differ, and the grain of the blocks switches along a diagonal line. That is where the shore was in 1984-86, and the order of reclamation remains in the shape of the town. Along the western edge, green square sports grounds line up, and on the quay beyond them white transit sheds and ships moored alongside remain as before. To the northeast two piers extend with a waterway between them, and large transit sheds, cargo-handling equipment and large white ships moored alongside appear. In the middle of the blocks there is a park with a mass of trees, and off the southwest of the island a single long breakwater draws a line. It is a layout in which cargo-handling quays and housing and schools live together on the same island. Further offshore to the south of the island, Kobe Airport opened in 2006, but that falls outside the frame.

Almost no ups and downs appear in the cross-section graph. The spread of the five measured values is about 2 m, with the east side, the lowest, at 3.7 m and the northern and southern edges at only 5.7 m. Whichever cross-section you cut, east-west or north-south, the line is almost horizontal, and you can see that land made by reclamation was flat from the start and left no room for hills left uncut or valleys to form. Since this is low land surrounded by the sea, it is worth checking the assumptions for storm surge and tsunami lot by lot on the hazard map published by the City of Kobe.

The one point where the official land price (Chika Koji) is published for office and warehouse use is in Minatojima 3-chome, toward the north of the island and about 1.4 km from the center. It was 83,000 yen per square meter in 2015 and 185,000 yen in 2026, about 2.2 times between the beginning and end of the record up to the 2026 publication. Kobe Port has one more artificial island to the east, Rokko Island, a generation later, where you can compare the differences in how the islands were made.