Sendai Port (Sendai Shinko) about 60 years ago and today

History of Sendai Port (Sendai Shinko)

The shore of Sendai had no inlet to receive large ships. Sand carried by the Natori River and the Nanakita River built a long beach, and rows of dunes and the low wetlands behind them continue along the coastline. Ships that needed deep water had no choice but to call at Shiogama to the north, and the Teizan Canal, running lengthwise just inside the coast, had carried rice and goods by boat since the days of the domain. This area, a little more than 10 km east of the town area and far from any railway station, was for a long time a land of fields and pine woods. The idea of digging out a sandy beach to make a port is the reverse side of this terrain.

If there is no natural depth of water, you can cut away the land and let the water in. The dug-in method, which makes channels and anchorages by digging down into a sandy plain, only works when there is a wide, low, flat area with nothing in the way and a large city standing behind it. The shore of Sendai had both conditions. As the creation of industrial land advanced across the country in the 1960s, this beach was chosen because having nothing but sand, pines and paddies counted directly as an advantage.

The era of beach and pine woods

The 1945-50 aerial photograph begins with a single line drawn diagonally from the upper right to the lower left. It is the coastline. The area above and to the left of the line is land, the area below and to the right is sea, the waves line up white streaks layer upon layer, and just inside the sandy beach the treetops of pines continue as a black band. On the inland side of the band, strip-like lots of fields are finely cut, and in the upper left there is one site with a group of large buildings. At the bottom of the center, a long, narrow water surface extends parallel to the coast, its tip bending like a hook. In the lower left corner many water surfaces divided into squares line up, and in the upper right woods and fields are mixed in patches. The triangle in the lower right is blank white because it is a range the photographs of this era do not cover.

Even if you switch to 1961-69, the scenery moves surprisingly little. The band of pine woods is in the same position, and the lots of the fields and the arrangement of the settlements are unchanged. The only difference is that a few buildings increased on the site in the upper left and the road leading to it became a little wider. The sea surface glitters finely in the sun, and dark shadows drift offshore. Neither channel nor pier appears anywhere at this point. The last coastline before the digging began is preserved here.

Ten years of digging

In the 1974-78 photograph the scenery turns inside out. A wide water surface runs diagonally through the center of the frame. It is not a natural bay but a channel made by digging down into the sandy plain to let ships in. In the upper right, tanks with round roofs stand in rows, and one ship lies alongside their quay. The left half is still under construction, with buildings standing only sparsely among white ground cut into lots. Many small shadows that seem to be work boats are scattered on the water. In this era the color leans toward yellow-green and the brightness changes from lot to lot, so the rawness of the land creation comes out even more strongly. It is the period just after the port opened in 1971, when port and town were growing at the same time.

When the beach turned into a port, it was not only paddies and pine woods that vanished from the map. Land on which people had made their living from the beach and the fields was replaced by the plans for channels and piers. If you set the two eras side by side, the gap is less than ten years, but in that time both the way the land was used and the kinds of work done there changed.

By 1984-86, the straight lines of piers are in place on both banks of the channel. In the upper left a group of smaller tanks and a yard stacked with materials have been added, and two ships are berthed at the quay. In the middle of the channel one ship moves ahead trailing a white wake, and toward the sea in the southeast a thin breakwater extends far, taking the waves of the open sea. The tank base in the upper right has hardly changed its form, and one building with a red roof has been added. On the southern shore a wide sandy beach still remains, with waves drawing white lines. Inland of it, buildings with large roofs line up.

A shore of containers and cars

In today's photograph, the southwestern shore is filled with grains of color. Red and blue containers form rows, and several long-legged cranes stand on the quay. On the next lot, cars line up neatly, waiting to be loaded. Along the northwestern quay long warehouses line up and several white ships lie alongside, and you can see from above that the shores are divided by the kind of cargo handled. Spherical tanks have been added to the tank base on the opposite bank, and while the width of the channel is unchanged, only the use of both banks has been updated. A sandy beach remains on the south side, but white straight structures continue between the beach and the sites. In the 1984-86 photograph, this was where the sandy surface touched the sites directly. In 2011, 40 years after the port opened, the tsunami of the Great East Japan Earthquake reached this coast. If you go back and forth between the two eras, you can follow with your eyes where the build of the shore changed.

The cross-section has a missing section. In the north-south direction, both points have no value and the line breaks off partway. This is because the water surface of the channel lies beyond that point. On the side that has values, it is 4.3 m in the west, 3.4 m at the center, and drops to 1.5 m toward the east, sloping gently toward the sea. The flooding assumptions for tsunamis and storm surges are shown as zones on the hazard maps published by the local government. If you open them side by side with the values of the cross-section, what this slope means becomes concrete.

Land value records can be picked up from a site for offices and warehouses in Minato 4-chome. At a point about 1.7 km from the location, the value was 31,000 yen per square meter in 2013 and 79,800 yen in the official land prices (Chika Koji) of 2026. From 2013 to the 2026 official land prices, that is growth of more than 2.5 times, which suggests that the land spreading behind the piers has gained value as a place for handling cargo.

The remnants of the beach are in the southwestern corner of the frame. Ponds, grassland and narrow waterways remain as the lowland on the side that was not dug, and fragments of pine woods can also be seen. If you trace in today's photograph the long, narrow water surface that extended parallel to the coast in the 1945-50 photograph, its continuity is hard to confirm because piers and sites block it. The waterways and ponds in the southwestern corner faintly carry on its direction. The skeleton, in which dunes and the canal lined up along the coastline, remains in the frame only as the way the lowland has survived. The nearest station to this area is Nakanosakae Station on the Senseki Line, and no tracks or station were built for the port. The land born from digging was given names and lots by a logic different from that of towns that grew around a railway station. If you advance through the eras and follow the same place with your eyes, only the outline of that logic remains where the band of pine woods disappeared.