Yumenoshima / Shinkiba about 60 years ago and today

History of Yumenoshima / Shinkiba

Yumenoshima and Shinkiba are land made later on top of the shallow sea at the inner end of Tokyo Bay. The front of the river mouths, where sediment carried by the rivers had made the water shallow, was suited to being turned into land by bringing in earth and waste by ship. There was also a reason why a timber town moved here. The basic way to store logs is to keep them floating in the water, and that needs a wide water surface gathered in one place. Along the inland canals there was no longer enough room to keep rafts, and sawmilling and the timber trade moved together from Kiba in Fukagawa. The place name Shinkiba (the name means new Kiba) is this move turned directly into a name.

A square floating on the sea

If you switch to the aerial photograph from around 1936-42, almost all of the range for which photographs are available is sea surface. Many striped patterns of shoals run over the water, and the shapes of the sand left by the ebbing tide remain as they were. Land divided by straight lines and a water surface enclosed in a square by a white rim appear only in the upper left corner. Small white dots are scattered inside the enclosure, which suggests that there too the water surface was partitioned and something was floated on it. The places with no photograph at all are three lots on the southeast side and one lot in the southwest, which remain as gray blank space. The island is nowhere yet.

In the 1945-50 photograph, a sharp-cornered square island appears in the center of the frame. The inside of the island is not uniform, with whitish fill and black puddles mixed in patches, and it looks like works stopped partway. It is surrounded by sea on all four sides, and no road or bridge crossing to the island can be seen. At the left edge, a grid of streets and canals lines up, and only that part is a town area connected to the mainland. The history, in which reclamation began before the war under a plan to build an airfield and the works were stopped by the war, overlaps well with this uneven outline of the island.

Only the seawalls first

In the 1961-69 photograph, the outline of the island has grown greatly to the north. In the northern lot, small mounds of piled-up earth and waste and bare work roads threading between them spread out, and the roughness of the surface comes through even across the grain of the photograph. In this period, the place was used as a final disposal site for garbage and was known by the name Yumenoshima.

The southern lot in the same photograph looks completely different. White straight seawalls have finished enclosing the sea in a square, yet the inside is still water surface, with patches of deposits floating only here and there. The outer frame first, the contents later. From the lower half to the right half of the frame, an expanse of rippling sea continues, and neither the lines of seawalls nor the lines of roads enter it. At the left edge, across a canal, large white buildings that seem to be factories are placed, and to their north the streets divide finely and the rows of roofs grow dense. From this difference in density you can read from which side the front line of reclamation extended.

Logs lined up on the water

By 1974-78 the photograph is in color, and the use of the enclosed water surface can be understood at a glance. Wooden rafts line up neatly in the ponds, and brown rectangles cover the water surface like a grid. On the land side, piles of timber laid down make stripes, and straight roads and wide bare ground just created divide them. In the lower left of the frame there is the same group of rafts, and the way the water surface is used continues outside the frame. Outside the eastern seawall, a row of small stakes juts out into the sea. At the southern end a bridge and the straight line of the road continuing from it come in, and along the northern edge a factory with a blue roof and finely divided roofs of houses appear. The water surface itself is the facility.

By 1979-83, gabled roofs begin to line up along the edges of the ponds. White and blue-green buildings form rows around the ponds, and the timber rafts fill the water surface almost without gaps. In the northern lot the development of a park is advancing, and an oval track, a round structure and paths edged with rows of trees can be made out. A wide elevated band crossing the frame straight east-west also shows clearly from this era. The water surfaces to the east and south are muddy brown, and even outside the seawalls the color of the water comes close to that of the land.

Ponds that became empty

In the 1984-86 photograph, the pond in the lower center is black and empty. Rafts remain in the upper and middle ponds, and the pond in the lower left is still filled as before, so you can tell that the use and crowding differed from pond to pond. Along the eastern edge, newly leveled bare ground and a green sports ground have been added.

In the 1987-90 photograph the rafts cover the water surface again, and the density as a timber storage pond is at its highest. Two east-west elevated structures run side by side and pass across the water to the opposite bank at the eastern end. In the southeast too, a row of bridge supports is rising. The tracks and roads arrived together. In 1988 two lines reached this island, a third was added later, and as of 2026 it is a station where three lines gather: the Yurakucho Line / the Keiyo Line / the Rinkai Line.

The method of storing timber floating in the water became less necessary as imports brought in as raw logs dwindled. Wood processed into boards and square timber could simply be piled up under a roof, and there was no longer a reason to hold a wide water surface. The emptying of the ponds is the result of this trend, and in the photographs it happens with a time lag from pond to pond.

If you switch to today's photograph, the timber has vanished from the water surface of the ponds. Only dashed frames marking the lots remain on the water, and the surroundings are covered completely by the roofs of warehouses and factories. The ponds kept only their outlines. In the park to the north, a stadium with a red track and a lawn plaza sit side by side, and on the water beyond, white ships are moored tightly to landing piers. The east-west band has become a corridor where several railway lines and elevated roads stand shoulder to shoulder, crossing the water of the mouth of the Arakawa River at the eastern end. A long, narrow green band continues along the seawalls, and the water of the river mouth lies outside it. Timber rafts remain here and there only in the pond in the lower left.

Even if you switch to the elevation cross-section, there is almost no relief either east-west or north-south. The central measuring point is 5.2 m, the lowest, south and west, are 4.7 m, and the highest, north, is 5.6 m, so the difference does not reach 1 m. It is the cross-section of land made by leveling flat on top of the water. The official land price (Chika Koji) point is in Tatsumi 1-chome, Koto Ward, about 1.9 km from here, and it is recorded as residential land. The records per square meter begin at 354,000 yen in 2013 and reach 694,000 yen in the 2026 official land prices, roughly doubling from 2013 to the 2026 official land prices. The assumptions for flooding on low land are published by the local government in the form of maps, so if you are involved with this area through your home or work, it is a good idea to keep the map distributed by Koto Ward at hand and check it.