Sunport Takamatsu about 60 years ago and today

History of Sunport Takamatsu

The town of Takamatsu long kept a layout in which the castle, the port, and the station stand shoulder to shoulder at the water's edge. North of Takamatsu Castle, which faces the Seto Inland Sea, was originally shallow sea and sandbars, and filling them in to run landing piers and tracks there settled the town's role as the gateway to Shikoku. So that passengers arriving by ship could change straight onto trains, the quay and the ticket gates were squeezed within a few dozen steps of each other. The area called Sunport Takamatsu is the land left behind after that change of trains was no longer needed.

Reclamation north of the castle

Takamatsu Castle is a sea castle that draws seawater into its moats, and the water's edge to its north became the starting point of reclamation. Each time the cargo handled by the port increased, the land work extended offshore, and freight sidings and passenger landing piers came to line up shoulder to shoulder in the same district. The Uko ferries, opened at the end of the Meiji era, linked Uno on the Honshu side with this quay and received almost all the people and goods entering Shikoku. The tracks are also dead-end, comb-shaped, because that shape was chosen to send passengers off the ships onto trains by the shortest route. The name of Hamano-cho, the district where a point of the official land prices (Chika Koji) was placed, is also a name that tells us today where the water's edge was.

The height of the ground stays around 2 m wherever you measure in this area. The measuring point at the center is 2 m, even the highest point in the west is 3 m, and the point in the east is only 1.6 m. On the flat surface made by reclamation and land preparation, there is almost nothing that can be called a slope.

The fan-shaped rail yard

In the 1961-69 aerial photograph, a single dark sea occupies the upper half of the frame. At that water's edge, left of the center of the frame, dozens of tracks spread out like an opened fan. The base of the fan is bundled thinly toward the town to the southwest, and its tip reaches straight to the port's quay. The shape for handing cargo between ships and freight cars is drawn on the ground as it is. In the sea, two thin jetties jut out diagonally. Toward the left of the frame there is prepared land clearly whiter than its surroundings, with still only a handful of buildings on it. It is a surface that has just been filled in. At the upper right, piers divided by straight lines and rows of buildings that look like warehouses line up.

In the middle on the right of the frame, a dark water surface cutting long and narrow into the land runs diagonally. Small buildings are packed tightly on both banks, and shadows that look like boats line up here and there at the water's edge. It can be read that, apart from the quay that received large ships, a waterway reaching into the town was still in use.

The lower two-thirds of the frame is filled with a town of finely packed roofs. It is the look of the town rebuilt after it burned in the 1945 air raid, and several wide straight streets can be seen running through it. A large lot with a different coarseness from its surroundings can be made out only toward the top of the center. It is the castle site.

In 1974-78 the photograph gains color, and the sea changes to a greenish blue. At the top edge of the frame a black band with no photograph remains, and only that part of the sea surface is cut off. Buildings line the formerly white prepared land on the left, and the lots fill in one by one. The fan of the rail yard is still intact and can be read as a bundle of white lines. On the piers at the upper right, buildings have increased, and shadows that look like round storage tanks are now mixed in. In the lower third of the frame, the color of the bare ground leans toward ocher, and the boundary of colors shows that it was taken under different conditions from the upper half.

The 1979-83 photograph has a dark, strongly bluish tone overall, and there is a white blank square in the upper left corner. It is the area with no photograph, left as it is. The fan of the rail yard does not change in this era either, and the reddish-brown roadbed extends to the southwest in a bundle. On the east side of the port, the buildings on the piers increase further. The oval track toward the inland on the right of the frame also appears in the 1961-69 photograph, and its position does not move in any of the three eras up to 1979-83. In this era, even the light-blue round water surface beside it can be told apart by color. The castle-site lot appears divided into the green of woods and the water surface of the moats, and the roofs of the town have grown even denser.

The end of the ferries

The Uko ferries that linked Honshu and Shikoku finished their role with the 1988 opening of the Seto-Ohashi Bridge. Once the joint between ships and freight cars was no longer needed, neither the sidings spread like a fan nor the long landing piers for handling passengers were needed at that scale. With port and railway land freed up together, the town of Takamatsu gained a chance to redo the design of the station area. The developed area is called Sunport Takamatsu, and Takamatsu Station moved to its present position in the early 2000s. In 2004 the Takamatsu Symbol Tower was built, adding one tall point to the outline of the waterfront.

Tracks that became straight lines

In today's aerial photograph, the fan remains nowhere. The tracks have been arranged into a few straight lines that run off to the west, and at the station's position long white bands line up in parallel. They are the roofs that cover the platforms. The places once occupied by sidings and quays have been replaced by lawn greenery and wide pavement, and several tall buildings stand there. Only one of them is far taller than the rest. A thin breakwater extends far north from the quay, with a small structure on its tip. White hulls are berthed at the landing piers, which shows that departures and arrivals of boats to the islands continue.

The long, narrow water surface cutting into the town also remains at the same angle in today's photograph. The buildings on both banks have been rebuilt, but small white boats are moored in a row at the water's edge, and the waterway itself has not been filled in and is still in use. It seems that even when the large quays moved offshore, the place for small boats did not move.

The main thing whose shape does not change through the three past eras and today is the castle site. The outlines of the moats' water surface and the woods are in the same place in every photograph. The surface that was sea, and the surface that was the castle's water's edge. If you compare these two, you can follow with your eyes how much of the town is ground made later.

The height figures show more clearly than the photographs that this is low, flat land. The hazard maps published by Kagawa Prefecture and the City of Takamatsu show graphically how far water is assumed to come in a storm surge or tsunami. If you open them once before walking the town, the meaning of the figure 2 m should look different.

Land price records remain from 2017 on. The official land price of residential land in Hamano-cho, near the location, rose from 119,000 yen per square meter in 2017 by 1,000 to 3,000 yen every year, reaching 132,000 yen in the 2026 publication. There is a difference of 13,000 yen from 2017 to the 2026 publication, and there is no year in the record when the value fell.