Takanawa Gateway City about 60 years ago and today

History of Takanawa Gateway City

The area called Takanawa is land clinging to the edge where the plateau drops to the sea. Walk only a few hundred steps west and the ground rises to more than double the height, and go east and a reclaimed flat surface continues to the canals. Railway land where no passengers got off ran north and south through that boundary. It was a wide rolling stock depot between Shinagawa Station and Tamachi Station, and for more than a century it remained a place the town side could only peer into.

Tracks laid on the sea

Shinagawa Station, opened in 1872, is a station on the section where Japan's first railway ran. In Takanawa at the time the plateau pressed right up to the water's edge, and there was little room to run tracks on land. The method chosen was to pile up soil on the sea and build an embankment. The tracks advanced through the sea away from the water's edge, and water was left between them and the land. The stonework of this embankment came to light underground during excavation for the redevelopment, and part of it has become a subject of preservation.

If you measure the height of the ground, it is 3.4 m at the center of the site and 5.4 m at the eastern measuring point, while only the western measuring point rises to 8.4 m. The figures also record where the foot of the plateau ended.

Half a century filled with tracks

If you open the aerial photograph from around 1936-42, dozens of thin white lines run in a bundle north and south through the center of the frame. The bundle curves slightly as it heads south, and its width spans several town blocks. On the east side, reclaimed land divided by straight lines lines up, with square buildings and round storage tanks on it. Farther east, the lower right of the frame is a light gray shallow water surface, with sand patterns appearing in branches. They are the traces of channels that ran out after the water drew back. A single small island with a pentagonal outline floats offshore of it. The west side is a contrast, with dense masses of woods and a town of finely packed roofs connected by diagonal roads. In the middle on the left of the frame there is a polygonal lot washed out whiter than its surroundings. The way its boundary bends matches neither the streets nor the grounds, and it is an area where the brightness of adjoining photo frames did not match.

In the 1945-50 photograph, the look of the reclaimed land in the east changes. Long, narrow buildings line up in many rows facing the same way, repeated at the same size lot after lot. The bundle of tracks is intact, and on the white lines the shadows of short railcars are strung together like beads. The shallow water surface at the lower right has changed into a surface brimming with water, and the outline of the pentagonal island can be read more clearly than in the previous era. Many canals cut toward the land side into the reclaimed land in the east, dividing the lots into several parts. At the lower left of the frame a single wide straight road runs, crossing the narrow streets of the town at an angle.

In 1961-69, the bundle of tracks reaches its greatest width. On the east side of the bundle, two groups of water surfaces finely divided into grids can be found lined up neatly. The canals run diagonally as black bands, and both banks are filled without gaps by warehouses and factories. At the right edge of the frame a new prepared surface shines bright, which shows that the tip of reclamation is moving farther offshore.

Canals in color

From 1974-78 on, the photographs have color. The canal water appears greenish blue, and the roadbed of the tracks becomes a reddish-brown band. The water surfaces that had been divided into grids lose the darkness of water in this era and change into a wide, flat, bright surface. Still, the thin lines dividing the surface remain, and in the group toward the south the row of lines is clear. An elevated road crosses the reclaimed land in the east diagonally, and at the water's edge on the right, small boats gather densely as white dots.

The 1979-83 photograph is a faded gray-brown overall, with little color information. Even so, the bundle of tracks and the large gray roof built to its east can be made out. The water of the bay at the upper right is muddied ocher, and large hulls are berthed in the canals. Toward the lower right of the frame, a sports ground appears whose infield soil looks reddish brown.

1984-86 is the opposite, a dark, deep tone, and the grid-like water surfaces line up clearly again. Several white cylindrical storage tanks appear clustered along a canal. In 1987-90 the frame becomes brighter, and some of the grids change into light-blue or greenish surfaces. In the bay a thin jetty juts far offshore, and at its base masses in colors that look like building materials are piled up. Through seven eras, the bundle of tracks does not move.

A new station on cleared land

When the depot's functions were moved elsewhere, the bundle of tracks was squeezed thinner by the amount of use it had lost. The opening of Takanawa Gateway Station in March 2020 came on land freed by that rearrangement, and it is the first new station on the Yamanote Line since Nishi-Nippori Station in 1971. Construction of blocks centered on the station continued, and in 2025 part of them opened.

In today's aerial photograph, the change at the center is clear at a glance. The bundled tracks have dropped to a few, and a wide, whitish-brown cleared site lies to their west. On the east edge of the cleared site, where it meets the remaining tracks, a long white structure extends in the same direction as the tracks, and the platform of the new station is here. Southeast of the cleared site, tall buildings stand in one cluster, with tree greenery and bright paved surfaces at their feet. The place that looked like a grid east of the tracks is covered by one large blue-green roof, with a surface for another use on top of it. The water surfaces of the canals and the positions of the bridges have hardly moved since the color eras. At the water's edge on the right, small white boats line up without gaps, and in the bay to the east a round structure floats.

If you line up the seven past eras and today, the west side moves least. On the plateau, the fineness of the roofs does change era by era, but the large lots covered with woods hardly change position. While the ground on the sea side was redrawn again and again, only the plateau side kept the same outline.

The figures show more clearly than the photographs that this is low land. The value of 3.4 m at the center is the height of a flat surface made by reclamation and fill. The flood and storm surge hazard maps distributed by Minato Ward show by color which assumptions this area falls under. If you walk the boundary between the plateau and the reclaimed land, it is a map you want to open first.

The point for the official land prices (Chika Koji) is placed in a residential area of Takanawa 2-chome, on the west side of the station. It is 337 m away. The price per square meter kept rising from 1,060,000 yen in 2016 without falling for a single year, reaching 1,950,000 yen in the 2026 publication. The increase is not uniform. From 2020 to 2021 it moved by only 10,000 yen, yet in the last year alone it rose by 270,000 yen.