Ukishima / Tonomachi King Skyfront about 60 years ago and today

History of Ukishima / Tonomachi King Skyfront

Tonomachi lies at the tip of the right bank where the Tama River flows out into Tokyo Bay. If you ride the Keikyu Daishi Line, get off at the terminus, Kojimashinden Station, and head east, the land is soon squeezed between the river and the sea. Sediment carried from upstream slowed down at the river mouth and was laid there, people built embankments around that low ground and opened fields, and then added more earth out toward the sea. Ukishima, the name that stands beside it, is the name of reclaimed land extended toward the sea in that way. It can be called a place where human hands have added land little by little on top of the soil the river laid.

Fields inside the embankment

In the aerial photograph from around 1936-42, about 30% of the lower side of the image is a pale gray area with no data, and the sea side to the south does not appear. Even so, the relationship between the river and the ground reads well. The Tama River flows diagonally from left to right through the middle of the frame, and bright sandbars lie in the stream. On the south bank a white band runs in a large arc, and the embankment and the road on top of it trace the bend of the river just as it is. Inside the arc, houses stand in short rows, and beyond them long, narrow lots of fields continue. The ridges of the fields change direction along the arc. On the ground of this era, no streets running straight or buildings with large roofs appear. Bright tidal flats where the traces of meanders curl like whirlpools spread at the lower right of the frame, showing that the boundary between water and land was not yet fixed. It is ground with nothing but fields.

Buildings that appeared along the embankment

By 1945-50 the missing part is gone, and the scene inside the same embankment has changed completely. Many long, narrow buildings line up in parallel along the embankment, and a mass of large roofs with rows of thin stripes sits south of them. The rows of buildings change angle little by little to match the arc of the embankment, and on the west side of the site a dense town with a grid of streets adjoins it. A group of small buildings like row houses lined up diagonally can also be made out. The right side of the frame is still bright tidal flats crossed by lines of branch channels, and a single thin line crosses it diagonally. The lower half of the frame is dark sea surface, with dark strips lined up in regular rows. They also look like rows used for nori seaweed farming, but you cannot tell this from the photograph alone. The dense townscape of Haneda spreads on the opposite shore to the north, and at the upper right square blocks and rows of long buildings can be seen. It is a photograph from the middle of the change in role from fields to factory sites.

Blocks covered with striped roofs

In the 1961-69 photograph, the inside of the embankment is densely filled with factories with bright large roofs. The stripes of the roofs are fine, and a yard lined with thin lines, large buildings shaped like saw teeth, and a group of round storage tanks continue south of the site. At the lower center of the frame a canal of dark water reaches in, with landing piers and tanks set at the water's edge. East of the canal, wide areas of bright, open ground remain and look like land in the middle of preparation. At the upper right on the opposite shore, the runways of Haneda appear as straight bright bands, and the composition of the airport and the factories facing each other across the river comes clearly into view from this era on.

Color begins with the 1974-78 photograph. The water surface of the Tama River is a mosaic of green and light blue tones, and the sandbars in the stream stand out brightly. And the blocks of Tonomachi are almost entirely covered by a single factory with large roofs of long, narrow parallel stripes. Its northern edge is cut off by the embankment and the road, and a thin green band runs around the inside of the site. A wide road in an arc crosses the south, and beyond it a large bundle of tracks gathers. At the western end a trunk road running straight north-south can be seen, passing south from the bridge over the river. Piers and landing piers, buildings with light-blue roofs, and a group of round tanks line up in the southeast, the water of the canal is dark green, and the lines of the quays stand out hard.

Even if you move on through 1979-83, 1984-86 and 1987-90, the outline of these large roofs hardly moves. The change is in the brightness and color: 1979-83 is a thin gray with an ocher tinge, 1984-86 a deeply subdued green-gray, and by 1987-90 the brightness is close to white silver. Since the division of the lots and the direction of the stripes stay the same, it can be read as a time when the same factory kept being used while its roofs were re-covered, not one when the buildings were rebuilt.

The change to research blocks

The replacement of factory sites by other roles is not a story of this area alone in Kawasaki. The same kind of replacement as at Lazona Kawasaki, where a former factory site in front of the station became a commercial facility, went in the direction of research and development on the factory land at the river mouth. The Tonomachi area is called King Skyfront and was laid out as a district where research facilities in the fields of life science and the environment gather. In 2022 the Tamagawa Sky Bridge opened, and the area is connected directly across the river to Haneda Airport. However, this bridge does not appear in the aerial photograph shown as "today", which shows that it was taken before then.

If you open the photograph as of 2026, the look of the blocks does not overlap with the era of the striped roofs. Separate medium-sized buildings are placed here and there with wide streets and vacant lots between them, and paved areas lined with white parking spaces and bands of lawn and trees fill the spaces in between. A long, narrow green band continues along the riverbank, and the road on the embankment still draws the same arc as around 1936-42. Beyond the wide trunk road crossing the south of the blocks, the ground of heavy industry, packed densely with material yards and large buildings, spreads unchanged. Although the buildings have all been replaced, only the arc of the embankment remains.

It can be said that there is almost no difference between the surface of the river and the ground. The five measuring points fall within a range of 0.8 m to 1.7 m, and even the highest point, in the east, does not reach 2 m. The City of Kawasaki provides the assumptions for floods, storm surges and tsunamis each as a separate map. Keep in mind that this is a place where low ground has been added on, and look up the address you are interested in. Land prices, for their part, can be followed not at the factory land of the river mouth itself but at a residential observation point for the official land prices (Chika Koji) in Daimachi, Kawasaki Ward, about 1.2 km inland. The record begins at 257,000 yen per square meter in 2016, and in the 2026 publication it is 324,000 yen. When reading it, allow for the fact that it is not the value of the ground where research institutes and factories stand.

Placing what happened in order of year gives the following.

As you move through the eras, looking at the following places makes the changes easier to grasp.