Tsukuba Science City about 60 years ago and today

History of Tsukuba Science City

If you open the 1961-69 aerial photograph in this frame, you can hardly find a straight line. There are only a few thin white roads cutting through diagonally, and the ground is a mosaic of fields carved into strips and irregular shapes and woods sunk in dark tones. The only grouping that looks like a town is one place at the left edge of the frame, a densely packed village stretching long and narrow north-south. This is how the area at the center of the City of Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, the gateway of Tsukuba Science City, looked before construction began. Five past eras can be traced back here; the first photograph is from before construction, and the remaining four fall in the middle of construction.

Fields on a flat plateau

All five elevation points fall in the 20 m range. The center is 23.8 m, the east 23.6 m, the south 24.2 m, and the north and west are both 26.5 m. From one edge of the frame to the other, the height moves by less than 3 m. This is the surface of a plateau spreading over the northeastern part of the Kanto Plain, and neither valleys nor hills enter the frame. The way the streets were later laid out shows directly that this was land where there was no need to move a great deal of earth.

The place name Tsukuba goes back to Mount Tsukuba, which rises to the north. The plateau spreading south of it was long used as land of fields where water was hard to get and of woods on flat ground. In the 1961-69 photograph, the direction of the field lots differs from place to place, and their sizes are uneven too. The woods remain as masses between the fields, and villages cluster small where roads meet. Above the center of the frame, a single oval ring with a bright outline can be seen. Its shape is completely different from the field lots, but you cannot tell from this grain what the ring was for. A seam between photographs, caused by a difference in exposure, runs like steps, and from the upper center to the right the image appears dark while the left half appears bright.

In 1963 the government chose this area as the destination for moving national testing and research institutions that had gathered too much in the capital. A wide stretch of flat land lay open in one piece, it was less than 60 km from central Tokyo, and the constraints of the terrain were small. The conditions for the moving side were all in place. In 1970 the Tsukuba Science City Construction Act was promulgated, and the acquisition and preparation of the land got fully under way.

Roads laid out first

If you switch to 1974-78, the character of the frame changes. The roads come before the town. From the upper left to the lower right, and in a direction crossing that diagonally, many thick straight bands have been placed on the ground. Their width cannot be compared with the ridges between fields, and where they cross they widen further. Yet almost no buildings are attached along them. Only the framework of the streets was made first, and the contents of the lots they enclose are still fields, bare ground and bright cleared surfaces.

Buildings are beginning to gather on the right side of the frame, and two places where long, narrow white buildings line up in a regular pattern can be read. Curved roads and lots are prepared around them. At the left edge, the long, narrow north-south village remains in the same position with the same shape as in 1961-69. The lower half is still fields, woods and scattered villages, and only the straight bands extend into it. At the top edge the color tone changes, and existing reddish-brown blocks and a small dark pond appear.

In photographs of a planned city, it is interesting that this order can be seen. In many towns roads remain after people have passed along them, but here the grid of roads has gone ahead onto the ground.

The order in which the roadsides fill

In 1979-83, the street network extends over the whole frame. Rows of dots line both sides of the streets, and the roads look like double lines. These are planted trees. From the center to the upper right, large rectangular buildings line up in order, with roofs of the same color too. In the center a stretch of bright beige bare ground remains, which can be recognized as lots waiting their turn for preparation. In the middle on the right there is a place where several dozen small white buildings of the same shape line up regularly. The lower half is still fields, rice paddies and woods, and the straight lines of the streets only pass through it.

The 1984-86 photograph was taken in winter, when plants had withered, and the ground sinks into a uniform brown. It is the photograph in which the outlines of roofs can be read best, and if you are counting buildings this era is the one to use. Buildings fill in from the north and the east. In the center buildings with large roofs gather, and to their north rows of long, narrow buildings turned at a slant overlap. In the middle on the left there are rows facing the same way too. Even so, in the lower half of the frame, strip-shaped fields still spread in one piece.

1987-90 is from the season of thick leaves, and street trees trace the streets as green double lines. In the center, where buildings are packed most densely, dark green surfaces are held between one large roof and the next. In the lower right, woods and a dark water surface remain, and the lower left is fields too. Buildings along the streets increase, and this corresponds to the stage in which the contents of the lots fill up toward the outside.

A town where the rows of trees grew

In today's aerial photograph, almost all of the frame is town area. In the center large buildings gather densely, and some taller than their surroundings are mixed in. Even so, the grid of streets keeps the direction and position in which it was placed on the ground in 1974-78. The framework of the streets does not move. If you follow the trunk roads running in the two directions that cross diagonally, you can see green rows of trees edging the roads from both sides. This is how the trees that were rows of dots in 1979-83 look after growing for nearly half a century.

There are other things that have not changed. The village at the left edge appears in today's photograph too with its long, narrow shape, and from the middle of the bottom of the frame to the left, strips of fields still remain in one piece. In the upper left there is a sports ground with an oval track. At the far left of the frame a vertical band of a different color tone enters, but this is not the boundary of a site; it is a seam where photographs were joined.

In 1985 the International Science and Technology Exposition was held at a site prepared next to the science city. The site itself is outside the frame of the photographs, but around this year the name of the place became known across the country. The city was born after that. In 1987 three towns and one village, Yatabe, Oho, Toyosato and Sakura, merged to become the City of Tsukuba, and the following year Tsukuba Town joined. The building of the research city came first, and the framework of the city caught up afterward.

The gateway of the town changed in 2005. A railway extended from central Tokyo opened, and the station built at its terminus was named Tsukuba. Until then the means of travel in the science city were mainly buses and cars, and railway stations existed only outside the frame. After the opening the town was connected with central Tokyo in less than an hour, and a flow of people changing trains was added around the station. Thirty years after the grid of streets was laid out, the position of the town's entrance was settled.

At a residential site in Takezono 1-chome, land value records run from 2017. The distance from the station is about 600 m. The value of 185,000 yen per square meter in that year of 2017 is the lowest in the series up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), and the 302,000 yen of 2026 is the highest. If you compare only the end points, the 2026 official land price is more than 1.6 times that of 2017. Although this is on top of a plateau, the work of turning fields and woods on flat ground into blocks has remade the ground in various places. Because the assumptions about how water behaves differ from place to place, it is good to check each lot on the hazard map published by the City of Tsukuba.

The same new town category also includes Yokodai in the City of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. Although they share the point of building a whole town anew, a suburban danchi (housing complex) for living and a city the state built to move research institutions differ from the very character of the land chosen.