Higashida (Yawata Steel Works Higashida District) about 60 years ago and today

History of Higashida (Yawata Steel Works Higashida District)

Higashida in Yahatahigashi Ward, the City of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, is low land that opens at the innermost end of Dokai Bay. In 1901 a government-run steelworks began operating here, and for about a century afterward the whole area was enclosed as a single works compound. If you switch the aerial photographs to the older eras, a view of long, narrow buildings filling the whole field of view appears, and in the photograph as of 2026 they have been replaced by buildings with large white roofs, wide parking lots, and laid-out blocks.

The head of the bay and the foot of the hills

The heights of this land differ clearly in character between the south and the north. Only the southern measuring point stands out high at 17 m; the center is 6.5 m, the east is 8.2 m, and the north and west drop to 4.5 m and 4.7 m. The high value in the south is at the foot of the mountains behind, and the low values in the north and west show that the water's edge of Dokai Bay is close. The framework of this area is a small patch of flat land partway down where the mountains fall into the sea.

The narrowness of the flat land is the other side of the reason for the site. A coalfield where coal was mined lay inland, and ships could come in to the innermost end of the bay. A large factory was placed where the routes for bringing in raw materials and for shipping out products were both short. Being low land close to a coalfield and to water transport is what made a huge works compound possible on narrow flat land.

This note does not say for certain how water collects here. The assumed extent of flooding is shown on the hazard map of the City of Kitakyushu, so it is best to open it at the level of the blocks and then return to the photographs.

A photograph covered in haze

In the 1945-50 photograph, three photographs' worth along the top edge are missing and left gray. In the remaining area too the center is washed out white, and the state of the ground can hardly be read. A white band hides the works compound. Only the left and right edges can be made out. At the left edge, finely cut lots and a network of roads threading between them can be seen, and at the lower left there is a section where buildings of the same size stand in regular rows. At the right edge and the lower right, roofs built densely along the slopes alternate with dark patches of trees. You cannot tell from this photograph alone what lay beneath the whiteness at the center. If you look at the next era and come back, you can guess that the covered area was the central part of the works compound.

Buildings filling the site

When you switch to 1961-69, the frame becomes clear all at once. From the upper left toward the bottom of the center, long, narrow buildings line up facing the same way, and their bands overlap in many rows. Because the buildings face the same way, the boundaries of the site can be read as breaks in the rows of roofs. From the top of the center a dark water surface reaches thinly south and dead-ends at about the middle height of the frame. On the east shore of the water surface, long buildings form diagonal rows. Slightly above the center there is a bright, wide surface with few buildings, and a whitish band lies faintly over it. At the lower left dozens of thin lines gather into a bundle and pass out to the west. A wide line crosses the southern edge of the works compound in an arc, changes direction on the right side, and passes out to the top of the frame. This is the railway. The right half looks completely different: small roofs cling densely to the slopes, and clumps of dark woods and a bright, open oval that looks like a sports ground are mixed between them. The frame splits in two, left and right. The division, factory to the west and housing to the east, is already complete in this photograph.

The 1974-78 photograph is in color, and the colors of the roofs can be told. Long roofs in rust red and blue alternate in rows, and the texture of a working compound comes across through the colors. At the end of the long, narrow water surface a white ship is berthed, and on the east shore buildings with green roofs stand in diagonal rows. On the opposite shore of the bay, similar rows of long roofs and piers continue too. At the southern end of the works compound, between it and the railway, there are a sports ground with a round track and a rectangular water surface painted blue. This photograph shows that places for the people who worked there had been provided inside the site. At the upper right, bare ocher ground opens in steps, and work cutting away the hill is under way. In the town area at the bottom of the frame there is a building with a round roof, which stands out from the square roofs around it.

Blocks where the blast furnaces stood

As the facilities finished their roles one after another, the land that had been inside the enclosure was opened to the side of the town. In 1990 an amusement park with a space theme opened on the former site, and it closed at the end of 2017. Its name survives in the name of a railway station and is still used as the station name as of 2026. A museum, a large commercial facility, and residential blocks also came onto the former site.

The photograph that comes after 1974-78 is the one as of 2026, and because there is no step in between, the drop is large. The bands of buildings that filled the works compound have vanished from the center, and instead buildings with large white roofs stand together. A wide gray surface surrounds them, and thin stripes line up regularly on it, so you can tell it is a place for parking cars. The factory bands turn into parking lots. The blocks mix square buildings, rows of trees, and green surfaces, and the roads curve gently instead of running in the straight lines of the works compound's days.

Some things have not changed. The long, narrow water surface reaches south from the same position and dead-ends at the same place. Even if you go back and forth between the eras, the shoreline hardly moves. On its left shore a group of factories with large reddish-brown and blue-gray roofs and piers line up, and ships are berthed. Toward the left of the frame, rows of long reddish-brown buildings also remain, showing that the factories have not all disappeared. The housing on the slopes of the southern hill is still built up at the same density as in the 1961-69 photograph. Only the central band that was the works compound has been replaced.

At Hobashira 1-chome, up on the southern hill, the official land price (Chika Koji) is measured at one point in a residential area. It is about 1.3 km from the location, and the record begins in 1995. The price per square meter was 62,000 yen, and in 2025 it was 24,300 yen. In the record up to the 2026 publication, the highest is 62,000 yen from 1995 to 1997 and the lowest is 24,100 yen in the last year, 2026, which means the value fell by about 60% in a little over thirty years.

The traces remain in the outlines of the blocks. They are the way the gently curving roads run, the direction of lots that does not mesh with the surrounding town area, and the wide elevated road that passes through the center in an arc. Each of these tells us that this was a single site for a long time.