In the real estate sector in Tokyo, there is a long chain of contempt, and each of the 23 districts has its own location. What Chiyoda has a royal temperament, a mixture of Shinjuku districts, and a high concentration of residents in the Bunkyo area. Each district has its own characteristics, but it always shines at the top of the chain of contempt, and there is always a “port area”.
This is a collection of Tokyo Towers, high-end residences, high-end office buildings, foreign embassies, and high-end fashion fronts. It has many famous neighborhoods such as Roppongi, Odaiba, Akasaka, Aoyama, and Platinum. It is called “Tokyo’s Tokyo.”
“Where do you live?” is one of the favorite questions for residents in Minato City. When the people in the port area pretend to say “port area” carelessly, the Japanese people will like to work hard with the strength of the Japanese, the people of the port area will harvest a set of exaggerated expressions with their own “Wow, you are a rich man” sound effect.
Uneven “opening port”
Why is the port area so popular with the rich? This has to be said that the port area is backed by the Tokyo Port and the entire Tokyo Bay.
Everyone knows that Tokyo’s original name was “Edo”. The so-called Edo, literal translation is “Jiangyin into the mouth” (the entrance to the river), in Japanese “江” can mean the sea, the lake, “Edo” can be understood as the meaning of the harbor, the estuary. At that time, Edo was located on the west side of the estuary of Sumida River, which is the boundary between the Musashi-Tibet and the Lower Kingdom. This Sumida River is the main river that flows into Tokyo Bay today.
When the capital city of Japan has not yet moved, the most affluent and most traded place in the Edo area is this area near the port. The social status of businessmen in those days was not high, because the convenience of logistics and transactions lived here. Today, wealthy businessmen and celebrities are still willing to gather here, which is the result of the development of Tokyo Port for hundreds of years.
In 1456, Otani Dojo, the parent of the fan of Asagaya, began to build Edo Castle, and built a small port at the Hirakawa estuary on the Edo-mashima, called “Edo”, which was the predecessor of Tokyo Port. After the completion of the “Edo”, many people in the vicinity of the terminal bought and sold rice, fresh fish and medicines and other daily necessities, which promoted trade in the region. In 1612, the Tokugawa shogunate rebuilt the Edo and built a large dock there.
In the last years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, with the signing of the Treaty of the United States and Japan on the Treaty of Trade and Cooperation, the Yokohama Port in the eastern part of Kanagawa Prefecture opened smoothly and quickly developed as a raw silk trading port, commercial port, passenger port and industrial port. The scale of the international port. Yokohama has robbed the limelight of Edo for a time, and Edo failed to open a port.
Indeed, Yokohama is better than Tokyo in terms of the natural conditions opened by the port. The water at the mouth of Yokohama is very deep, and it is naturally suitable for large ships to stop. At that time, the water level of the Edo estuary is shallow. Ever since, the impression of Yokohama’s “international” and Edo’s “domestic” has gradually been determined.
In the Meiji period, it was really inconceivable that the capital of the Tokyo Bay was not ported. The “Tokyo Port” was finally put on the agenda by the government. The preparation work for the Sumida River into the seaport began, and Yuedao and Shibaura became the first man-made land in the port area.
What really helped Tokyo Port to be built was the Great Earthquake in Kanto in 1932. The earthquake caused land traffic to be paralyzed, and the port of Tokyo, which was still under development, suddenly became the transportation hub of the time. In order to use the waterway to transport materials, the government has fully opened the port, excavated waterways, cleaned up silt, and artificially built land. It has successively built three major terminals, namely, Shimazu, Shibaura and Takeshi. After 9 years of construction, Tokyo Port finally ushered in a new life in 1941.
However, the good times did not last long. In December 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor directly ignited the Pacific War with the United States. After the Tokyo Port was taken over by the US military, it basically stopped working. Just born, he was cut off from milk, and the fate of Tokyo Port is much more.
As we entered the US-Soviet Cold War, Japan and the United States gradually turned into allies. After that, the Japanese economy continued to soar, bringing strong logistics demand, and Tokyo Port began to exert its true strength. At the end of the 1960s, the container logistics revolution swept the major ports around the world. The late Tokyo Port was keenly aware of this trend and took the lead in equipping the port with facilities corresponding to containers.
On the one hand, the Tokyo business district is close to the port industrial zone, and the outer parts have just been shipped to the assembly line. The assembled products can be put on the shelves, forming a virtuous cycle of production-consumption-reproduction, and also making Japan Manufacturing products are beginning to be cost competitive globally.
On the other hand, container shipping links Tokyo Port to the US consumer market on the other side of the Pacific, as well as the energy supply in the Middle East and iron ore from Australia, India and Brazil. In particular, from the perspective of the trans-Pacific shipping route, the Tokyo Bay has the advantage of being close to the water in the Kansai region, and the Tokyo Port is closer to the Japanese economic center than the Yokohama Port. Therefore, there are more and more ocean-going vessels entering and leaving Tokyo Port.
Since 1998, Tokyo Port has finally surpassed Yokohama Port, and its foreign trade container throughput has reached the top in Japan. It has a sea area of 5,453 hectares, a land area of 1,080 hectares, a total of 24 domestic and foreign terminals, and a total of 115 berths. Among them, there are 4 container terminals (Daijing, Qinghai, Shinagawa, Odaiba) and 16 container berths. Today, Yokohama Port on the west coast of Tokyo Bay is often seen as a foreign port in Tokyo.
From the port area to the bay area
Standing on the Tokyo Tower, the city’s neon lights flashing under the night, and the houses are like a matchbox, which is so meticulously placed in the city.
The Tokyo Bay Area, which is formed by the Tokyo Minato-ku, is 80 kilometers deep. It is surrounded by the Tohoku Peninsula (Chiba Prefecture) and the Miura Peninsula (Kanagawa Prefecture) on both sides of the east and west, passing through the narrow Puhe Waterway and West between the two peninsulas. The neighboring Sagami Bay is connected to the Pacific Ocean. The surrounding cities are organically integrated, making it the world’s most populous city with the most complete urban infrastructure.
The Tokyo Bay Area has a population of 41 million, accounting for one-third of Japan’s national population. In 2010, the Bay Area’s real GDP was 198 trillion yen, accounting for 38% of Japan’s total GDP, equivalent to Italy’s national GDP.
Less than 200 years ago, Tokyo Bay has transformed from a logistics center into a global top-level bay area, and there are many places to inspire.
The initial shallow water in Tokyo Port restricted the development of logistics, and the government began to reclamation and land, allowing the terminal to reach the deep water area. With the acceleration of urbanization, the landfill in Tokyo Port has become increasingly fierce. Today, more than 90% of the land close to the ocean that you can set up in Tokyo Bay is an artificial coastline with a total reclamation area of more than 250 square kilometers.
The land is there and the traffic has to be solved. In addition to Tokyo Port and Yokohama Port, Tokyo Bay also has four ports: Chiba Port, Kawasaki Port, Yokosuka Port and Kisarazu Port. These ports are managed by the corresponding institutions in the region. Will it cause vicious price competition between ports, increase unnecessary internal resources consumption, and reduce the international competitiveness of the entire Tokyo Bay?
Aware of this problem, the Japan Transportation Bureau’s Harbour Bureau proposed the “Basic Concept of the Tokyo Bay Harbor Project”, which organically integrated the above-mentioned ports through a top-level design to form a wide-area harbor to compete with other ports in the world.
The six major ports, together with the two major international airports, Haneda and Narita, and the Shinkansen, such as Tokaido, constitute a three-dimensional network of sea, land and air between Tokyo Bay and major cities in Japan and the world.
People who have been to Tokyo are often impressed with their complicated tram maps. Behind these daunting complex routes, there is a sophisticated network layout. The transportation system in the Tokyo Bay area has become the subject of competition and research for rail transit planning in various countries.
Industry is the core competitiveness of the regional economy. Tokyo developed the Keihin Industrial Zone to the southwest and developed the Jingye Industrial Zone to the east. The two industrial zones, Keihin and Jingye, extend to the sides of Tokyo Bay. It has concentrated on industries such as steel, non-ferrous metallurgy, oil refining, petrochemical, machinery, electronics, automobiles, shipbuilding, and modern logistics, and has become the world’s largest industrial industrial zone.
This layout has isolated the industrial zone from the large population of major urban areas in Tokyo. The city mainly develops finance, research and development, culture, large-scale entertainment facilities and large-scale commercial facilities.
If the city is “fragrant,” the population is coming.
The success of the Tokyo Bay Area is also the result of the rapid development of urbanization. More precisely, the metropolitan area of Tokyo Bay is taking the “big city” route.
An important feature of metropolitanization is the huge size of the urban population. In 2015, among the world’s largest cities, Tokyo (Tokyo Metropolitan Area), which ranks first, has a permanent population of 38 million. In the wave of urbanization, Tokyo and the surrounding three counties of Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba have become one of the largest in the world.
In 1900, the population of Tokyo was 1.5 million, and it was only ranked seventh in the world. Fifty years later, despite the war bombing, the population soared to 11.28 million. After that, the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area continued to expand, reaching 30 million in 1985. Since then, the population growth has slowed down, but it still reached about 38 million in 2015.
Globalization has developed very rapidly in the past 30 years, and there are more and more foreigners in Tokyo. Due to the aging of the younger, Japan has also become a developed country with a lower immigration threshold. Some come to study abroad, some come to job hunting, some through cross-border marriage, and some through labor introduction, have lived in Tokyo.
The entire Tokyo Bay Area (Capital Circle) has 260 higher education institutions and more than 1.2 million registered university students. Among them, the Keihin Industrial Zone has well-known research universities including Keio University, Musashi Institute of Technology, and Yokohama National University.
Large-scale population gathering and large-scale industrial exchanges have made the entire Tokyo Bay full of vitality and vitality, as well as so-called urban diseases. However, when the population of the Tokyo metropolitan area reached one or two million, people once exclaimed that the big city was so sick. But when its population reaches 30 million or even close to 40 million, its big city disease is not so obvious. At least, in Tokyo, where the population is so dense, you can’t see the traffic jams that are common in other big cities.
The reason is that Tokyo has improved the management and operational capabilities of high-density populations, from planning and infrastructure construction to daily management levels and capabilities.
In the same way, the development and construction of the Tokyo Bay has caused serious environmental pollution. After the war, the coast of Tokyo Bay became an industrial conference area. Heavy polluting enterprises such as steel, chemicals, and shipbuilding discharged waste water into Tokyo Bay. The large chimneys in the city made Tokyo unable to see the blue sky. The large-scale reclamation of land has also brought about damage to the natural environment. After more than 30 years of pollution control efforts, the water in Tokyo Bay has become clear, the fish has returned, the sky has turned blue, and the port area has returned to a quiet and pleasant living environment.
From the pier to the port area to the Bay Area, from Edo to Tokyo to the metropolitan area, the estuary on the island of Honshu in the Dongpu Island chain has become the world’s premier metropolitan area.
