Where to Stay in Funabashi, Chiba-ken

What is Funabashi known for?

Nakayama Racecourse, one of the four major courses of the Japan Racing Association, holds the Arima Kinen and the Nakayama Grand Jump, while Funabashi Racecourse runs its meetings on weekdays. Shopping is the other answer. LaLaport Tokyo-Bay opened on the bay shore in 1981, and the first large IKEA in Japan went up on the site of the SSAWS indoor ski slope.

Shops like these are why Funabashi is called the merchant city, set against Chiba as the seat of the prefecture. Funassyi, a pear fairy and the unofficial mascot, comes from here too.

What are the main landmarks in Funabashi?

The Ōhi Shrine, known locally as Funabashi Daijingū, is the oldest name here, named in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku under the year 863. Shell mounds go further back. The Torikakenishi Shell Mound is a Jōmon midden, and the Tobinodai Historic Site Park Museum stands in a park laid out over the Tobinodai mound in Kaijin, where some of the oldest human bones in Japan were found.

Funabashi H. C. Andersen Park, in the farmland of the north, is named for the author born in Odense, Funabashi's Danish sister city since 1989. On the bay, Funabashi Sanbanse Seaside Park faces the Sanbanse tidal flat.

What is the history of Funabashi?

The name is a legend. Yamato Takeru is said to have crossed the Ebi River on boats laid side by side and planked over, a boat bridge, which is what the characters of Funabashi mean. Shell mounds such as the Torikakenishi Shell Mound show that people lived here through the Jōmon period, the Ōhi Shrine appears in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku under the year 863, and the name itself appears in the Azuma Kagami, the chronicle of the Kamakura shogunate.

Under the Tokugawa shogunate it was a post town. Travellers on the Sakura road and pilgrims bound for the temple at Narita rested here, and the shōgun came to hunt in the country around. Most of Honchō burned in 1868.

Tokugawa loyalists fought imperial troops around the Ōhi Shrine in the Boshin War, and the shrine, used as a headquarters, burned with the town. Funabashi Town was created in 1889 and became a city in 1937, merging with Katsushika Town and the villages of Yasakae, Hōden and Tsukada. The army grounds at Narashino made it a soldiers' town, as Kawabata Yasunari wrote.

Air raids did little damage to the wartime city, and the streets around the station came through, so after the war their black market, stocked from the sea and the farms, was busy enough to be called the Shanghai of Japan. Housing estates then spread over the Shimōsa Plateau, the shallows were reclaimed for industry and shops, and Funabashi became a core city in 2003.

Where is Funabashi?

Funabashi sits at the head of Tokyo Bay, roughly midway between central Tokyo and Chiba and within twenty kilometres of both. The middle of the city stands on the flat Shimōsa Plateau, which divides the Ebi River, running south to the bay, from streams in the north-east that flow east into the Inba channel. The coast is almost all reclaimed land. Ichikawa lies to the west, Kamagaya and Shiroi to the north and north-east, and Yachiyo and Narashino to the east and south-east, while the small Maruyama exclave sits wholly inside Kamagaya.

How do you get to Funabashi?

Funabashi Station is the hub, with Sōbu Line trains from Tokyo, and Keisei Funabashi Station beside it has Keisei Main Line trains straight from Narita Airport. Nishi-Funabashi is the bigger interchange. Five lines meet there, among them the Tokyo Metro Tōzai Line from central Tokyo and the Keiyō Line toward Maihama and Tokyo Disney Resort.

Keikyu buses run from Haneda Airport to both stations.