Aratsu, Fukuoka — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Aratsu?

A bridge carries the expressway over the harbour mouth. The Aratsu Ohashi is a cable-stayed bridge linking the first chome to Nanotsu across the entrance to the Hakata fishing harbour, and the Fukuoka urban expressway loop runs over it. The name comes from a hill.

Aratsuyama, also called Aratoyama, stands in Arato-machi, and the reclaimed ground took its name when the district was created in 1957. Tanks fill the rest of the view. A hundred and five of them stand on the wharf, which was finished in 1970 and has served as the oil terminal of Hakata port since.

What is the history of Aratsu?

Hakata became a treaty port on 4 August 1899. Larger ships and heavier cargo followed, and the port was expanded by filling public water at the anchorage and the central wharf. Work below Nishi park started in 1937.

The city had begun the southern part of the fill and some of the revetment when the Pacific war stopped everything, and it resumed only in 1951, thinly, between other works. Oil forced the pace. Imports were rising sharply while the oil installations of Hakata port lay scattered among ordinary port facilities, which was dangerous, so the city wanted to gather them onto the made ground below Nishi park as a safety district.

Nippon Oil decided to move in 1955. Other companies followed once it had, and the filling began in earnest, with the first zone finished in March 1957 and the second in February 1958. A sewage works came later.

Its two zones were licensed in 1961 and completed in 1964 and 1970.

Where is Aratsu?

Aratsu covers about thirty-eight hectares at the northern edge of Chuo ward in Fukuoka, facing Hakata Bay on three sides, with the port district to the south-east and Nishi park to the south-west.