A series of six island fortresses (daiba) constructed in 1853 by Egawa Hidetatsu for the Tokugawa shogunate in order to protect Edo from attack by sea, the primary threat being Commodore Matthew Perry's Black Ships which had arrived in the same year to force Japan to end its centuries-old national isolation policy[1] Of the originally planned 11 batteries, seven were started construction but only six were ever finished, one of which was the artificial island of Odaiba.

The main facilities were constructed on the western coast of the Boso Peninsula from Cape Susaki in Tateyama to Cape Futtsu in Futtsu, Chiba Prefecture and from Jogashima at the southern tip of the Miura Peninsula to the Uraga Channel at the mouth of Tokyo Bay and extending to Natsushima in the city of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Many of the 28-cm howitzers installed in the gun emplacements around Tokyo Bay Fortress were removed during the Russo-Japanese War and were deployed to the Siege of Port Arthur, where they were deployed to devastating effect against the Russian Pacific Fleet.

From the 1920s and 1930s, many surplus guns of the Imperial Japanese Navy, such as the 12-in main battery of the battleship Aki which had been made available due to the reduction of capital warships per the London Naval Treaty and the Washington Naval Treaty, were reused in these coastal artillery installations.

The third of these islands (the one closest to Cape Kannonzaki) was rendered unusable by land subsidence caused by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake.