Old photographs of four stations on the Den-en-toshi Line: from Futako-Tamagawa to Minami-Machida

Published: September 9, 2026 / About 15 min read

Photographs of the same era, set side by side at four stations

When you trace hilltop residential areas through aerial photographs, if you step through only the area around one station in order of era, the story of the town taking shape connects surprisingly smoothly. But if you rearrange photographs of the same era sideways, to the next station and the one after that, the story suddenly becomes bumpy. This is because in the year when the rows of houses around one station are completely packed, a few km farther on, field furrows still cover the slopes.

The four locations along the Den-en-toshi Line, Futako-Tamagawa, Tama Plaza, Aobadai, and Minami-Machida Grandberry Park, suit this side-by-side reading. This is because the number of eras of photographs you can choose differs for each, and the years when the tracks arrived are also scattered across a span of 18 years. This article follows what looks out of step when the four locations are aligned by era. To give the conclusion first, the direction of the mismatch matches neither the order of distance from Shibuya Station nor the order of the land's height.

The starting point is the low land of the Tama River

Only Futako-Tamagawa, the starting point, is on the low land of a river rather than on a hill. Its elevation measurement point is 12.9 m in the center, with the north at 13.6 m and the east at 12.7 m, level at around 13 m, and it drops a step to 9 m in the south and 7.6 m in the west. Both low sides face the riverbed of the Tama River, and the 6 m step is the trace of the river's cutting. This is land whose height differs by an order of magnitude from the three stations in the hills.

In the number of photograph eras, too, this location alone stands out. Seven eras can be chosen, from around 1936-42 to 1987-90, while the three locations on the hill side have five or six. Land with early traffic of people and goods was photographed that much earlier. In the photograph from around 1936-42, there is still only one bridge crossing the Tama River, and rows of houses appear dense only on both sides of the road extending from its foot. For the locations of the three hill stations, there are no photographs of this era at all. This means that when the photographs begin, the town and the hills already had a time lag of 30 years between them.

The order of heights does not match the order of the stations

If you place the three stations in the hills in order of closeness to Shibuya Station, their elevation measurement points are 54 m, 37.8 m, and 71.7 m. The land does not get higher as the tracks go farther in: from Tama Plaza the land first drops about 16 m to a saddle on which Aobadai sits, and farther in from there Minami-Machida Grandberry Park reaches the 70 m range. This is because the Tama Hills are not a single slope but terrain where ridges and valleys alternate in many lines, and the tracks cross those lines as they advance. If you view this line as a story of climbing a hill, the explanation breaks down at Aobadai.

If you measure the four directions of each location, the habits of the terrain after it became a town also remain. Aobadai is on a surface descending from 45 m in the east to the 30 m range in the west, and the difference among the four directions is 14.6 m, the largest of the four locations. Tama Plaza has 57.5 m in the west and 47 m in the east, a difference of 10.5 m, and at Minami-Machida the center's 71.7 m is lower than any of the four directions, with the north rising to 79.2 m. A reversal in which the highest station sits at the bottom of a valley within its location occurs in the sequence of these four locations. This is because the tracks and the station were run along the floor of the valley carved by the Sakai River, and the figures show that the absolute height of the elevation is a separate matter from whether the place is a ridge or a valley.

1945-50: photographs remain for only two of the four locations

The first stumbling block of the side-by-side reading is that photographs of the era you want to align do not necessarily exist for every location. Only two locations, Futako-Tamagawa and Tama Plaza, have a 1945-50 photograph you can choose, and at Aobadai and Minami-Machida Grandberry Park the first era you can choose is 1961-69. The very fact that there are no photographs is an indirect record that human activity had not yet gathered there.

If you compare 1945-50 at those two locations, you can see where the contrast lies. At Futako-Tamagawa the gravelly riverbed spreads white, long, narrow sandbars remain in it like islands, and the rows of houses grow thicker on the northeast side of the bridge's foot. Tama Plaza in the same era is, wherever you look in the frame, long, narrow paddies on valley floors, fields on the ridges, and dark woods. Clusters of roofs are only scattered here and there at the mouths of valleys and the feet of slopes, and there is no sign of dwellings on top of the hills. It was an era when the riverside already had the core of a town, while the hills had room to open paddies only as wide as the valleys.

1961-69: the first era in which all four locations are available

It is from 1961-69 that the four locations can be lined up in the same era. And the contrast between what each location shows in this photograph is the greatest along the line. At Futako-Tamagawa both banks of the Tama River are already filled with houses, the field lots are pushed into the corners of the frame, and thin grid-like lots are drawn even on the sand of the riverbed, which until then was simply white. It is a picture of land that is nearly complete as a town.

At Aobadai in the same era, not a single track runs through. Ridges covered with dense tree canopy undulate across the whole frame, and paddies on the valley floors branch between them as bright bands. You cannot find traces of blocks divided by straight lines anywhere. Minami-Machida Grandberry Park is the same: fields finely divided into strips and the stripes of their furrows catch the eye. Bands of dense woods meandering along the valley lines trace the path of water, and only one wide road crosses the frame diagonally, going over the hill and out to the southwest. Before the railway came, that road was the only thing connecting this valley to distant places.

Tama Plaza is a little more complicated. The place where the station would be built is itself still fields and valleys, and the outline of the town appears nowhere, but only the upper right corner of the frame is different: houses of the same shape stand in many rows facing the same direction. That slope was paddies and woods in 1945-50. The turning of the hills into residential areas had started first in a different place, without waiting for the station to arrive. Note also that although 1966 falls within the span of the era label, no tracks appear at either Tama Plaza or Aobadai. Because the tracks do not appear, the photographs of this era can be read as having all been taken before the opening.

The days the tracks extended farther in

The gap between the photographs of the four locations is exactly the gap between the years the tracks arrived. If you line up the dates recorded in Tokyu's chronology, you can see that the section in the hills did not open all at once but extended station by station over 18 years.

Tama Plaza and Aobadai are stations that got their tracks on the same single day, April 1, 1966. Both stations were placed partway along the section of a little over 14 km first laid into the hills. Minami-Machida Grandberry Park, on the other hand, is a station that opened with the extension of October 15, 1976, a gap of ten and a half years. Two extensions, in 1968 and 1972, came in between, so the line advanced station by station every few years until it reached the valley on the Tokyo border. On April 9, 1984, it reached Chuo-Rinkan Station and the whole line was complete. The section including Futako-Tamagawa took the route name Den-en-toshi Line on October 11, 1963, and until then it was called the Oimachi Line. This means the name of the line came first, before the stations in the hills were born.

1974-78: the station first or the lots first?

1974-78 is the ideal era for checking how the ten-year gap in the extensions shows up in the photographs. At Aobadai the middle of the frame has completely changed, showing tracks crossing the hill from west-southwest to east-northeast and a long, narrow structure that looks like a station slightly left of center. North of the tracks, streets curving with the terrain spread out, and rows of long apartment buildings facing the same direction line up. The streets on the south side are curved too, and detached houses are packed in, but brown ungraded surfaces and fields are mixed in between them. From the shape of the streets and how the buildings fill in, you can read the order of placing the station first and then building the town.

Minami-Machida Grandberry Park in the same era has stopped one stage before that order. In one corner of the west side, roads drawn as if with a ruler and long, narrow lots are laid out, but not even half of the buildings have been built yet. It is a view typical of graded land, with white lot lines and brown bare ground forming a geometric pattern. Moreover, in the center of the frame two wide roads for cars run side by side, and the small bridge of a grade-separated crossing is also visible. Roads for cars came before the railway across the valley, and 1976, when the tracks reached this land, falls right within this era.

Tama Plaza shows yet another face. While blocks rise densely north of the station, wide areas of farmland and earth-colored graded land remain toward the south of the frame. This light and shade shows that development did not advance in concentric circles around the station but advanced patchily, following the pace of the land readjustment association in each district. Even around a station about eight years after its opening, filled and unfilled sides coexist in the same frame. If you look across the three locations, the order in which the station and the town arrived divided three ways even on the same line.

The 1980s: how fast the vacant land filled, and the gaps in the photographs

The years from 1979-83 to 1987-90 are the period when vacant land is replaced by roofs with each photograph you step through. At Tama Plaza, as you go from 1979-83 to 1984-86 and 1987-90, street trees and garden trees spread their branches and the color of the frame deepens. By 1987-90, vacant land becomes hard to find. At Aobadai, in 1979-83 the differences in tone disappear and the whole frame becomes one continuous built-up area, but from the upper left to the left edge, wide surfaces of bright bare ground with only lot divisions drawn remain, showing the wave of urbanization partway through moving west. Most of that bare ground turns into roofs in 1984-86, and in 1987-90 a wide flat area that looks like a school and a brown sports ground appear on the hill, and the woods have almost disappeared.

When you follow the 1980s at Minami-Machida Grandberry Park, the circumstances of the photography itself become a wall. The 1979-83 and 1987-90 photographs have a band-shaped gap in the center, and it falls exactly on the station area. The clue here is 1984-86, the only era in which the area around the station is in the frame. A large expanse of leveled bare ground appears southeast of the station, and inside it an arc-shaped lot that looks like a sports ground is visible. The graded land on the west side is filled with roofs, and the town that had been only lots is finally starting to move as a town. For the eras when the station area does not appear, you can only estimate from the eras before and after.

Land value records also split into two eras

Near the four locations there are measurement points of the official land prices (Chika Koji), but the years when the records began split into two. The reference points for Aobadai and Minami-Machida Grandberry Park run from 1983, and those for Futako-Tamagawa and Tama Plaza from 2016. Even on the same line, stations with a yardstick of more than 40 years mix with stations with only 10 years' worth, so you cannot line up the four figures as they are and talk about which is better.

If you compare the two locations with long records, the difference between a hilltop and a valley floor shows in how values were set in the 1980s. The reference point for Aobadai climbed from 236,000 yen per square meter in 1983 to 475,000 yen in 1987 and 785,000 yen in 1988. In the same year, 1988, the reference point for Minami-Machida in the valley of the Sakai River was 653,000 yen, a difference of 132,000 yen. Since the difference between the two in 1983 was only 41,000 yen, the difference in how fast the values rose turned directly into the gap.

Differences remained in how they fell, too. Aobadai fell to 400,000 yen in 1996 and 336,000 yen in 2000, and dropped to 285,000 yen in 2004 and 2005. At Minami-Machida the decline lasted even longer, reaching 195,000 yen in 2005 and 2006. This is the same value as in 1983, when the record began, and in the published series up to the 2026 publication, 1983 / 2005 / 2006 are the years of the lowest value. It took more than 20 years to return to the starting point. From there, by 2026, Aobadai reached 409,000 yen and Minami-Machida 314,000 yen, and within what can be referred to as of 2026, neither has reached its 1988 value.

For the two locations with records from 2016, only the movement after that is known. The reference point for Futako-Tamagawa moved from 615,000 yen in 2016 to 871,000 yen in 2026, and the one for Tama Plaza from 430,000 yen to 644,000 yen. The hilltop town and the riverside town left records with a very similar direction for 2016 to 2026.

Step through the eras and compare the four locations

The procedure for reading this line in photographs can be divided into three steps. First, align the era and step sideways through the four locations, checking where a town outline exists and where it does not. Next, when you come across a gap in the photographs or a seam between shots, fill it in with the adjacent eras and with the same era at the neighboring station. Finally, go back to the elevation figures and check whether the place is on the back of a ridge or at the bottom of a valley. If you look in this order, you can read in the light and shade of the frames how the hill towns were not born all at once but filled in patchily, following the pace of each land readjustment association and the dates of the extensions.

You cannot tell from the photographs alone how water gathers in low places. If you want to know about the land along the Sakai River, the Hazard Map Portal Site of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism gathers the published materials of each local government.

Start from the white riverbed of Futako-Tamagawa, then go on to the yato valleys of Tama Plaza, the ridges of Aobadai, and the field furrows of Minami-Machida Grandberry Park. On each location page, you can switch the photographs of the same place by era and view them together with the elevation cross section. When you open a photograph from 60 years ago, check in turn which valleys and ridges the slopes and stairs you walk today corresponded to.

The prices in this article are actual examples at each point in time and do not reflect market prices after the article was written.