Akeno Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Akeno Danchi

Heading east from the center of Oita, the road turns uphill around where the low-lying townscape ends, and beyond the top of the climb another flat surface appears. Akeno Danchi is a residential area opened on that surface. At this location, the top of the plateau fills the frame as one piece, and neither the sea nor a railway enters it. The photograph shows only the rise and fall of hills cut by many shallow valleys, and streets laid out while reading that rise and fall.

High surfaces separated by valleys

It may be called flat, but it is not a single board laid on top. The measuring point at the center is at 47.5 m, but the three sides all exceed 60 m: 64.9 m to the north, 62.7 m to the west and 64.4 m to the south. The center sits about 15 m to 17 m lower than those three sides, and only the east drops sharply, to 34.9 m. The landform is several flat surfaces at around 60 m lined up apart, with shallow valleys running between them out to the low ground. If you look in the aerial photographs for places where woods remain in bands, they usually coincide with those valley lines.

Because rain falls away to the valley floors, water cannot be drawn up onto the surfaces. They do not become rice paddies, but the slope is gentle, a sizable area can be secured in one piece, and they are convenient for lining up lots of the same size. That character is why a suburban residential area was opened at this height. The nearest station is Takajo Station on the Nippo Line, placed on the low ground below the plateau. The route of climbing the hill and then going home is the daily direction of this district.

The photographs this location can go back to are two, 1961-69 and 1974-78, one each capturing the time when the hill was still woods and the time just after the blocks were laid out. The scale of what happened between the two photographs is what makes this land interesting.

Woods and terraced fields

In the oldest photograph, 1961-69, most of this surface is woods and fields on slopes. The dark tree canopy undulates following the shape of the valleys, and small fields are set in terraces into the gaps. The roads are narrow and run along the ridges, avoiding the valleys, and the hamlets lean toward the east of the frame. On the east side, roofs line up along a single road running north-south, and finely divided paddies and fields spread around them, their lots oriented to follow the flow of water.

The edges of the frame are also worth a look. On the north edge, a long, narrow hamlet and fields fit into a valley line, and beyond them the woods cross the ridge. On the west side, wooded slopes continue, mixed with bright patches of bare ground here and there. On the south side, many thin stripes line up on the slopes, which read as terraced farmland. Human work reaches only the valley floors and the edges of the ridges, and the broad parts of the surface were still woods.

Among this, there is only one surface shaped completely differently from its surroundings. Slightly above the middle of the frame, it is bright flat ground cleared out of the woods, with edges cut off in straight lines. Inside, long, narrow buildings line up facing the same direction, and next to them a lot that looks like dozens of thin strips laid side by side, whitish bare ground, and a broad surface leveled with rounded corners follow one after another. It is clear that these are traces of moved earth, but you cannot tell at this resolution what the surface was for. The photograph clearly records only that large-scale work had begun on the hilltop.

Replaced in ten years

In the 1974-78 photograph, the same hill has been rewritten entirely. From the middle of the frame to the north, long, narrow buildings of equal length line up in many rows facing the same direction, with narrow roads and open spaces between the buildings at regular intervals. The view reads as rows of mid-rise apartment buildings, and the rows of residential buildings occupying the hill happened within roughly these ten years. On the west side there are blocks divided into a grid, with a small roof in each lot. Apartment buildings and detached houses share the surface, each in its own place.

Within the rows of buildings there are several places where buildings wider and shorter than those around them are grouped, with whitish flat open spaces beside them. The arrangement looks like facilities for schools or meetings with their sports grounds and squares, but their use cannot be stated from the shape of the roofs alone. You can read that the framework of the blocks is put together in two kinds, buildings for living and buildings for shared use.

The south side is unfinished. Streets extend while bending diagonally, and buildings are starting to go in on both sides, but beyond that it is still bare ground, and at the bottom edge cut slopes and heaped mounds of earth can be seen. The land development was heading south, so the bright flat ground seen in the previous era was the entrance to this work. Meanwhile the valley side to the east has hardly changed from the previous era and remains hamlets and paddies. If you go back and forth between the two eras, 1961-69 and 1974-78, you can see that the expansion of the district happened only on top of the plateau.

A hill filled with roofs

In today's photograph, roofs line up without gaps on the surface. The south side that was bare ground in 1974-78 and the slopes beyond it are also filled, and green remains only in the woods along the valley lines and around broad flat surfaces that look like sports grounds. There are several sports grounds in the frame, each paired with a building with a large roof, which shows that the framework of the blocks is divided by facility. In the middle, a single large roof holding a wide paved area can be seen, with larger buildings gathered around it. The former rows of residential buildings are a mix of parts remaining in the same position and direction and parts replaced by buildings of a different shape. On the valley side to the east too, the lots of paddies and fields have disappeared, and roofs are packed in as if filling the valley.

The reference point for official land prices (Chika Koji) is placed in Akeno-nishi 1-chome on the hill. It is about 660 m from the location, in the middle of the residential area created by the land development. The residential price was 75,800 yen per square meter in 1994 and 87,800 yen in the 2026 publication. In between, in 2015, it was 60,200 yen, so it neither kept rising nor kept falling. It is a figure showing that values are moving even on a hilltop about half a century after the land development.

The City of Oita publishes a hazard map. Cut ridges and filled valleys are already hard to tell apart under the pavement, so it is more reliable to check on the map where water tends to collect before walking. Places where a street bends suddenly for no apparent reason, places where steps climb over a change in level, places where a park has the shape of a long, narrow strip. When you come across such shapes, there is usually an original valley underfoot.