Around Amagasaki Q's Mall about 60 years ago and today

History of Around Amagasaki Q's Mall

Amagasaki lies right between Osaka and Kobe. It is flat low ground formed from sediment carried by rivers, with the Kanzaki River flowing along its east edge and Osaka Bay immediately to the south. The highest ground is the eastern measuring point at 2.2 m, and in the west it drops to 0.4 m. The center is 1.4 m, the north 0.6 m and the south 1.3 m. The range from top to bottom does not reach 2 m, and there is nothing that could be called a slope. It is flat, water can be used, and railways can be run through it. From the point of view of someone building factories, it was land where all the conditions were in place. The view of this location holds the station and the bundle of tracks, the river flowing to the east, and an urban area where factories and housing are mixed, with none of them missing. Going back and forth between the eras, you can see which of those three moved and which did not.

A single line crossing the fields

If you open the c. 1928 aerial photograph, the area from the middle of the frame upward is filled with paddies and fields. Long, narrow lots like strips line up facing the same direction, with narrow paths between paddies and waterways threading between them. The hamlets extend in bands along the old road, and along the bottom edge and in the lower left of the frame there is an urban area packed with the fine grain of roofs, along with factory buildings. The boundary between farmland and town shows as if cutting across the frame. A single line crosses that farmland from left to right, sloping slightly down. It is the railway. Toward the left of the frame the tracks are bundled into several lines, forming a station yard with thin parallel lines that look like passing tracks. When the railway linking Osaka and Kobe opened in 1874, a station named Kanzaki was placed here. This photograph shows well that this is land where the tracks came before the town. On the right side of the frame a river with a wide floodplain meanders, and rows of houses can be seen on its far bank as well.

If you switch to c. 1936-42, the ratio of fields to roofs begins to reverse within the same view. Farmland still remains in the upper half, but the rows of houses along the roads have thickened, and the lower half has become an urban area packed tightly with the grain of roofs. The roofs are not uniform in size. Several especially long large roofs are mixed among the small houses, and it can be read that buildings for living and buildings for making things share the same blocks. In the photograph of this era there are several squares in the middle of the frame filled with uniform black, as if ink had been dropped on them. Their outlines are straight, and their tone is clearly different from the surrounding fields. You cannot tell from the photograph what failed to appear in it.

Burned areas and large roofs

The 1945-50 photograph feels completely different from the eras before and after it. The grain is coarse, and the whole frame is whitish and bright. As your eyes adjust, you begin to see white blank lots scattered here and there in the urban area. These are areas with no building outlines, where only the shape of the lots remains. Amagasaki is a city that suffered war damage, and this bright frame is also the face of a city standing at the entrance to reconstruction. The same frame also shows lots with long, narrow buildings neatly lined up. It is the shape of factory buildings in rows. Burned areas, working factories and fields that still remain share one photograph.

By 1961-69, only a little of the fields remains at the top edge of the frame. Buildings with large roofs line up in groups north and south of the tracks, and wooden rows of houses fill the space around them. Toward the left of the frame there is a circular structure and an oval sports ground, and along the river on the right, factories and reclaimed land continue along the bank. At the bottom of the frame another river course meanders widely, and buildings are packed on both sides of it too. Open ground remains only within factory sites and along the riverside. It is in this era that Amagasaki as an industrial city fills the whole frame.

What color reveals

From the 1974-78 photograph on, the frame is in color. Under the blue-green tint, the first thing that catches the eye is the red running track toward the left of the frame. It is an athletics track, and on its north side there is a building with a circular roof. Color also tells us about the materials of buildings. If you move on to 1979-83, it becomes clear that many of the densely packed roofs are blue metal sheets, and you can see small workshops fitted finely between the houses. In this era and in the 1984-86 photograph, ocher square surfaces appear here and there in the frame. These are lots where buildings have disappeared and the soil is exposed, and the large ones are factory sites. Signs that the rebuilding of the town had begun show up as changes in color.

Where the large roofs left

Kirin Brewery's Amagasaki plant, which spread north of the station, ended operations in the 1990s. Brewing needs large amounts of water and a wide site. With the withdrawal of a plant that had held both of these close to the city center, a sizable piece of land right in front of the station became free all at once. A large commercial facility opened on the site in 2009, and since 2013 it has been called Amagasaki Q's Mall. The character of the station also changed. In 1997 the JR Tozai Line opened, and with the Tokaido Line and the Fukuchiyama Line it became a transfer station where three lines meet. The station that had been the entrance to a factory town shifted its role to a station for transfers and shopping.

If you switch to today's photograph, the fine grain of the roofs has visibly decreased. In lots where small roofs of blue metal sheets once lined up, large white rectangular roofs and tall buildings whose walls also show in the photograph are mixed in. The outlines of the lots have also become straighter, and there are places where the roads have been widened. On the other hand, some things have not moved. The position and direction of the bundle of tracks are almost the same as in the c. 1928 photograph, and the red running track has been in the same place since 1974-78. The band of warehouses and factories along the river also remains, together with the shape of the bank. Going back and forth, you can see that even after the factories left, it was the tracks and the river that set the framework of the town.

A point that has long recorded land values is in Hama 2-chome in the City of Amagasaki, 752 m from this location. The official price per square meter jumped from 208,000 yen in 1983 to 555,000 yen in 1991, then fell to 182,000 yen in 2012-2014, hitting the bottom up to the 2026 publication. In the 2026 publication it is 195,000 yen, and compared with the drop from 1991, the movement after the bottom is roughly flat. It is also a flat area where the height of the ground changes only in units of tens of centimeters. The assumed flooding is drawn by zone on the hazard map published by the City of Amagasaki.