Ebina about 60 years ago and today

History of Ebina

Where the Sagami River leaves the mountains and comes out onto the plain, its flow splits into several channels over the sand, leaving a wide lowland on the left bank. Ebina Station stands on that lowland. This lowland tilts very gently toward the south, the direction in which the Sagami River flows down. The height measured north of the station is 21.7 m, the station point 21.5 m, the west 21.2 m, the east 21.0 m and the south 20.8 m, and the differences among the five points do not even reach the level you would notice on foot. A few hundred meters to the east, the edge of the plateau rises, and above it the land changes to fields and woods. The flat lowland, easy to irrigate, was long used as rice paddies, and the division of placing villages on top of the plateau continued. In the Nara period the provincial temple (Kokubunji) of Sagami Province was placed in this area, and the place name Kokubu still remains on the east side of the station. Next to the sites of an old government office and temple, railway tracks were laid in the middle of the paddies, and three lines gathered there; this is how the town of Ebina came to be.

A junction among the paddies

Open the 1961-69 aerial photograph and the frame is almost all rice paddies. Long, narrow lots line up in the same diagonal direction, and the paths between the paddies form a slightly tilted mesh. The Sagami River flows from the upper left of the frame out to the middle of the left edge, but its water channels are thin, and on both sides surprisingly wide riverbeds of white gravel open up. The flow does not gather into one, splitting and rejoining between sandbars. Several railway lines run diagonally across the paddies, approaching each other and gathering at one point in the center of the frame. Buildings are slightly clustered only around that gathering point, and otherwise sparse rows of houses only line up thinly along the riverside road and the edge of the plateau. The right side of the frame is a slope where dark woods and fields are mixed, and the boundary between the lowland and the plateau can be read directly as a line. Toward the right of the bottom edge there is a corner where many long, narrow buildings of the same shape line up, looking oddly orderly in a landscape of nothing but paddies. Only about two roads crossing the Sagami River can be seen in the frame, with thin lines crossing over the wide riverbed. The station was still a junction among the paddies, not the center of a town.

Sidings and large roofs

In the 1974-78 photograph, along with the arrival of color, the way the land is used begins to move. A little below the center, a long, narrow site appears where many tracks are bundled side by side. The lines open like a fan and close again, showing that it is a place for lining up and stabling trains. On its north side several buildings with large roofs shining white have been built, surrounded by wide paved yards. It is the first stage in which factories and facilities for handling goods began to come into the paddies. Toward the top of the frame, a wide motorway that was not there in the previous era runs east to west. In the late 1960s the Tomei Expressway opened across the city area, and the timing overlaps with that. The villages along the river stay as bands and thicken a little, and in the southwest corner new residential lots have been cut.

By 1979-83, the main stage of change moves east. On the right side of the frame, on top of the plateau, a residential area neatly divided by narrow roads spreads all at once, with red and blue roofs densely lined up. Although the paddies on the lowland still remain widely, only the plateau side becomes a town first. The long, narrow railway site in the center is still there, unchanged, and the factory to the north has added buildings and widened the outline of its site.

The 1987-90 photograph has no data on the northeast side of the view, and you can read only the riverside and the center. Even so, the change in the roads is clear enough. The roads that crossed the paddies diagonally have been widened into white bands, and the shapes of the intersections have been made into angular outlines. In the lower left of the frame there is a corner where long, narrow buildings of the same length line up facing the same way, readable as rows of houses built at the edge of the paddies. The paddies in the center are still wide, and the town gained thickness as if surrounding the paddies.

A station where three lines meet

It took time for Ebina Station to become the face of the town. The stations of the Odakyu Odawara Line and the Sagami Railway were placed here in the early 1940s, and for a long time they were used as a transfer point between two lines. In 1987 a station on the Sagami Line was added here, and it became a station where three lines meet. Gathering lines does not necessarily gather people, and the area around the station turned into a place for commerce even later. On the east side of the station, the commercial facility ViNA WALK opened in 2002, and a plaza and blocks of shops were laid out in front of the station. The west side long remained land where material storage yards and paddies were mixed, but in 2015 LaLaport Ebina opened, creating flows of people on both the east and west sides. Two of the three lines run within the prefecture, and a line heading to central Tokyo, a line heading to Yokohama and a line linking the inland areas cross at one point. Ebina's character as a transfer station is this combination itself.

A station area where paddies and high-rises coexist

In today's photograph, the bundle of tracks remains in its fan shape on the east side of the station, and commercial facilities with large roofs and multistory parking garages sit on its west side. Just south of the station, several tall buildings stand a head above the low roofs around them, casting dark shadows at their feet. And yet, in the left half and the lower part of the frame, the lots of farmland remain surprisingly widely. Paddies of almost the same shape as in the 1961-69 photograph continue within a few hundred meters of the feet of the high-rise buildings, and this is the distinctive feature of the Ebina station area. The Sagami River side has also changed its appearance. The riverbed where white gravel once spread is covered in grass and appears as a green band. The official hazard map of the City of Ebina draws as a map how far from the river the assumed flooding area reaches. The residential area on the plateau has increased in density within the lots cut in 1979-83, and beside the motorway that runs east to west along the top edge, large buildings that look like logistics facilities have increased. One building with a roof regularly covered with black panels stands within that band, the only one of a different color among the continuing large white and gray roofs. It is a building that uses the surface of its roof directly for equipment. The corner north of the station where large white roofs lined up remains a site of large roofs as of 2026, but in one section toward the east alone the buildings have disappeared and it has returned to bare ground.

In the record, no year up to 2025 exceeded the 1992 amount. For a residential site in Kokubu-minami 1-chome, about 600 m from the location, the 1992 value of 312,000 yen per square meter was the highest up to the 2025 publication, and after that it kept falling, dropping to 187,000 yen in 2006. After hitting the bottom up to the 2026 publication at 187,000 yen in 2006 and 2012, it turned upward; in 2025 it returned to 307,000 yen, just short of the starting level, and in the 2026 publication it was 333,000 yen, exceeding the 1992 amount. The depth of the valley and the pace of the recovery can be viewed together with the sequence of photographs in which paddies are replaced by the town.