Fujigaoka about 60 years ago and today

History of Fujigaoka

The Higashiyama Line of the subway, extending east from central Nagoya, reaches its terminus at Fujigaoka just before the hills spreading east of Owari. In this town, the name of the station came before the name of the town. According to the origins of town names compiled by Meito Ward, Fujigaoka is a name that combines the "Fuji" of Oaza Fujimori with the fact that the subway's Fujigaoka Station is located there. The name of nearby Koike-cho also comes from a local district name and from Koike Kariike, a small irrigation pond that was at the site of the station. A village of hills and valleys holding reservoirs was rearranged into a residential area with the subway terminus as its axis. Before and after that rearrangement appear clearly separated in the aerial photographs.

Hills of woods and valley paddies

In the 1945-50 photograph, most of the frame is a mass of dense woods. Narrow valleys run between the woods, branching as they go, and only the valley floors look bright as paddies. Here and there the surface of the woods is blanked out in white and mottled, suggesting thin hills with sparse trees. Right of the center there is a village of clustered roofs, from which roads scatter in all directions. At the lower left and lower right of the frame, ponds full of water shine, and in the upper right corner a river flows in a large bend. There is not a single piece of land with orderly lots. Only one white road crossing from west to east a little below the center is a noticeable man-made line.

In the 1961-69 photograph too, the combination of hills and valleys hardly moves. The white mottling has decreased, and the woods look blacker and denser than in the previous era. The village is in the same place, and the road toward the bottom has widened, crossing the frame in a gentle arc. In the center of the top edge, a long, narrow white band slicing diagonally through the paddies has been drawn, showing that works moving earth had begun outside the hills. A square piece of land, cut and turned white, also appears toward the right of the bottom edge. However, there is still no station and no track anywhere. The photograph captures the hills just before the terminus came.

Hills where the terminus came first

The chronology of the Transportation Bureau City of Nagoya records the opening of the Fujigaoka Works in March 1969 and, in April of the same year, the 4.4 km extension of Subway Line 1 from Hoshigaoka to Fujigaoka. On the day of the extension, five bus terminals including Fujigaoka were also opened, and from the following month Line 1 came to be called by the nickname Higashiyama Line. This means that a railway terminus, a train works and a bus transfer point were placed all at once on hills in the suburbs. According to the history of land readjustment in the City of Nagoya, 103 associations were established in the city from 1960 to 1970, and the project areas extended to about 5,000 hectares. The introduction to Meito Ward also cites large-scale land readjustment and the construction of the subway and the expressway as the reasons the rural area changed into a commuter town.

In the 1974-78 photograph, most of the hills have been replaced by grid streets and rows of houses, and on the east side of the station a yard appears where tracks open in a fan shape and line up in numbers. On the left of the frame, an elevated motorway runs from the top edge to the bottom edge, connecting in the lower left to an interchange that draws a large loop. In the center toward the bottom, a building with a large white roof and a round sports ground stand side by side. Even so, not all of the hills became housing land. Woods remain together on the left of the bottom edge, and in the lower right newly developed white bare ground spreads. In the upper right corner, paddy lots continue in their grid. The ward was born just before this, in 1975, when it separated from Chikusa Ward to become Meito Ward.

The bare ground in the lower right is divided by roads in the 1979-83 photograph, and houses begin to line up as if surrounding a pond. The whole photograph sinks into brown, but the fan shape of the yard and the elevated road on the left trace the same lines as in the previous era. In 1987-90, green edges the bank of that pond like a ring, and almost the whole frame is filled with roofs. Even at this point, the woods on the left of the bottom edge and the paddies in the upper right keep their shape.

A station where two lines cross

In 2004, the spelling of the station name was changed from Fujigaoka written with a small katakana ke to Fujigaoka written with a hiragana ga. In March of the following year, 2005, the Tobu Kyuryo Line of Aichi Rapid Transit opened between Fujigaoka and Yakusa. It was a line laid as a means of access to the venue of Expo 2005 Aichi, which opened that month, and in the introduction to Meito Ward it is called by the nickname Linimo. The subway terminus came to double as the starting point of a line heading to the hills further east, and widened its role into a transfer station between two lines.

As of 2026, the fan shape of the yard still appears in the same place and with the same shape as in 1974-78. The elevated road on the left and the loop-shaped interchange also hardly change the position of their lines. The dark green mass remaining on the left of the bottom edge almost overlaps the outline of the woods of 1945-50, and is a corner that remained as woods. The pond in the lower right also remains, its banks surrounded by green, and in the upper right corner paddy lots can still be seen here and there. Everywhere else, valleys and ridges alike are filled with rows of houses without distinction.

The change in the density of the town is around the station and in the upper part of the frame. Along the top edge in 1974-78, white box-shaped buildings were only sparsely lined up, but in today's photograph several rows of mid-rise and high-rise buildings stand in the same area. Tall buildings also gather right around the station, and blocks are packed as if edging the fan shape of the yard. On the other hand, the blocks to the south and east away from the station remain fine rows of low roofs, and the size of the grid cells has hardly changed since the 1979-83 photograph. The buildings are taller the closer they are to the terminus station, and lower toward the outside of the hills.

If you go back and forth between 1945-50 and today's photograph, the old terrain also shows through in the way the roads run. Many of the narrow roads that followed the lines of the valley paddies have been absorbed into the grid streets, but the one road running from west to east toward the bottom still crosses the frame in almost the same arc in today's photograph. Within the grid redrawn after leveling the hills, only this road keeps its direction from before the land readjustment.

On land made by cutting hills and filling valleys, the way the ground was formed can differ from place to place even within the same block. Assumptions of how far water will come in heavy rain, including places where valleys were filled, are on the City of Nagoya's hazard map. Koike-cho is a town that inherited the name of a pond, and the official land prices (Chika Koji) for its residential site rose every year from 2016 to 2026 except 2021.