Gakuenmae about 60 years ago and today

History of Gakuenmae

Gakuenmae is a residential area that a railway company cut open in the hills in the west of the City of Nara. North of the station, streets curving in arcs as if a fan were opened from the station area line up in many layers, and hills where woods and reservoirs remain surround them on the outside. In the 1961-69 aerial photograph, only these fan-shaped streets and a single road extending straight north stand out sharply among the surrounding paddies, fields and coppice woods. If you follow the later photographs, the tops of the hills are gradually covered by the roofs of houses.

A fan drawn on the hills

The railway linking Nara and Osaka, later the Kintetsu Nara Line, opened in 1914, and the City of Nara's comprehensive plan cites this as one step in the process by which the city's railway network took shape. Here, the tracks entering Nara from Osaka over the mountains cross from east to west a land where gentle hills and valleys are intricately mixed. In the valleys, terraced paddies and reservoirs that store water for the paddies continue, and coppice woods remain on the ridges. There is almost no land that comes together flat, and it is terrain where spreading a town all at once requires development that cuts the hills and fills the valleys.

It was the railway company that owned the tracks that itself opened a residential area on these hills. The Kintetsu Group's chronology records the start of sales of the Gakuenmae residential area in 1950. The City of Nara's comprehensive plan also records that from around this time after the war, housing development progressed around Kintetsu's Gakuenmae Station, and that during the postwar economic boom, housing development spread across the hills in the northwest of the city. It is an arrangement in which the company running the railway itself prepares the town for the people who live along its line, and the fan shape in front of the station that remains in the photographs is thought to be the framework of that residential area.

Hills filled over four eras

If you look at the center of the 1961-69 photograph, just north of the station there are fan-shaped streets of layered arcs, and on their east side a single straight road extends north. North of the fan, white buildings of the same shape line up in many parallel rows on both sides of the road, and to the south on the east of the road, houses in square lots are laid out neatly. Only this area is divided by neat straight and curved lines. A little to the east, a single small black reservoir opens its mouth. Rows of houses in fine lots also spread south of the station, and there is one white rectangular open space. The rest of the frame, however, is mostly black coppice woods, terraced paddies and reservoirs scattered here and there. On the hill to the right there is a large group of white buildings, but the orderly residential areas are limited to both sides of the station. On the hills from the northwest to the north, several surfaces where the bare ground shows white, as if the woods had been stripped off, are scattered, suggesting that development of the hills had already begun in this era.

The arcs of the fan are all drawn with the station side as their center. Short radial roads connect arc to arc, in a form where the route from any lot to the station area is short. Here, it can be read from the lines in the photograph themselves that the direction of the streets was decided with the station as the pivot. On the other hand, the houses south of the station line up along the slope in square lots close to strips, drawn with lines different from the fan to the north. North and south of the tracks, the way the streets are drawn is clearly different.

On the hills in the upper left and upper right, new residential areas where small houses line up densely along winding streets appear in the 1974-78 photograph, and the paddies in the valleys have greatly decreased. The parallel rows of buildings north of the station have increased in number, and the fan-shaped streets keep their shape. The large reservoir on the right and the reservoir southeast of the station keep their water surfaces, and rows of houses press up to their shores. At the upper left and lower right edges, surfaces where trees have been cleared and the bare ground shows white spread, showing that development was still continuing.

1979-83 is a summer photograph, and the green is deep. Most of the hilltops are already filled with the roofs of houses, and coppice woods remain only on the ridges and on some slopes. On the shore of the reservoir on the right, a sports ground with a red running track around green turf can be seen. In the woods running due south from the station, several long, narrow bands of bright green weave through. Around the station, large flat-roofed buildings have come inside the fan, and buildings have also increased beside the white rectangular open space south of the station. The arcs of the fan themselves, though buried in rows of houses, can be clearly followed as the arrangement of the roofs. The 1984-86 photograph is dark in tone, but large white buildings have increased south of the station, and in the lower left newly cut bright surfaces appear together. On the shore of the reservoir on the right, large white roofs have been added beside the oval of the sports ground, and the large reservoir away to the north of the station has also been surrounded by rows of houses right up to its banks. Moving through the four eras in order, you can follow how the residential area starting from the station spread outward and outward, as if crossing the valleys one by one.

The railway company's town today

If you look north of the station in today's photograph, the fan-shaped streets remain, drawing almost the same lines as in 1961-69. The road extending north has not changed direction either. The change is on the north side of the fan, where some of the white buildings that lined up in parallel have disappeared, and in their place a bright corner of small lots has appeared. The white rectangular open space south of the station is still in the same position, surrounded by large buildings. In the lower left of the frame, mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings have come to line the slopes of the hills. The reservoirs on the right and toward the south keep their water surfaces, and some of the woods remaining on the ridges have not disappeared. The places where woods and ponds remain can all be found in the same positions in the 1961-69 photograph. The large reservoir to the north sinks black among the rows of houses, its banks still intricately shaped, and on the ridge to its east a single cluster of dense green trees remains. The development did not level the hills completely flat, but filled the spaces between with housing while avoiding the ponds and parts of the ridges. Traces of the hill terrain can be read in this arrangement of woods and ponds.

At the standard site in Gakuen-kita 1-chome, about 230 m north of the station, the record of the official land prices (Chika Koji) can be traced from 1983. The price per square meter, up to the 2026 publication, was highest at 980,000 yen in 1991 and lowest at 193,000 yen in 2005. It is a residential area spread by cutting hills and filling valleys, and the ranges of shaking and landslides assumed near slopes and in places that were valleys are published by the City of Nara as a hazard map.