Hamamatsu Station Northeast (Act City) about 60 years ago and today

History of Hamamatsu Station Northeast (Act City)

The city area of Hamamatsu sits on sediment carried by the Tenryu River. It is land to which the word relief hardly applies. The north and west are 4.9 m, the center and east 4.3 m, and the south 4.1 m, so the difference between top and bottom is only 0.8 m. The values step down slightly toward the south, but it is not a slope you can sense on foot. The Enshu-nada Sea lies to the south and a plateau to the north, and the Tokaido ran through the flat band between them, where a post town on the Tokaido was placed. The route by which people and goods passed east and west came first, and the railway was laid over it in the same direction.

In 1889 the Tokaido Line was completed along its full length, and Hamamatsu became an intermediate station on the east-west trunk line. Flat land suited the laying of tracks, and around the station wide surfaces were needed to handle freight cars. In time this city became known as a city that makes musical instruments, and textile and transport equipment factories gathered too. The facilities on the side that ships out what was made grew up in a form that clung to the station. The frame takes in the station, the yard stretching east of it, and the city area spreading outward from there.

Two lines descending to the southwest

The 1945-50 aerial photograph is white and grainy, and individual roofs cannot be told apart. Even so, the large lines can be followed. A little above the center of the frame and toward the right, a band in which many dark lines are bundled together runs horizontally. From its western end two lines branch off and descend to the southwest, run close together for a while around the center of the frame, and then pass on toward the lower left. On the right side of the frame a river meanders from top to bottom and curves sharply near the bottom. In the upper left there are several dense masses of woods, and the roads run irregularly only around them. From the middle to the bottom of the left half of the frame are strip-shaped fields, with lots facing the same way very neatly. The lower half catches the eye most: the white lines of the roads run in a grid, yet the grains of buildings filling the spaces between them are sparse, and the whole surface is uniformly bright. You cannot tell from this one photograph alone what is there and what is not.

A yard surrounded by roofs

When you switch to 1961-69, the image quality improves, and almost the whole frame becomes city area. Roofs are packed tightly into the lower half too, which was bright and uniform in the previous era, and the white lines of the roads stand out as a mesh. The bundle of lines looks longer and thicker than before. A band in which many thin lines run in parallel stretches east from around the station. The two lines descending southwest from the bundle also have clearer outlines, and the way the roofs break off changes only along them. Fields remain only in the lower left and the bottom corner of the frame, which shows that the edge of the city area has been pushed out that far. In the middle of the left edge, a whitish lot where many horizontally long buildings line up appears, and south of it there is another bundle of lines.

Color comes in from the 1974-78 photograph. The color leans toward yellowish green, and the roofs of the city area are a mix of gray and ocher. In this era the yard east of the station stands out most. It crosses the frame as an ocher band, with stripes of thin lines lined up inside it. The band is wide on the side near the station and narrows the farther east it goes. The river runs vertically down the right side as a thin band tinged with green, and the grass of the riverbed appears bright yellowish green. In the lot in the lower left, buildings with white roofs are lined up in rows, and just north of them a wide soil-colored surface is left open. It is how a site for making things is used.

The stripes of sidings and a blank

In the 1979-83 photograph, the whole frame sinks into a bluish gray, and the blue of metal sheets begins to stand out on the roofs. Within the same frame, the north side of the station has changed greatly. Part of the surface where stripes were packed in the previous era has been replaced by a bright ocher blank. Inside that blank, one shape that looks like a round structure can be seen. Stripes of lines still remain on the east side, so this is the picture of a surface partway through changing its use in order from one end.

In 1987-90 that change moves further ahead. From north to northeast of the station, wide bright gray-white and ocher surfaces continue, and hardly any stripes of lines remain. The round structure appears more clearly than in the previous era, and roads radiate out from it. The tracks themselves have been reduced to a few thin bands that only cut diagonally across the frame. A frame in which the stripes of sidings have disappeared and a blank of this size spreads appears only once among the five past eras.

A tower northeast of the station

The method of handling freight in small lots by freight car was replaced by trucks and containers. As freight handling declined, the wide yard that had clung to the station finished its role. The vacated land was a site of rare shape, in the center of the city yet not finely cut up by roads. There was no need to line buildings up to fit existing roads, and the places for the halls, the tower and the hotel building could be decided from the start.

In 1994 Act City Hamamatsu opened on that land. It combines a tower about 212 m tall, large and small halls, a hotel, and facilities for exhibitions and conferences. In the city that makes musical instruments, a place for letting people listen to sound was added right next to the station.

When you open today's photograph, several large box-shaped buildings are clustered northeast of the station, and a building far taller than its surroundings stands among them. Its size is completely different from the grain of the roofs around it. In front of the station a round plaza and walkways stretching from it can be seen. East of the station the tracks unravel into a bundle again, and many lines run side by side under white roofs. The river on the right has neatly finished white embankments, and the water surface is tinged with green.

There are also things whose position has not moved since the old eras. These are the direction of the tracks cutting diagonally across the frame, the meander of the river on the right, the masses of woods in the upper left and the row of white roofs in the lower left. They are in almost the same places as in the 1945-50 frame. The surface that was the yard northeast of the station and the lower half that was once fields have been replaced. However, the two ways of changing differ. The lower half is a surface that filled up as roofs gathered little by little, while the area northeast of the station is a surface that was emptied all at once and then refilled with another use. Two surfaces that filled in different ways sit within the same frame.

As for land values, there is a record continuing from 2013 at a residential site in Chuo 1-chome, Chuo Ward, Hamamatsu. It is 890 m from the location. Per square meter it starts at 243,000 yen in 2013 and is 334,000 yen in 2026, a plain shape in which, up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), the cheapest year is 2013 and the highest is 2026. From 2013 to 2026 that is about 1.4 times. Even in the stretch more than ten years after the former site's opening as a town, the upward direction has not changed. It is flat, low land, and the river is close too. The expected flooding is shown by depth level on the City of Hamamatsu's hazard map.