Heijo New Town (Takanohara) about 60 years ago and today

History of Heijo New Town (Takanohara)

Along the northern edge of the Nara Basin, a long, low ridge of hills running east to west closes it off. These are the hills long called Narayama; to the south they look out over the site of the Heijo Palace, and going down the valleys to the north you come out onto the lowlands on the Kyoto Prefecture side. These hills, which separate Nara and Kyoto, were for a long time land of woods for firewood and charcoal and of paddy fields in the valleys. On a place where the railway merely crossed the back of the hills from north to south, a town the size of a whole hill was built on top from the 1970s on. It is Heijo New Town, and Takanohara Station was placed as its entrance.

The hills called Narayama

The ups and downs of the terrain show directly in the elevation values. Around the station it is 55.6 m, with 58.1 m to the south and 54.5 m to the north, almost flat, while the east is 68.9 m and the west 71.2 m, 13-16 m higher. It is terrain in which a long, narrow north-south valley cuts the hills, and the railway runs along the bottom of that valley. The order is that the railway first chose the easiest line over the hills, and the town building that came later set that line as its axis. From here one railway line reaches both central Nara and the city of Kyoto, and the land on the hills had not been used up as farmland. Amid the housing shortage of the period of the postwar economic boom, this combination pushed the hills up as a candidate for large-scale development.

The era of woods and terraced paddies

The oldest 1945-50 aerial photograph has no coverage of the southern side, and from just under half the height of the frame downward it is painted a uniform pale gray. In the northern half that escaped the gap, the left (west) is dark woods where ridges and streams interlock, and at their foot long, narrow terraced paddies form steps. The right (east) is paddy fields divided finely across the whole surface, with a grid of footpaths and channels extending evenly. An old highway runs north-south along the border between the woods and the paddy fields, and on both sides of it small clusters of roofs continue in a band. To the left of the highway, toward the top, there is an irrigation pond, which in this era appears as a smooth, bright surface.

The 1961-69 photograph has no gaps, and it takes in even the valleys deep in the hills in one image. The western half and a wide area on the south side are still woods, with small paddies carved into each valley between the ridges. The settlements are limited to along the highway and the mouths of the valleys, and there are almost no buildings on the hills. In this era, notice the thin line running straight up and down through the center of the frame. It is the railway, laid by choosing the valley bottom that cuts the hills north to south, and it later becomes the backbone of the town. The irrigation pond that looked bright in 1945-50 sinks black here, and small water surfaces follow one another below it too. The way the paddy fields spread on the east side has hardly changed from 1945-50.

The water use of the hills can also be read from the photographs. The irrigation pond toward the top has the form of a dammed valley, and it looks like a triangle wide on the north side and narrowing to the south. Several similar small water surfaces are scattered below it and at the foot of the hills. A system of storing rainwater valley by valley and dropping it to the paddies below made farming possible on this land, which has no large river on the hills. Building a town on the hills also meant folding up that system and laying down a different path for the water. On land where hills were cut and valleys filled, the paths of rainwater are pulled along by the direction of the valleys before development. The City of Nara publishes maps of landslide warning zones and assumed flooding, and you can check there how each block is treated.

White bare ground spreads

In the 1974-78 photograph, only the southwestern corner of the hills suddenly turns bright. The white bare ground of land under development, stripped of grass and trees, spreads out, and on it buildings of the same orientation and the same length are lined up. They are mid-rise apartment buildings, and the scene of the first residential buildings lining up appears here. The surroundings are still woods, and the line where the edge of the development cuts into the woods is raw. Along the vertical line in the center, a wide band like a construction road appears, and the axis running north-south through the hills begins to thicken.

By 1979-83, the white bare ground juts out widely into the bottom third and the center left of the frame. Surfaces where only the lines of lot division have been drawn and no buildings have gone in, streets drawing curves, rows of slab-shaped residential buildings, and groups of small roofs of detached houses all line up at the same time within one frame. In the center left of the hills there is a large white surface where soil has been gouged out, and you can see the development progressing while moving earth. Around the station, long, narrow structures and wide vacant lots appear, and the outline of the place that will become the center of the town is fixed. Another block also appears in the northeastern corner, showing that development was going ahead at the same time on the north side of the hills too.

The border between the station area and farmland

In the 1984-86 photograph, the skeleton of the streets is almost all in place. The western half of the hills is filled with curving streets and lots, and the rows of apartment buildings and the blocks of detached houses are divided as if painted in separate colors. However, from the east side of the station to the southeast, white surfaces where development has finished and only lot lines have been drawn are still wide. The distribution of the vacant lots left in this one photograph shows that the town did not appear all at once as a finished product but was built in order, lot by lot.

In the latest aerial photograph, those vacant lots are filled with buildings and trees. Just west of the station sits a commercial facility with a large roof, and tall apartment buildings line the streets extending from the station area. Meanwhile, in the right half of the frame, the flat land opening to the east remains farmland. The shapes of the paddy lots almost overlap with the 1961-69 photograph, and you can see at a glance that only the top of the hills was replaced over a little more than half a century. The irrigation pond at the upper center, which appears from the 1945-50 photograph on, is also in the same place with the shape of its water surface hardly changed.

There is movement outside the hills too. In the latest aerial photograph, a wide motorway crosses the upper right of the frame diagonally and passes on to the north with the approach of a looping interchange. This road already appears in the 1984-86 photograph, while in the same place in 1979-83 there are only paddies, settlements and a residential area under development. The motor route over the hills was opened at almost the same time as the skeleton of the town on the hills was fixed. The greenery once stripped away by development is also scattered in the latest photograph as islands of deep green between the blocks. If you look from above, you can tell that the woods on the hills did not all disappear, and that the town was put together in a way that left them between the lots.

As for the price of residential land, it has not kept pace with the maturing of the town. At a residential site in Ukyo 4-chome, about 430 m from the location, the record per square meter starts at 270,000 yen in 1994, and this value is also the highest up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). The cheapest up to the 2026 publication is 112,000 yen in 2006, meaning that it fell to about 40% of the starting point. In the 2026 official land prices it is 172,000 yen, recovering to a little over 60% of the starting point. The value of a town born all at once on the hills swung widely in the decades after its opening.