Himeji Station North Casty 21 about 60 years ago and today

History of Himeji Station North Casty 21

When you get off a train at Himeji Station and walk north, the main keep of the castle comes into view straight ahead at the end of a wide street. In front of that view, the area from north to east of the station is land that was long used only for the railway. Beside the passenger platforms, many sidings for rearranging freight cars were laid, and the bundle of tracks crossed the town from east to west. If you look only at the town after the tracks disappeared from ground level, it is hard to remember that the band was there. If you advance through the aerial photographs in order from the oldest era, you can clearly read the thickness of the bundle and when it became thin.

Lines drawn on the lowland of a plain

The castle town of Himeji spreads south of the castle and is bounded by the Ichi River to the east and the Semba River to the west. It is lowland where sediment carried by the rivers piled up in thin layers, with almost no relief that could be called a slope. If you measure the elevation, even the highest north side is 11.5 m and the lowest south side 10.2 m. The center and the west side are both 10.8 m and the east side 10.7 m, so wherever you measure, it falls within the lower part of the 10 m range. A surface with a difference of little more than 1 m from end to end is suited to laying many sidings for sorting freight cars and lining up long rows. With even a slight tilt, parked cars could roll, and with a curve you could not see to the end. This flatness allowed the arrangement of long, narrow railway land stretching east and west of Himeji Station.

To run a bundle of tracks, width and length must be secured together at once. It reads as though, rather than the built-up town, the edge of the fields south of it was chosen. After the Sanyo Railway reached Himeji in 1888 and a station was placed south of the castle, the center of gravity of the town moved gradually south. In the reconstruction plan after the 1945 air raids burned most of the city area, a wide street linking the castle and the station north to south was laid, creating an axis that looks straight at the main keep.

Three eras that show the bundle of tracks

In the 1961-69 aerial photograph, a thick band crosses the center of the frame from east to west. On the east side of the station, thin lines branch out like a fan, and the fineness of that mesh shows that it was a place for handling freight cars. The north side of the band is a city area densely packed with small buildings right up to the edge of the moat, and the mesh of its alleys is fine too. The moat at the northern end keeps its square outline surrounded by woods and appears as a corner darker than the surface of packed roofs. From there, only one wide straight road extends south. Because the surrounding roads are all narrow, this one alone looks unnaturally wide.

The south side beyond the band is a completely different scene. Rectangular fields line up across the whole surface, with only scattered settlements, and the roads are as narrow as the ridges between paddies. The tracks had become the border between town and farming village. In the lower left of the frame, ponds and gardens were made on the hill of Mount Tegara, and this area became the site of the grand exposition of 1966. The monorail that ran between the site and Himeji Station stopped operating in 1974 and was abolished in 1979.

In the 1974-78 color photograph, the inside of the band can be read in more detail. The bundle of sidings lined up east of the station, the line branching off west of the station and heading north, and a corner where long, narrow buildings line up regularly, apparently for cargo handling. The widest open surface in the town is the tracks, and there are only a few roads crossing them. Color also makes it easier to tell apart residential areas where white and gray roofs mix and small factories where bright square surfaces line up. A large white building stands west of the station, and the fields on the south side begin to be replaced by housing and factories. On Mount Tegara, the oval of an athletics stadium stands out white within the green of the hill.

By 1979-83, the farmland on the south side has decreased further, and blocks of commerce and housing now continue in a chain. The green of the fields remains only thinly outside the band. Even so, the band itself does not move. If anything, the sidings stretch long toward the right of the frame, and even fine stripes that appear to be parked cars can be read. Up to this era you can also see at a glance that the buildings are packed differently north and south of the tracks. The composition of ground-level tracks dividing the city area into north and south did not change for more than twenty years.

A surface freed by raising the tracks

Tracks running at ground level create a level crossing every time they cross a road. Many tracks lined up east to west were also a wall that kept stopping north-south movement for long periods. The composition broke down only after the 21st century began. Through a continuous grade separation project, the Sanyo Line was raised onto a viaduct in 2006, and in 2008 the Bantan Line and the Kishin Line followed. The track beds left on the ground and the land for freight cars that had finished its role became a wide stretch of cleared land connecting from north to east of the station. The project to rebuild this land as a whole is called Casty 21. A plaza and pedestrian routes were placed in front of the station, and in a lot toward the east, a cultural and convention facility opened in 2021, and next to it a general medical center that merged several hospitals opened in 2022. The street toward the castle has also been reshaped with wide sidewalks.

If you switch to today's photograph, the east-west tracks have been reorganized into a single thin band of viaduct, and square buildings and paved lots line up where the sidings were. The group of large white buildings seen toward the right of the frame is the new facilities that filled the cleared land. In front of the station a wide pedestrian surface with a roof juts out, and the width of the street heading north from it stands out even in the photograph. The surface that had separated north and south has disappeared, and the blocks north and south of the station appear as a continuous city area. On the eastern edge the riverbed spreads out white, with housing packed right up to it. An observation point for official land prices (Chika Koji) is placed in the residential area of Hojoguchi, about 630 m from this location. If you line them up per square meter, 2017 is 165,000 yen, 2021 in between is 195,000 yen, and 2026 is 234,000 yen. Even if you compare only the start and end points up to the 2026 publication, there is a gap of 69,000 yen.

Many traces remain. The long, narrow land left open under the viaduct, the alignment that curves west of the station and branches off to the north, and the gentle climb toward Mount Tegara. All of them follow the composition of the old photographs as it was. On this land, which is almost flat however you follow it north to south, only the height of the viaduct remains as relief made by human hands. Whichever era you switch to, only the castle surrounded by its moat and the direction of the street extending north from the station stay in position. If you find the woods and the white main keep at the top of the frame and then lower your eyes to the south, you can see how much the same land has been rewritten.