Kita-Nagase (Former Okayama Rail Yard) about 60 years ago and today

History of Kita-Nagase (Former Okayama Rail Yard)

The Okayama Plain is land where flooded rice paddies line up in a grid. The edges of the lots are straight as far as the eye can see, and the settlements only stretch thinly along the roads. There was an era when a large spindle shape, thin at both ends and swollen in the middle, sat in the middle of this sheet of paddies. If you step through the aerial photographs from the oldest era onward, this shape appears, grows fat, and then disappears. In the last photograph the same place holds a building with a white round roof and a wide, flat, sand-colored surface, and the tracks run off to the east as a narrowed bundle.

The low surface of the Okayama Plain

The values picked up scatter only between 2.7 m and 0.7 m. The center is 2.7 m, the east 2.5 m, the north 1.4 m, the south 1.1 m and the west 0.7 m. The difference between the edges is 2 m, and even the center, the highest point, does not reach 3 m. This is land where a surface hardly different from sea level continues from one edge of the frame to the other. The land falls slightly to the west, but never enough to notice on foot. Only the direction of the irrigation and drainage channels knows about that slope, and almost no habit forced by the terrain shows in the arrangement of the paddy lots or in the way the roads run.

A facility that sorts freight cars by destination wants long, narrow land. Neither its length nor its width could ever fit into one or two blocks. Trying to secure such a shape in one piece inside a city would mean destroying the town. Here, however, the trunk line already ran through, and paddies spread on both sides of it. Land that could be taken without destroying the town lay in just the right position to relay east-west transport along the Sanyo route. After the Sanyo trunk line reached Okayama in the Meiji era, this area was for a long time a place where trains only passed through, but as a surface for sorting freight cars it had no ups and downs, the alignment was straight, and on top of that it was empty.

Four eras of the spindle shape

The 1945-50 photograph is coarse-grained, and the roofs cannot be followed one by one. The tracks run diagonally as a thin line from the lower left of the frame to the upper right, and toward the upper right they split into several lines and gain width. Even so, the thickness is still modest. Around them rectangular paddies line up everywhere, with small settlements dotted among them, backed by groves. Above the center a meandering stream appears as a thick dark band, and at the northern edge a wooded hill rises in black. On the left a stream curves thinly from north to south, and toward the bottom of the frame the differences in shading at each seam between photographs form horizontal steps.

By 1961-69 the spindle shape can be read clearly. From the center left to the upper right corner, a wide surface in which many parallel lines can be counted stretches diagonally, tightening thin at both ends. The whole photograph is sunk in darkness, and the paddy lots look like a patchwork of light and dark. The change is only inside the spindle shape, and the surroundings are paddies as before. The settlements stretch thinly along the roads, and the density of buildings finally rises only in the upper right and lower right corners. The meandering stream at the upper center and the wooded hill to the north are in the same positions as in the previous era. To check the contrast between the paddies and the spindle shape, it is best to set this photograph as the baseline first. If you step backward and forward from here, you can follow at a glance both how the shape grows fat and how it disappears.

In 1974-78 the frame takes on color. The tone differs completely from strip to strip: the upper strip leans to a brownish green, the middle strip to a vivid green, and the lower strip to a pale reddish brown. Between the upper and middle strips there is a black band with nothing in it, and part of the frame is missing only in this era. The spindle shape fits neatly into the middle strip, and dozens of thin lines can be counted. In the lower strip the bare paddies are dyed reddish brown, with buildings packed densely between them. At the lower left a river meanders, showing a gray water surface.

In 1979-83 the color tone is even, and this is the era in which the spindle shape appears thickest, in rust color. The bundle of parallel lines swells greatly from the center to the right, and at the western end it is squeezed thin and connects to the trunk line coming in from the left. Around it green paddies remain widely, with square buildings and settlements dotted among them. Left of the center there is a row of white buildings and a small light-blue rectangle, and at the upper right the buildings are packed without gaps. The wooded hill to the north, the stream at the upper center and the river at the lower left all keep their positions. This is the photograph in which the contrast between the green of the paddies and the rust color comes out most strongly among the four eras up to 1979-83.

What was placed on the former site

In 1984 the system of relaying freight by sorting freight cars one by one was changed nationwide. Once the work of regrouping cars by destination itself was no longer needed, the surface for it was no longer needed either. The land that had finished its role was left at the edge of the city area in its long, narrow shape. It lies along the trunk line, is not far from a station, and on top of that belongs to a single owner as one piece. Vacant land in a city where these conditions come together rarely appears. In 2005 Kita-Nagase Station opened on the former track site, and in a place where trains had only passed through, people began to come and go. A large park and large buildings were placed on the former site one after another.

In today's photograph the bundle of tracks remains on the east side, but its width is narrow. A large building with a white round roof stands around where the spindle shape used to swell, and a wide, flat, sand-colored surface and curving paths spread around it. On the south side of the bundle a long, narrow white roof runs along the tracks, and toward the east several large box-like buildings stand in a row. The city area leaves no gaps in the southern half of the frame, yet left of the center paddies still remain as squares. The river keeps its green embankments and meanders to the lower left, and the wooded hill to the north also remains in black. The observation point where values can be picked up is in a residential area of Kita-Nagase Honmachi, about 267 m from this location. The official land price (Chika Koji) per square meter fell gently from 65,900 yen in 2010 to 65,000 yen in 2013, turned there, and was 77,500 yen in 2025. The rise from the bottom is a little over 12,000 yen, and within the range up to the 2026 official land prices, 81,400 yen in 2026 is the highest.

The color of the surface that appeared thickest in the four eras up to 1979-83 remains nowhere in today's photograph. The trace remains in the long, narrow shape of the lots. The shape of the former tracks remains in the park, and the roads tracing its edges and the boundaries of the sites also run diagonally, matching the direction of the spindle shape. The paddy land division aligned in a grid and the long shape crossing it diagonally still do not match in angle. On land where the difference in elevation is only 2 m, the terrain has little power to decide the shape of the town. Here the angle of the trunk line and a single spindle shape placed by pushing the paddies aside have decided the direction of the lots.