Kori Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Kori Danchi

The frame of Kori Danchi sits on the hilltop itself. The address is Korigaoka in the City of Hirakata, and the elevation of the location is 25.9 m; the north is 31.7 m, the west 33.1 m, the south 42 m and the east 22.2 m, so heights from the 20 m range to the 40 m range appear within short distances. The housing sits not on a single flat plateau but on a rise finely cut by valleys. To the west, outside the frame, the plateau drops to the lowland, and the Keihan Main Line runs along its foot. Korien Station, the gateway, is outside the frame, and this photograph is not a view looking up at the hill from the station but a view from directly above of the hilltop alone.

For a long time no large settlement grew on the plateau. Rain falls away to the valley side, so it is not suited to flooded farmland. People and paddies gathered below the step, on the lowland on the left bank of the Yodo River, and when the Keihan Main Line opened between Temmabashi Station and Gojo Station in 1910, the town grew along the tracks on that lowland side. Only fields, woods and a few terraced paddies on the valley floors remained on the hilltop. The very fact that land of a sizable area remained untouched became the condition for a large housing area to be placed there later.

A photograph with a cover over it

The photograph from around 1936-42 does not show the hill properly. A large mass of thin diagonal lines layered many times over spreads from the left half of the frame to the center, and because its outline is cut off sharply, it looks not like the shadow of the terrain but as if the photograph itself had been altered. From the eastern edge of the mass to the center of the frame, white rectangular buildings line up along a road within a bright band. You can read that something was on the hilltop, but its layout cannot be followed.

Switch to 1945-50 and the cover comes off, revealing the skeleton of the plateau. Parallel valleys run in several lines as black bands of woodland, and the ridges between them remain as bright surfaces. Long, narrow buildings of the same shape line up at intervals along the run of the ridges, a single straight road crosses east to west slightly above the center of the frame, and buildings of the same shape continue on both sides of it as well. Before the war, this plateau held the Kori Works of the Tokyo No. 2 Army Arsenal, a gunpowder manufacturing facility of the former Imperial Japanese Army. Dangerous work requires buildings to be placed apart and linked by roads. The evenly spaced rows left in the photograph fit that use without strain.

A danchi placed on the former site

The former site was wide and continuous, and a railway ran below the step. Amid the postwar housing shortage, these conditions were decisive. The Japan Housing Corporation, established in 1955, chose this plateau as a site, and in 1958 residents began moving in. At the time it was called the largest danchi (public housing complex) in the East. The relationship straddling a city boundary, with the address in Korigaoka in the City of Hirakata and the nearest station Korien Station on the City of Neyagawa side, was also born at this time. Beyond simply lining up slab-shaped mid-rise residential buildings, a design combining several types of residential buildings was tried, and it became one of the models that later danchi building referred to.

In the 1961-69 photograph the center of the frame is almost filled with rows of residential buildings. Long, narrow buildings of the same shape stand in groups of several, and each group faces a different direction. There is a section where rows turned at an angle open like a fan, and right of the center of the frame there is a row curving in an arc along the bend of a road. Just to the lower right of the center, many small buildings that look as if they stretch arms in three directions are dotted about, clearly different in shape from the slab-shaped buildings. Roads that bend to fit the terrain, not a straight grid, divide the blocks. The value measuring the density of what appears in the photograph has increased a little over twofold, from 21.2 in this era to 47.4 as of 2026.

At the edges of the same photograph, the surroundings of the town placed on the hilltop still remain. From the center of the frame downward, stepped terraced paddies continue between wooded valleys. In the right third, a grid of fields spreads over the valley floor, and in the lower left corner there is an old townscape of fine grain. The land development proceeded by choosing the top of the plateau, and the valley lines and the lowland were not touched. Even within this one photograph you can read that the times when the town grew on the hilltop and at its foot differ by about twenty years.

A town of bare ground turning green

Step forward to 1974-78, and the terraced paddies from the center downward are replaced by rows of housing and bright bare ground. This is the era when housing lots climbed up to the valley floors. On the hilltop several earth-colored surfaces that look like playgrounds can be seen between the rows of buildings, and the planted trees grow so that the green of the site deepens. As you move on through 1979-83 and 1984-86, the arrangement of the buildings itself does not move much; instead, the tree crowns spread and the outlines of the rows soften. You can see that within about twenty years of the land development, the town of bare ground changed into a green town.

The frame as of 2026 is filled with buildings to its edges. The pattern in which long, narrow buildings stood in rows has faded, and at the left edge of the frame and right of the center, sections appear where large pale-colored buildings stand together. This is the result of the rebuilding of the early residential buildings and the redevelopment of the site carried out since the 2000s. Detached houses fill finely into the space between buildings and the valley slopes, and at the upper left a building with a round outline can also be seen. In the upper right corner, a wide motorway and the ramps attached to it cross the valley that was fields in the old eras.

The valleys were left

Some things do not move even when you go back and forth between the eras. The lines of the valleys cutting the plateau remain as bands of trees, and the wooded hollow at the center of the frame keeps appearing as a dark surface in the same position from 1945-50 through the photograph as of 2026. Since the land development placed the residential buildings by choosing the ridges and left the valleys, the bends of the streets trace that terrain. If you follow the gently turning roads with your eye, the shape of the ridges and valleys hidden under the housing area comes into view.

The official land price (Chika Koji) of a residential area in Miyanoshita-cho, Hirakata, about 620 m from the location, kept falling from 159,000 yen per square meter in 2003 and, with a phase of slight recovery in 2007 and 2008 in between, reached 124,000 yen in 2012. From 2013 to 2021 it stayed at 123,000 yen, unchanged for nine years in a row, fell to 122,000 yen in 2022 to hit the bottom up to the 2026 official land prices, and has risen to 124,000 yen in 2023, 126,000 yen in 2024 and 128,000 yen in 2025. In the 2026 official land prices it is 130,000 yen.