Makomanai about 60 years ago and today

History of Makomanai

About 10 km south of central Sapporo, the town of Makomanai sits on a flat surface held between the Toyohira River and the Makomanai River. It is land on which different uses have been written over the same flat surface in turn: in the Meiji era a cattle ranch of the Hokkaido Development Commission (Kaitakushi) was placed here, after the war a US military facility, and after its return housing and sports facilities. Each time you switch the era, the main subject of the frame changes, and the rows of long, narrow buildings all facing the same way turn into grid blocks, while the pasture that spread to the south turns into rows of houses.

A surface of ranch and barracks

In the black-and-white 1961-69 photograph, grid streets are drawn from the center of the frame to the north, and inside them dozens of long, narrow buildings stand in rows facing the same way. The shapes and sizes of the roofs are closely matched, clearly different in character from the surrounding houses. The farther north, the larger the buildings, with wide paved surfaces and open land still only divided into lots mixed in. The history of this area being requisitioned by the US military after World War II and, after its return, becoming a camp of the Self-Defense Forces remains in this orderly arrangement.

South of the rows of orderly buildings, a corner where small houses line up along curving streets has already formed. The composition of lots cut by straight lines next to lots curving with the landform is handed down in the eras that follow.

South of that, the lower half of the frame is a wide, bright surface with only straight roads running lengthwise. The lines of furrows and the borders of lots can be seen, but there are almost no buildings, and pasture and farmland continue. This is land where the Hokkaido Development Commission opened a cattle ranch in the Meiji era and the American Edwin Dun passed on livestock farming techniques, and a landscape of livestock and grassland took up half the frame until the 1960s.

At the western end of the frame, the river meanders, spreading a white riverbed, and bright stepped slopes line up on both its banks. The east side is a band of dense woods long from north to south, and farther east are irregularly shaped fields and scattered houses. The contrast that stands out most in this era is that only the flat surface in the center is divided by straight lines, while outside it everything is made of curved lines that follow the landform.

Facilities placed by the Olympics

When you switch to 1974-78, a large building with a round roof appears in the upper left of the frame. The roof is white, the surroundings are a wide green space of turf and woods, and a ring-shaped path surrounds the building. At the 1972 Sapporo Olympics, Makomanai was a main venue, and the opening ceremony and the ice events were held in this area. The facilities built for the Games and the park surrounding them replaced the northwest corner of the pasture all at once.

In the center, rows of long residential buildings line up along the grid blocks. The housing built as the athletes' village was used as housing after the Games, and low-rise rows of houses spread around it. The Namboku Line of the subway also extended in this flow, and in 1971 a station that became the southern end of the line was placed in this town. In the lower left of the frame, the area of a different photographing course overlaps with a black edge, and a residential area with curving streets appears in it. From the difference in color and the black band you can tell directly that the image that looks like one photograph is a patchwork of several flights.

Two towns facing across the forest

In the 1984-86 photograph, the blocks have extended far to the south. Grid roads and houses have entered the surface that was pasture in 1961-69, and open spaces the color of soil that look like sports grounds can be seen in several places. If you move your eye southwest from the round-roofed building, an elliptical running track surrounded by white stands appears clearly. It is a place that could not be seen in the previous era because it lay exactly on the seam band in the lower left of the frame, and the whole shape of the facility comes out only when you advance the era. In the northern corner, large flat-roofed buildings with wide parking lots line up, and the center of the town takes shape. The band of woods running north-south on the east is still dense in this era, but bare earth shows here and there on the slopes, with bright surfaces where trees have been cut mixed in as dots.

If you compare the same band of woods with 1974-78, the color is completely different. In the previous era the eastern slope is dyed brown all over, and the grain of each tree can be clearly seen. In 1984-86 the same slope is filled in with dark green, and the grain cannot be told apart. It is worth remembering, as you advance the eras, that the things you can read change just because the season of photographing differs.

East of the band of woods, dense blocks of housing spread over the top of the slope. The town of Makomanai and the town to the east face each other across the band of forest, a composition that has hardly changed in today's photograph either. Although this is a location where land development greatly reshaped the blocks, the point that the band of forest hardly moves is the most stable element in this frame.

The surface between the rivers, and land prices

In today's photograph, the round-roofed building and the elliptical facility remain in the same positions, and the green space around them has grown denser. In the blocks in the center, buildings are being rebuilt, and the colors of the roofs change finely. The bright band running north along the edge of the woods looks thicker than in 1984-86, and in the woods to its east a surface covered with dark rows lined up regularly has appeared. The southern half that was pasture is almost filled with rows of houses and roads. At the northern end of the frame, a corner lined with large blue and gray roofs and wide parking lots takes up the edge of the blocks, showing that this is not a town of housing alone. At the southern end, the river appears as a bright stream, and a bridge links the town with the opposite bank.

If you line up the five measuring points, you can see what this flat surface really is. The center is about 94.4 m, and the east at about 89.7 m and the west at about 89.3 m are both about 5 m lower. The south is the highest at about 110.7 m, and the north drops to about 90.0 m. There is a single surface descending gently from south to north, the center sits at the position of its back, and both the east and west sides fall toward the Toyohira River and the Makomanai River. In the cross-section graph, compare the north-south descent with the way both east-west ends go down together. The hazard map published by the City of Sapporo shows in figures how far the low surfaces along the rivers spread.

At the residential land in Makomanai Izumimachi, about 330 m from the location, the official land price (Chika Koji) per square meter rose from 100,000 yen in 2014 to 167,000 yen in 2025. Up to the 2026 publication, the cheapest is 100,000 yen from 2014 to 2017 and the highest is 170,000 yen in 2026, a rise that does not form any large dip on the way. This surface, which has piled up uses from ranch to barracks to the athletes' village and then a planned residential area, is still rising in value after more than half a century.