Megumino New Town about 60 years ago and today

History of Megumino New Town

The town of Megumino is in the southern part of the Ishikari Plain, on flat farmland about 25 km southeast of central Sapporo. It is land that needed neither cutting hills nor filling valleys, and a grid of streets was placed as it was on a surface where the difference in height is only about 2 m. The process by which a surface of nothing but strip-shaped fields was replaced by a grid town remains step by step in each era of the photographs.

A surface of pioneer fields

The name Eniwa comes from the name of a mountain standing apart to the southwest, and is said to derive from an Ainu word for a sharply pointed rocky mountain. As settlement advanced in the Meiji era, this area was opened as well-drained land for field crops, and the railway linking Sapporo and Chitose ran north-south through the fields. Before any plan for a residential area was brought in, both the flat land and the tracks were already in place.

Unlike residential areas cut out of hills, here the landform itself has barely changed before and after land development. This is because the height does not change whichever way you move: about 26 m at the center of the frame, highest in the south at about 27 m, about 25 m in the north and east, and about 26 m in the west. Even within the same Sapporo area, the land conditions are completely different from Makomanai, where facilities and housing were layered on a terrace held between rivers.

In the black-and-white 1961-69 photograph, almost the whole frame is farmland. Lots long and narrow like strips line up diagonally, and the differences in brightness from lot to lot appear as stripes. In the fields, farmhouses backed by dense groves are scattered in dots, linked by thin farm roads. In the center of the frame, the tracks and a road run side by side in a straight line north to south, splitting in two at the northern end.

A little west of the center is a band of dense groves that continues north to south, meandering irregularly. The way the band curves is clearly different in character from the field boundaries drawn straight, and it reads as woods left along a watercourse. In the northwest corner of the frame, many long, narrow buildings line up facing the same way, built differently from the surrounding farmhouses. In the southeast corner the river spreads a bright riverbed, and a lot that looks as if the soil has been dug up appears on its bank.

Farmland divided by color

When you switch to 1974-78, the photograph becomes color, and the fields appear divided into green, brown and pale yellow. Each lot differs in crop or stage of growth, and this appears as information that could not be read in black and white. The framework of the fields itself is almost the same as in the previous era, and from the center of the frame to the north nothing that looks like housing appears yet.

The movement is on the south side. In the lower half of the frame, rows of houses extend northward, and small buildings have begun to pack in along the streets. Just west of the tracks, two groups of long rows of red roofs line up regularly. It is an arrangement of buildings of the same shape and size placed at equal intervals, showing that they were built under a different plan from the surrounding detached houses.

In this era's photograph, a horizontal band of color crosses the middle of the frame. The slight difference in the depth of the green above and below the band is not because the ground surface changed, but because it falls on the border where photographs taken on different days were joined. When you advance the eras, keeping the positions of such bands in mind makes it harder to confuse changes in the ground surface with the circumstances of photographing.

The grid appears

In the 1984-86 photograph, grid blocks have spread east of the tracks on a large scale. The streets are wide, the corners of the intersections are neatly aligned, and the lots are of uniform size. Going back and forth between the two photographs, you can read the order in which lot lines were drawn on the surface that was fields in the previous era and then filled with roofs. Toward the east of the blocks there is one green space that the surrounding streets enclose in a circle, a landmark in the flat town.

An area of brown bare ground with only thin lines and lot lines drawn on it remains on the northeast side of the blocks. The border of color shows directly how far the front line of land development had advanced in this era. West of the tracks, a building with a large white roof and a wide paved surface have newly appeared, and a long, narrow flat structure has appeared beside the tracks. In step with the completion of the blocks, the facilities on the side that supports life in the residential area were placed in the same period too.

Remaining fields and a dip in land prices

In today's photograph, the residential area east of the tracks is filled with roofs to the edge of the frame. The brown surface in the northeast, which was midway through land development in 1984-86, is also covered with streets and houses. The circular green space remains as it was, its trees grown into dark green. The long rows of red roofs along the tracks also appear without changing position or direction. Even 40 years after the framework of the blocks was drawn, the shape of the roads has barely moved.

On the west side of the tracks, by contrast, fields remain together outside the rows of red roofs. Many of the lot shapes overlap with the strips of 1961-69, showing that the spread of the town stopped at the tracks in this area. In the northwest of the frame, a corner spreads where buildings with large blue and gray roofs line up lot by lot, a group of buildings of a different character from the lot where long, narrow buildings stood in rows in 1961-69. In the southeast, green spaces and a square surface that looks like a sports ground line up along the river, and a bridge links the two banks.

At the residential land in Hakuyo-cho, about 260 m from the location, the record of official land prices (Chika Koji) draws the shape of a deep dip. In 1994 it was 44,500 yen per square meter, but from there the value fell sharply once. Up to the 2026 publication, the cheapest is 21,800 yen from 2016 to 2018, about half of 1994. After that the direction changed, and in 2026 it reached 50,000 yen, the highest value in the records up to the 2026 publication. It is a shape showing that the 40 years since the blocks were completed were not a straight line in terms of land prices.

Because the land is almost flat, the vertical swings in the cross-section graph are small. If you check how much vertical exaggeration is applied and then compare the two lines, east-west and north-south, you can feel the flatness of this surface as numbers. When you want to know about water flow and assumed flooding, the City of Eniwa's official hazard map is the basis.