Tama New Town Minami-Osawa about 60 years ago and today

History of Tama New Town Minami-Osawa

The town of Minami-Osawa is toward the west of the Tama Hills, in the southern part of the City of Hachioji. It is land where many narrow valleys cut into hills in the 100 m range of elevation, and if you compare the five measuring points, the difference between the high and low sides stays within about 12 m at most. In the mid-1960s a wide-area residential plan to meet the housing demand of the National Capital Region was fixed, and the towns opened in order, starting from the districts toward the east. This area is at its western end, and the shape of the hills remained until the last. The 60 or so years until valleys branching like fingers were cut, filled and replaced by a station and blocks can be grasped by going back and forth between the five old photographs and today's photograph.

Hills carved by yato valleys

In the black-and-white 1961-69 photograph, not a single block appears. Ridges of dense woods and bright valleys cutting thinly in between them cover the frame. On the valley floors, long, narrow strip-shaped lots continue, narrowing farther upstream until they disappear into the ridges. A way of using the land, farming in order from the valley floors where water was easy to draw and leaving trees on the slopes, shows directly in how light and dark are divided.

Only the northern edge of the frame looks different. The valleys widen, the farmland comes together, and several settlements with houses lined up along roads appear. The roads that go south from there are thin and wind where they cross the ridges. In the northeast corner, fields divided into a grid are gathered, and beyond them it is woods again. You can read that the inside of the hills was not a place where people lived but a place they went through and farmed.

The height figures tell how this landform has remained. All the measuring points in the four directions are higher than the center: the west about 127.3 m, the south about 127.1 m, the east about 123.7 m and the north about 120.1 m. The center at about 115 m is the bottom of a hollow surrounded by them, which means the station and the center of the town were placed at the bottom of this valley. Both cross-section graphs draw a shape that dips in the middle. The vertical scale is written on the graph, so do not take the apparent steepness at face value. Because conditions differ between surfaces where ridges were cut and surfaces where valleys were filled, the City of Hachioji's official hazard map is the primary source for the assumptions on each piece of land.

Ridges cut down

The 1974-78 photograph is in color, but the whole frame sinks into pale pink and brown, and it is hard to tell woods from bare ground. Surfaces where the grain of branches can be seen are woods that have shed their leaves, and surfaces whose outlines cut off in straight lines are leveled bare earth. Seen separately, they show that the works in this era were limited to the line of a road crossing the ridges and part of the slopes. The woods returning to dark green in the next photograph, 1979-83, is because the season of photographing differs, not because the ground surface went back. One white flat surface with square corners, clearly different in character from the surrounding woods, lies in the upper left of the frame.

The southern half of the frame catches the eye in 1979-83. Surfaces where ridges are cut down into flat terraces spread out, with many lines like contour lines carved into the ocher bare earth. The edges of the terraces are combinations of straight lines and large arcs, completely different in shape from natural valley lines. In the middle of them, a white rectangular flat surface and a green rectangle sit side by side, and a group of small buildings lined up regularly along an arc appears to their northeast. You can read that this is the lot where people first began to live inside the hills. Toward the east of the frame, a wide road passes diagonally from northeast to southwest, and the front line of land development advances along that line. The northern half remains dark green hills, and the settlements and farmland are also almost unchanged from 1961-69.

Residential buildings and a railway roadbed

In 1984-86, the area from the center of the frame to the south changes completely. Blocks where long, narrow white residential buildings stand shoulder to shoulder appear, with curving streets passing between them. The direction of the buildings is aligned in each lot, and the whiteness of the roofs is also very similar. The arrangement seen from above alone shows that they were built together at the same time to the same design. Around the blocks, brown prepared land spreads on three sides, carved with layer upon layer of lines of roads for carrying soil.

Another thing that stands out in this era is a band cutting diagonally through the frame. It has a constant width, draws a gentle curve, and is held on both sides by slopes of cut and fill. The band on which tracks ride in later eras appears at this point as an earth roadbed.

When you switch to 1987-90, tracks have been laid on that band. The tracks cut diagonally through the frame, and in the center you can see a wide station yard with several lines side by side and long, narrow platform-like structures. It was in 1988 that the Keio Sagamihara Line was extended to this district and a station was placed, exactly overlapping with the era of the photograph. Northwest of the station, buildings with white and blue roofs gather, and the framework of the lot that becomes the center of the town appears. The rows of residential buildings have increased further from the previous era and spread south. Meanwhile, large areas of ocher prepared land remain in the east and west of the frame, and finished surfaces and surfaces still to be made sit next to each other.

A town built around the station

In today's photograph, almost none of the ocher of the prepared land remains. The station yard is in the same position as in 1987-90, and along the wide road heading northwest from it, large flat-roofed buildings and a circular plaza line up. One sports ground with a reddish elliptical running track lies toward the west of the frame, and a ballpark with a fan-shaped infield and long, narrow courts divided into a grid line up to its west. A square sports ground with brown bare earth showing is also slipped in between them. On the northeast side too there is a lot where a fan-shaped ballpark, rows of courts and large buildings are gathered. Housing reaches up to the hilltops, and rows of apartment buildings and lots of detached houses are painted separately slope by slope.

Even so, the framework of 1961-69 has not disappeared. There are many places where the green of the valleys remains as lines, and their direction almost matches the valleys in the black-and-white photograph. In the southwest and southeast corners of the frame, woods remain together, showing where the edge of the hills stopped. The settlements on the northern edge have added houses without changing the shape of their roads, and the fields in the northeast that were a grid in 1961-69 have filled with housing. In that a town was placed by cutting hills, it is the same as Kozoji New Town, but it differs in that here the railway came after the town, and the position of the station decided the town's center of gravity.

The residential land in Minami-Osawa 2-chome is about 350 m from the location, and there are records of its official land price (Chika Koji) from 2001. In that year it was 203,000 yen per square meter, and from there it fell to 163,000 yen in 2005. The direction changed after that, and in 2026 it became 227,000 yen, the highest value in the records up to the 2026 publication. Over 24 years it has just barely exceeded the 2001 level.