Musashigaoka Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Musashigaoka Danchi

The northern suburbs of the City of Kumamoto are built of valley lines carved by rivers and the flat surfaces remaining on both sides of them. The place name Musashigaoka comes from Musashizuka, a mound associated with the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and the nearest station for the area is Musashizuka Station on the Hohi Line. The plateau surface makes water hard to obtain, but in exchange flat, wide land can be obtained in one piece. The condition that streets could be drawn without carving steps became the reason it was later chosen as a residential area. This frame cuts out the area at a position that places blocks divided into a grid in the upper half and rows of long, narrow residential buildings in the center, with the meander of a river grazing the bottom edge.

A mesh that was only fields

In the coarse-grained black and white of 1945-50, clusters of small squares continue from corner to corner of the frame. It is fair to say that only lots of fields appear, and no sizable residential area can be found anywhere. Roofs continue in only two places. One is along the river at the bottom edge, where houses line up without a break along the waterside road. The other is along a thin line crossing the frame diagonally, where small settlements continue here and there. Bands of woods run on both sides of the line, looking like rows of trees or the trees of an embankment. The river enters from the right edge and bends greatly at the bottom edge, spreading a white riverbed on the inside of the bend. It is a flow from before the banks were put in order, meandering while keeping its width. Each field is small, and their directions are not aligned either. It is the shape of land that was not divided along contour lines but opened little by little to fit the roads and waterways. White clouds and black cloud shadows are scattered along the top edge, and the upper left corner falls into gray, outside the range photographed at the time.

Even if you switch to 1961-69, the composition hardly moves. The mesh of fields, the meander of the river and the positions of the settlements are as they were. If you look for differences, there are two. The thin diagonal line has become thick and white, taking the form of a road, and a lot where several large white buildings gather has appeared toward the right of the frame. From their shape they look like a factory or a school, but you cannot tell what they are used for from the black-and-white grain. In the upper left corner the lots draw curves along the edge of the hill, showing where the flat surface ends. Up to this era, the framework of the land was still fields.

A grid and rows of buildings

The 1974-78 photograph is in color, with brown and green scattered in patches. From the center upward, a figure completely unlike the earlier mesh of fields appears. Straight streets are drawn vertically and horizontally, and empty land with only lot lines mixes with houses beginning to be built. The order in which the land filled in shows that the streets were drawn first. Toward the west of the blocks, long, narrow buildings like strips line up in many rows facing the same direction. Roofs of the same length and the same width are placed at equal intervals, clearly different in shape from the district where detached houses are densely packed. This is how the residential buildings of apartment housing replaced the fields. South of the rows of buildings, streets in a fine grid continue, forming a band where small roofs line up without gaps.

At the lower left of the same photograph, two wide roads run diagonally, and an already completed dense city area continues outside the frame. The upper left corner is yellowish-brown bare ground, with soil widely exposed on slopes carved by narrow valleys. It looks like a trace of soil that was cut and carried somewhere. At the lower right the river's riverbed spreads brown, partway through work to push the flow to one side. Among the fields, surfaces of grid shining white are also mixed in, suggesting that covered cultivation had begun to come in. A developed section and a section still in fields sit next to each other within the same frame, showing that the surface was not replaced all at once. Note that in this era's composite, only the band along the top edge is from a separate flight, and its color tone leans toward green.

The order in which fields turn into residential areas has a reason based on the terrain. A swelling city area first fills the lowland along the river and the edges of the existing town, and when those are packed it climbs up to the surface of the plateau one step higher. The plateau makes it hard to draw water and is not suited to paddies, but in exchange it has an area that can be secured in one piece and a flatness that lets streets run without cutting slopes. The thickening of the single diagonal road in 1961-69 is also part of the same flow: when a road comes through, the movement of people and cars changes, and the work of converting fields into housing lots also becomes easier to carry out. In the 1974-78 frame, empty land with only lines and houses beginning to be built appear mixed, and this is the appearance of land where the work of arranging lots and the building of houses overlapped in the same period. A district where the residential buildings of apartment housing are placed together sits next to a district where detached houses are packed along narrow streets, and this can also be called a feature of land where a surface was made together under one plan.

A plateau swallowed by the city area

In today's photograph, the upper half has no gaps. Roofs and roads fill the surface, and the mesh of fields has been pushed to the upper left and the bottom edge of the frame. The rows of buildings that appeared in 1974-78 remain in the same position and facing the same direction. The roofs have been reroofed in bright colors and the surroundings have been filled with detached houses, but the spacing and length of the rows have not changed. Toward the right of the frame, large roofs and rows of parked cars line up along the trunk road, and commercial surfaces have been added to roadsides that had been only housing. At the lower left the crossing of the two roads has been arranged into the shape of a ring.

The fields have not disappeared. On the inside of the river's meander at the bottom edge, fields remain in a crescent shape. Although surrounded by city area on three sides, they keep their lot lines clearly. Wide farmland also continues on the east side of the river, divided by season into brown and pale green, and stands out well as a surface amid the gray of the city area.

The height figures also back up the flatness of this land. The five measuring points fall between 76.5 m and 80.8 m, a spread of only 4.3 m. The higher ones are the west at 80.8 m and the east at 80.5 m, the lower one the north at 76.5 m, and the center is 77.6 m. Many danchi (housing complexes) in Kyushu were built by carving hills into steps, but here there was no need to carve steps. A residential area in Musashigaoka 3-chome, about 290 m from the center of the frame, is the reference for official land prices (Chika Koji). Per square meter, 110,000 yen from 1994 to 1998 is the highest in the record up to the 2026 publication, and 64,600 yen from 2012 to 2014 is the lowest. In the 2026 publication it is 83,000 yen, having come back nearly 30% from the bottom, but it stays in the 70% range of the 1994-1998 level. The flood assumption maps presented by the City of Kumamoto show in color how much flooding is assumed on the low land along the river. Do not decide which side is low by the elevation figures alone; open those maps as well.