Nameshi Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Nameshi Danchi

Nameshi Danchi lies on the northern edge of the City of Nagasaki. The urban area of Nagasaki, extending long and narrow toward the sea, has almost no flat land, and places to live could only be sought at the heads of valleys and on the flanks of ridges. Nameshi is one of these; before it took the name of a danchi (housing complex), houses clustered along the valley line, and above them terraced fields and forests were layered. The nearest station is Michinoo Station on the Nagasaki Line, located where the valley has descended all the way down. Seen from the center of the city it is the northern outskirts, but cross one valley and you are in Nagayo Town, and around the danchi the boundary between city and town is intricate.

The valley floor and the high ground to the east

Between the ground underfoot and the hill to the east there is a difference in height of about 48 m. The measuring point of the location is 50.9 m, and although it differs by only a few meters from the south at 56.7 m / the north at 54.1 m, the east rises to 99.3 m and the west to 62.1 m. The row of numbers shows a landform where you stand on the floor of a valley extending gently north to south, held between high ground to the east and west. The east-west cross-section graph rises like a wall on the right side because the hill standing east of the danchi presses in as it is, and the north-south cross-section is drawn much more gently than that. If you go down the valley you come out onto the slight flat land of Michinoo, and there it meets the tracks.

The valley is not a single one. Seen in the aerial photographs, branch valleys enter the hills like spread fingers, and at each of their junctions a small flat is born. People first lived at those junctions, with fields lined up above them and forest toward the ridgelines, in that order. You could also say that building a town on the slope was the work of replacing this order, one layer after another from the bottom.

Slopes that were fields and forest

The slope from before Nameshi was called a danchi remains in a single photograph from 1961-69. The image is coarse, but you can read without hesitation where the houses are. The houses are only on the floor of the valley. White roofs continue in one row on both sides of the narrow roads branching from the valley, and away from there the buildings vanish abruptly. The bright bands extending along the contour lines are terraced fields; the surfaces in the sun shine white, and the surfaces covered with grass sink into gray. The tops of the ridges are dark masses of forest; the individual trees cannot be made out, but the shape of the ridgeline can be traced by the breaks in the shadows. Only the lower right of the frame looks different, showing an urban area packed densely with roofs and a single railway line crossing it. This is the area around Michinoo Station. On the right of the frame a long, narrow water surface lies, dark gray in this era.

If you zoom in on the side of the eastern hill, the makeup of the ground surface becomes clearer. Unbroken forest covers the top of the hill, and a narrow white road winds up its foot along the contour lines. Wherever the road eases, bright squares gather, and those are fields. Each lot is long and narrow, changing direction to match the slope. At the head of the valley a cluster of white dots can be seen, showing that houses were placed a few at a time at spots where water came out. Not a single straight line of the kind drawn by land development appears yet on the slope in this era.

Ten years when the earth moved

When you switch to 1974-78, the rows of houses have increased on the right half of the slope. The roofs that had stayed on the valley floor climb up one step at a time, and new buildings sit on the flat surfaces of the terraces that had been fields until then. In between, ground just stripped of vegetation shows white, and white surfaces of land development on the slope appear here and there. The long, narrow water surface on the right is muddy brown, and the sign that earth was being moved upstream shows directly in the color of the water. The way the roads are drawn also changes. Mixed in with the thin lines tracing the contour lines, thick lines are drawn that cross the slope ignoring its gradient, and new houses grow from both sides of them. In the urban area on the valley floor the grains of buildings pack in further, and roofs fill even the gap next to the tracks. Between the two eras, this slope was in the middle of the work of reading fields anew as housing lots.

In the period when Nagasaki's population grew, the valleys extending north from the center of the city changed one after another into residential areas. The Nameshi area was also part of that flow, and housing lots were made by the procedure of cutting the slopes into terraces, running roads through them and building up flat surfaces. Land development that cuts the hills and fills the valleys is also a rereading of the original landform. The residential areas that formed long ago on the slopes of Nagasaki are known for narrow roads and many stairways. The new kind of development, cutting the terraces by machine and laying roads that cars can pass first, was also an answer to avoid that inconvenience. The rows of houses move together toward the high ground in the aerial photographs because the roads went up first. Because it is a town on a slope where cut and fill are mixed, you cannot tell from the aerial photographs where water collects and how cliffs / retaining walls are handled. The hazard maps published separately by the City of Nagasaki and Nagayo Town draw the assumed ranges of landslides and flooding, so for any slope of concern it is worth comparing those maps with the photographs.

Roofs that reach the ridges

In today's aerial photograph, roofs continue without a break from the valley floor up to the shoulders of the ridges. Much of the high ground that was dark forest in 1961-69 has changed into housing lots, and the phrase housing lots up to the shoulders of the ridges applies just as it is. In the middle of the left edge of the frame many long, narrow buildings line up in parallel, forming rows facing the same direction. Toward the upper right of the frame, a wide area of bare ground stacked in steps like tiered platforms opens, and if you go back to 1961-69 at the same place it becomes forest and terraced fields. From the middle toward the lower right of the frame, a building with a roof far larger than the surrounding houses sits on its own, and beside it there is one flat surface with no roof. Securing flat ground in a town on a slope is not easy, so surfaces like these are usually placed on top of terraces carved out of the slope. The steep surfaces do remain, and dark green is wedged like lines in the breaks between the rows of houses. The water surface on the right shows a greenish color and remains together with the trees around it. As of 2026, the slopes of Nameshi are in a form that keeps only the skeleton of the landform while having replaced the entire surface.

The movement of values also reflects the course of this slope. The value of residential land, which was 70,000 yen per square meter in 1983, rose to 119,000 yen in 1999, and from there fell for a long time, hitting the bottom up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji) at 61,200 yen in 2014 and 2015. In the 2026 publication it is 75,500 yen, back to a level slightly above 1983. This series belongs to a residential point placed in Yamazoe, Takata-go, Nagayo Town, about 468 m from the danchi, and it is not the value of the danchi itself, but it can be read that the area that spread housing lots onto the hills received the same wave.