Otokoyama Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Otokoyama Danchi

If you get off the train at Kuzuha Station on the Keihan Main Line and look up at the hill to the east, slab-shaped residential buildings line up in steps on top of the slope. The City of Hirakata, where the station is, is in Osaka Prefecture, while Otokoyama Danchi (public housing complex), spreading over the hill, is in the City of Yawata, Kyoto Prefecture, and commuting to work and school in this town has long crossed the prefectural border. The name Otokoyama has been known since old times because Iwashimizu Hachimangu Shrine stands at the northern end of the hills. South of the low land where the Katsura River / the Uji River / the Kizu River come together, a single hill long from north to south lies. The southern half of that hill is the frame of this location, and its position, connected by a single train line to the centers of both Kyoto and Osaka, later became the reason a large-scale residential area was placed here.

A hill of ponds and terraced paddies

In the aerial photograph from around 1936-42 the upper right of the frame is missing, but the framework of the land can be read from the remaining area alone. From the center to the lower right, dense woods cover the hill, and on its west side paddies divided into long, narrow strip-shaped lots line up to the foot of the slope. Many black water surfaces are scattered in the hollows of the hill. They are irrigation ponds made using the valleys. There is almost no sign of people living on the hill, and only the narrow roads following the valleys and the small patches of flat land along them stand out white.

The 1945-50 photograph covers the whole frame, and the difference between white and black comes out strongly. At the eastern foot of the hill, rows of houses continue long and narrow on both sides of a road running north-south, and from there paddies in large lots spread east toward the low land. Inside the hill, you can see small terraced paddies branching deep into the valleys. Irrigation ponds can be found in several places, at the upper left / center left / lower center of the frame, and the system of gathering the rain that falls on the hill and distributing it to the paddies at its foot appears on the photograph as it is. In the middle of the hill only one bright lot that looks like buildings and an open space can be seen; everything else is filled with woods and valley paddies.

A hill that was still a mountain

Even in the 1961-69 photograph, the outline of the hill has hardly moved. The woods cover the same area, and the division of the paddies almost overlaps with the 1945-50 photograph. The differences are in the details: small open patches the color of soil appear here and there deep in the valleys and on the shoulders of the ridges, and several roads leading into the hill have become wider. The rows of houses at the upper right of the frame extend further north and south, and their southern end begins to bite into the paddies. Even so, the hill itself is a mountain, and almost nothing in the photograph of this era hints at what it would look like ten years later. The idea of a town sitting on top of the hill took shape on this land for the first time in the thirtieth year after the war.

Ridges that were cut

In the 1974-78 photograph, the hill turns into something else. Land under preparation, the color of bright soil, forms a band running diagonally through the center of the frame from north-northeast to south-southwest, and inside it dark slab-shaped residential buildings stand in rows. Lots have been divided, but open land with no buildings is still wide, and there are many places where only the lines of streets and the steps have been drawn first. It was the Japan Housing Corporation that cut open the hill, and residents began moving in in 1972. At the edges of the preparation, the boundary between woods and bare ground is raw, and the tops of ridges left uncut look like black islands. Even so, the irrigation ponds in the valleys have not been filled in and remain as greenish water surfaces along the western edge of the prepared land. On the slope at the left of the frame, fine blocks of detached houses spread at the same time, and the city area along the road at the upper right has also grown thicker. In the flat land of the right half, the brown of paddies and fields still dominates in this era.

In the 1979-83 photograph, the brightness of the bare ground has disappeared. The rows of residential buildings remain lined up in the same positions as in 1974-78, and the spaces between and around them are filled with buildings. Several large roofs and leveled ground that looks like sports grounds appear, and groves begin to grow at the feet of the residential buildings. The blocks of detached houses to the west cross the valley and extend south, and new rows of residential buildings have been added on the hill south of the danchi too. You can understand that a mountain was replaced by a town in ten years just by looking at the two photographs one after the other. The woods of the hill remain as large masses in the middle of the northern edge of the frame and along the edge from the south to the southeast. In a period that overlaps with the time a town settled on the hill, Yawata Town adopted city status in 1977.

What remains on the ridge

In today's photograph too, the rows of residential buildings are on the lines drawn in 1974-78. The amount of green has changed greatly: the trees in the blocks have grown, and from above the spaces between the buildings are edged with dark green. The irrigation pond that survived the preparation also shows its water surface in the same position, now surrounded by trees. A pond from before the preparation has remained, and it serves as a clue for following the original valleys of the hill. Buildings with large roofs gather at the eastern foot of the hill, and green lots remain in the flat land to the northeast even as of 2026. If you move your eye outside the band of preparation, the slopes to the west and south of the hill are filled with blocks of detached houses, and only the blocks of the danchi keep a different design idea of straight streets and long residential buildings.

The slope descending to the east comes out clearly in the elevation figures as well. The measuring points placed on the ridge fall in the range of 45.3 m to 51.3 m, but only the one point to the east drops to 31.2 m. That drop of more than ten meters is the gradient of the slope heading toward the low land of the Kizu River as it is. If you look at the cross-section graph in the east-west direction, you can see that the town sits not on a level platform but on a slope tilting one way. In a town on a prepared slope, the places where rainwater gathers often follow the valleys from before the cutting. It is worth opening the hazard map published by the City of Yawata and tracing once which valley's extension the road you use lies on.

The record of values, official land prices (Chika Koji), continues at a residential area in Otokoyama Kanefuri, about 710 m from the location. The 130,000 yen per square meter of 1983 is the starting point of the record, 377,000 yen in 1991 is the highest value up to the 2026 publication, and 91,300 yen in 2021 is the lowest. In the 2026 publication it is 103,000 yen, below the starting point of 1983. For the value of a residential area on a hill, the range of the record is quite large. The forty-odd years after the hill turned into a town are engraved in the figures of this one point.