Ryugasaki New Town about 60 years ago and today

History of Ryugasaki New Town

If you cut the aerial photograph of this location into top and bottom, two pieces of land of completely different character appear. The lower half is lowland paddies divided into strips by straight paddy ridges, and the upper half is the top of an upland where woods and fields interlock. The boundary runs diagonally from northwest to southeast, and the edge of the upland is fringed with woods. Ryugasaki New Town was placed on top of this upland. Ryugasaki-shi Station on the Joban Line is outside this range. The lowland paddies could not easily be moved. If you looked for land with a wide flat surface that was also not paddies, the land that remained was the top of the upland. The contrast between top and bottom in the photograph also serves directly as the explanation for why the town was placed where it is.

An upland of woods and valleys

The 1961-69 aerial photograph shows the upland before the town was laid on it. In the upper half, dark woods and bright fields interlock finely, and the edge of the woods draws complicated lines like inlets. These inlets are valleys cut into the upland. The valleys branch and extend inward, and only their floors are long, narrow bright lots. Toward the left of the top edge of the frame there is a long, narrow black water surface, which reads as a pond collecting the water that gathers in the valley. The clusters of houses keep not to the flat surface of the upland but to the roads along the valleys. A little left of center, rows of houses go down the valley in a single line. In the lowland of the lower half, large strip-shaped paddies line up neatly on the diagonal, and a single settlement wrapped in dark woods floats in their middle. It reads as trees enclosing the houses. There is not a single straight street, and every road bends to trace the lines of the terrain.

Rows of white roofs

In the 1974-78 photograph too, the skeleton of the upland has hardly moved. The mosaic of woods and fields is in the same range, and the lowland paddies overlap right down to the division into lots. The change is in two places. One is that rows of long, narrow white roofs have increased, forming groups from the top center of the frame to the right. Long, narrow buildings of the same shape, only one group of them in 1961-69, are split into several groups lined up among the fields. The other is that a wide, bright beige surface has appeared a little left of center. It is a surface where the woods were cut and the earth exposed, and neither lot lines nor streets have been drawn yet. At the time of this photograph most of the upland is still fields and woods, and the shape of the town is nowhere to be seen. If you look back with the photographs side by side, this bare ground was the forerunner of the works.

Lots drawn first

In the 1979-83 photograph, the western shoulder of the upland changes into something else. In the upper left of the frame a bright orange development site spreads out, and inside it fine residential lots are drawn without gaps. Buildings can still hardly be seen, and only the lot lines and streets are drawn on the earth. From this development site a wide road extends southeast, tearing through the woods, and branches widely in the center of the frame. This photograph clearly shows that the road cut through the woods first. Around the branch, wide flat land the color of earth has been prepared, and the edge of the development meets the woods with a raw outline. The paddies on the lowland side have not changed at all, and the works are going ahead only on top of the upland.

In the 1984-86 photograph there is no green of crops in either the fields or the paddies, and the whole frame is uniformly brown. The lots in the upper left are packed tight with detached houses, and roofs continue along the curving streets. This means that the lots were filled with houses within a few years. The wide road extends until it crosses the frame from the upper left to the right, and on its east side new reddish-brown bare ground has spread. The development moved east. South of the road too, several bright surfaces that have been leveled flat appear. From the difference between the two photographs you can read that the procedure was to finish the lots in order from west to east.

Until the lots were filled

In the 1987-90 photograph, a new development surface spreads in the center of the frame. Fine residential lots have been drawn, yet the houses are still few enough to count, and the same scene as in the upper left of 1979-83 has been repeated ten years later in a different place. A little left of center, a row of buildings lined up in an arc has been added. The way buildings of the same shape line up regularly along a curve shows from above that this is a different design from the blocks of detached houses. On the south side, near the boundary with the lowland, new blocks of detached houses have also begun to spread. The pond at the left of the top edge of the frame keeps its water surface in the same position in this era too.

In today's photograph, the central surface that was only lots in 1987-90 is filled with buildings. Along the wide road, buildings with large roofs and wide parking lots line up, and in the upper right there are blocks where buildings of the same shape form rows and a green surface that looks like a sports ground. The residential district in the upper left keeps its skeleton as it was, and the street trees have grown so that the green looks dense from above. In the lower half of the frame, on the other hand, the strip-shaped paddies remain in almost the same shape as in 1961-69, and the settlement at the edge of the upland has not changed position. The photographs lined up side by side lead to the reading that only the top of the upland became a town.

This difference between top and bottom also shows in the numbers. The measuring points placed on top of the upland are 18.5 m and 19.9 m, and the east is also 18.6 m, almost the same, yet only the southern point drops to 7.6 m. This step, which drops more than ten meters to the south, is the boundary with the lowland where the paddies spread. The western 13.9 m is a value close to the valleys at the edge of the upland and shows that the flat top surface has been cut away by valleys. If you switch to the north-south cross-section graph, the flat surface of the upland and the shape of the shoulder falling from it to the lowland can be seen in a single line. On development sites made by cutting and filling, rainwater tends to gather along the valley lines from before they were cut. The hazard map published by the City of Ryugasaki shows the assumptions for flooding and landslides. Because the assumptions are entirely different on top of the upland and on the lowland, it is worth checking once on the map which side the road you use every day falls on.

Land price records survive only from 1994. The site is residential land in Nakanedai 5-chome, about 370 m from the location, and 118,000 yen per square meter in 1994, at the start, is also the highest value up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji). The lowest up to the 2026 publication is 37,000 yen from 2013 to 2015, and 2025 is 39,000 yen. In the 2026 publication it is 39,900 yen. If you line up the starting point and the 2026 publication, the latter is about a third of the former. The 1970s and 1980s, when the upland was turning into a town, fall in a period the numbers cannot follow. The periods of change that can be followed in the photographs and in the numbers do not coincide.