Sagamihara (US Army Depot) about 60 years ago and today

History of Sagamihara (US Army Depot)

North of the tracks of the JR Yokohama Line, from Sagamihara Station toward Yabe Station, its eastern neighbor, the US Army Japan's Sagami General Depot spreads along the tracks. According to the City of Sagamihara's materials, its area is about 196.7 hectares, the largest of the US military facilities in the city. In the aerial photographs this base takes up a large part of the frame from the upper right to the right side, with many rows of warehouses with long white roofs. Southwest across the tracks, fine rows of houses are packed in, and a composition in which two pieces of land of different character face each other across a single line of tracks appears in every postwar era.

A military city drawn on the upland

Sagamihara sits on the Sagamino Upland, which spreads east of the Sagami River. The city's materials give, as the reasons the former Imperial Japanese Army chose this place, that it was a flat upland with almost no relief, and that it was close to Tokyo and wide land could be obtained cheaply. In 1938 the Sagami Ordnance Works of the Tokyo arsenal was established, and in June 1940 it became the Sagami Army Arsenal. It was a factory that made tanks and shells, and more than 10,000 people are said to have worked there. A large-scale land readjustment that laid out radial streets starting from the arsenal went ahead, and in April 1941 two towns and six villages in the surrounding area were combined to create Sagamihara Town. Sagamihara Station on the Yokohama Line also opened in the same year, 1941. The city regards the orderly townscape centered on the station and the wide roads as what this military city plan left behind.

The base in the two black-and-white photographs

The 1945-50 photograph shows both the framework of the plan and the farming villages remaining around it. Several diagonal roads extend from around the station, and west of the station small houses are packed tightly into lots that open in a fan shape. North of the station there is a ring road drawing an oval, and the area inside it is still white ground with nothing built on it. On the right side of the frame, east of the station, long, narrow buildings line up regularly on a grid of roads crossing at right angles. This is the site of the arsenal. Apart from that, strip-shaped fields cover most of the frame, and a long straight road crosses the frame diagonally from the left to the lower right, running into a circular intersection in the lower right. In the upper right corner a river meanders, with settlements surrounded by trees huddled beside it. The US Army moved in in September 1945, the month after the end of the war, and the US military requisitioned the site in December 1949.

It is the 1961-69 photograph in which the base clearly shows its form as a supply hub. From the upper right to the right side, many long, narrow warehouse buildings line up in parallel, and the whiteness of their roofs stands out from the dark rows of houses around them. Directly north of the station there is a wide paved surface, with small squares placed in aligned rows. Around the oval road, small buildings line up along the arc. According to the city's materials, after the Korean War and the Vietnam War it became a major supply base of the US Army Japan, and there was a time when about 5,000 Japanese employees are said to have worked there. The area southwest of the tracks is filling up with rows of houses, but to the south and west of the frame there are still many field lots, and in the upper left two oval tracks of school grounds can be seen, with a factory with a large white roof at the left edge.

Rows of warehouses and a ring line

By the 1974-78 photograph, the ground of the base has turned a pale earth color, and the contrast with the rows of white warehouses grows stronger. Toward the right there is an oval sports ground, and a line drawing an arc appears along the north edge of the base. Outside the tracks the fields have almost all been replaced by housing, and the strip-shaped lots seen in the black-and-white eras survive only as the courses of roads through the rows of houses. White factories with large roofs cluster in the lower left, and with the tracks along the south edge of the base as the boundary, the pale ground to the north and the cluster of fine roofs to the south are sharply divided. By 1979-83 that arc can be clearly read as a ring line running around inside the base, and at the upper right edge long, narrow reddish-brown objects continue along the tracks. In this era only the bottom third of the frame is a separate photograph in a yellowish tone, and the seam shows as a single horizontal line.

In 1984-86, brown bare ground appears on the open land north of the station, and the paved surface east of it is completely filled with fine grains. Red roofs are added to the factories in the lower left. In the 1987-90 photograph too, the outer edge of the base and the arrangement of the warehouses are almost the same, and only patches of grassland and bare ground spread in one corner north of the station. The ring line running around the north of the base also shows without a break, and inside it paved surfaces line up, divided into sections. The rows of warehouses and the ring line keep appearing in the same positions through the four eras from 1974-78. The city's materials note that many of the warehouses still in use are buildings from the arsenal era, and near the headquarters Sagami Shrine, built in the arsenal era, remains as a shrine park.

The returned north side of the station

The city, together with its residents and the city assembly, has called for the return of the base. At the Japan-US Joint Committee in June 2008, the return of about 17 hectares on the north side of the station was decided, and it was handed back to the Japanese government on September 30, 2014. The 88 US military family housing units that adjoined the station were moved to another US military housing area to coincide with the return. On the returned land, a north-south road opened in 2017 and an east-west road in 2018. About 35 hectares continuing north of the returned land came under joint use by Japan and the United States from December 2015, and of that, the southern 10 hectares began full operation in April 2024 as the Sagamihara Sports and Recreation Park. The returned land is national land held by the Ministry of Finance, and the city has been drawing up a land use plan for it as the Station North Exit district.

In today's photograph, the area north of the station and inside the ring line has turned into grassland and bare ground, and the rows of warehouses break off east of it. The arc-shaped line still remains, and on its right, warehouses with long white roofs continue to line up facing the same way as before. At the upper right edge, a wide green surface like turf can also be seen beside the warehouse buildings. Southwest of the tracks, large buildings have increased among the rows of houses, but the road extending diagonally southwest from the station keeps the same direction as in the 1945-50 photograph, and the trace of the military city's streets can be read there. The official land price (Chika Koji) of residential land in Sagamihara 2-chome, about 450 m from the station, fell from 459,000 yen per square meter in 1991, the highest up to the 2026 publication, to 197,000 yen in 2012 and 2013, the cheapest, and then turned upward.