Shogen Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Shogen Danchi

At this location, if you switch the aerial photographs in order from the oldest, the order of change looks reversed. A town appears as a single mass on the back of the hill early, and it is only much later that the woods that filled its surroundings turn into town. Shogen Danchi, a danchi (housing complex), is on a hill away to the north of the town area of Sendai, and paddies spread over the lowland to the south. The nearest station is Yaotome Station on the Sendai Subway Namboku Line, and its position is south of the frame. The circumstances in which the back of the hill was chosen lie on the side of the lowland spreading to the south. The flat land that had been used as paddies had no room to spare in one piece, and it was on top of the hill that a large surface could be made at once.

A hill of irrigation ponds

The 1961-69 aerial photograph shows the hill before land development began. The frame is almost filled with relief, and masses of dense woods and bright grassland and fields make a fine mosaic. Between them valleys run, dividing like branches, and black water surfaces are placed here and there on the valley floors. There are several in the middle of the frame alone, and they can be read as ponds made by holding back water where the valleys narrow. There is hardly any sign of people living on top of the hill. At the southern lower edge, strip-shaped paddies and rows of houses line up, and there is also a small settlement in the lower left of the frame. The only straight lines drawn by human hands in this photograph are the white road cutting diagonally along the eastern edge of the hill and the paddy ridges at the lower edge. Narrow lots of fields sit on the ridges between the valleys, and you can read that the surfaces that could be cultivated were limited either to the backs of the ridges or to the valley floors. The roads crossing the top of the hill are all narrow, and they either trace the ridges avoiding the valleys or go down skirting the sides of the ponds.

A photograph that shows only the town

If you switch to the 1974-78 photograph, it is hard to believe it is the same hill. From the center to the right of the frame, a single mass of blocks sits on the back of the hill. Fine rows of detached houses are divided regularly by streets, and in one corner at the upper right many long, narrow white buildings line up diagonally. Inside the blocks, wide green surfaces and many buildings with large roofs are placed, which suggests that lots for uses other than living were built in from the start. The town was completed in the gap between the photographs. Between 1961-69 and the next photograph, the works of cutting the hill flat began, lots were divided, and things went as far as houses being occupied. The figure of the works partway through remains slightly left of the center, where curving terraces and bright bare ground with only the lines of the lots drawn can be seen. The left half of the frame is still dense woods, and the paddies at the lower edge are also unchanged. On the southern edge of the blocks, a long, narrow water surface remained in a valley, surrounded by woods. The marsh in the valley was not filled in. At the top edge of the frame, wide roads cross in a loop, and a grade-separated intersection crossing the hill can be seen.

The blocks in the leafless season

The 1984-86 photograph was taken in the season when the leaves had fallen, and the whole frame sinks into brown. Because the ground can be seen even under the groves of trees, it is actually convenient for tracing the skeleton of the blocks. The lines of the streets overlap those of 1974-78 exactly, and the gaps that had remained between lots are filled with buildings. On the surface left of the center that was partway through the works in the previous photograph, rows of buildings lined up along the curves and a leveled surface that seems to be a sports ground have come in. On the lower western side of the hill, a wide land development surface and buildings with long roofs appear in the upper left of the frame, and land of a different character from the residential blocks is being prepared outside the hill. The water surface in the valley is in the same position, and the groves of trees around it also remained. To the south and east of the blocks, the townscape of detached houses seeps outward, and houses also begin to continue along the roads on the edge of the hill. While these blocks were growing, in 1987 the Sendai Subway Namboku Line opened as far as Yaotome Station, linking the area to the center of Sendai by rail. The next year, in 1988, the City of Izumi was merged into the City of Sendai, and with the shift to an ordinance-designated city the year after that, Izumi Ward was established in this area.

A town that extended west

In today's photograph, the left half of the frame, which was dense woods in 1974-78, has changed into a residential area. The streets draw arcs as if tracing the contour lines, and detached houses and mid-rise buildings line up along those arcs. The fact that the blocks divided by straight lines were made first and the blocks of curves were added later shows directly in the difference in how the lines are drawn. The woods became town last. In the lower left of the frame there is a large building with a round roof and an area where sports grounds and courts line up. The blocks on the back of the hill keep their skeleton unchanged, and as the street trees have grown, green streaks run through them when seen from above. The long, narrow water surface in the valley is in the same position as of 2026, and the area around it is the greenest in the frame. If you go outside the blocks, paddies and fields remain in the lowland to the south, and only the contrast between the town on the hill and the farmland in the lowland has continued since 1961-69.

The back of the hill looks flat, but as a surface it is partway up a slope. The measuring points placed in the blocks are 71.0 m and 71.5 m, and the south is also 70.2 m, almost the same, yet the east drops to 63.7 m and the west rises to 80.4 m. It is a form in which a single flat terrace was made within a hill high in the west and low in the east. If you switch to the east-west cross-section graph, this flat terrace and the form changing in height on both sides of it appear as a single line. The terrace was made by cutting and filling, and the places where water gathers tend to follow the positions of the valleys shown in the 1961-69 photograph. You cannot tell from the photographs alone where the rain goes. You will want to look at the assumptions shown on the City of Sendai's hazard map together with the positions of the valleys in that photograph.

Land value records begin in 2002. There is one residential reference point in Shogen 7-chome, about 550 m from the location, and its start is 87,300 yen per square meter. Up to the 2026 official land prices (Chika Koji), the lowest is 64,900 yen in both 2012 and 2013; the highest is 138,000 yen in 2026, and if you set the starting point and 2025 side by side, the latter is a little more than 1.5 times the former. This point has no values from the period when the town was placed on the hill. The three past photographs show the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and the numbers begin in 2002. The two records of the same hill do not overlap in time in any year.