Suma New Town (Myodani) about 60 years ago and today

History of Suma New Town (Myodani)

If you switch to the 1974-78 photograph, the frame is almost white. Ground with neither trees nor roofs reflects light all over, and only the lines of lots are drawn faintly on it. Long, narrow buildings stand in rows facing the same way only in the northeast corner, and that part alone stands out as a finished town. The rest is still freshly cut earth. The Myodani area of Suma New Town becomes a completely different place before and after this one photograph.

Paddies cutting the valleys, and irrigation ponds

The town area of Kobe is a long, narrow band squeezed between the Rokko Mountains and the sea, and the housing that no longer fit there spread by wrapping around to the west of the mountains. Myodani lies where that wrapping-around led, land where the hills continuing west from Rokko are cut by many shallow valleys. Just as the place name Myodani (tani means valley) suggests, flat surfaces were scarce from the start. The row of heights varies by direction. Against 97.7 m at the station's measuring point, the west is 97.8 m, almost the same, the south at 111.7 m and the east at 111 m are more than 13 m higher, and only the north is 4 m lower at 93.5 m. The station area sits on the shoulder of a valley that descends northward with the ridges to the south and east at its back.

The oldest photograph, from 1961-69, shows the time when those valleys were still cultivated. The frame is hills from edge to edge, the ridges are covered with black woods, and on the floors of the valleys that branch into them, paddies, each at a different height, line up to the far end. Narrow lots curving as if tracing the contour lines stack up one after another toward the inner end of the valleys. Slightly above the center, two long, narrow dark water surfaces that block valleys line up vertically. They are traces of storing water on the valley floor to feed the paddies. The houses only gather a few at a time along the valleys, and narrow roads link them, bending along the valleys. In the four corners of the frame, bright lots of fields are gathered, and a row of white buildings comes in slightly only at the right edge. Toward the bottom of the center, a smooth gray surface with little relief spreads out, different in texture from the fine lots of paddies and fields. No grid of streets is drawn anywhere.

A hill that turned white

In the 1974-78 photograph, those valleys and ridges have been cut away all together. In the upper left, white bare ground spreads its branches in the shape of the valleys, and the cutting bites deep into the woods. From the center to the south, leveled surfaces continue, on which only the layout of lots is drawn in lines, with no buildings on them yet. The cut surfaces fill the frame. In the middle, murky water lies shallowly, and many construction roads cross around it. The northeast looks different, with long, narrow residential buildings forming diagonal rows lined up without gaps, accompanied by a wide sports ground that seems to belong to a school. At the southern lower edge too, rows of houses and long buildings have appeared. The western and southwestern edges remain dense woods, and at the right edge the tone suddenly sinks dark. This is the seam where photographs of different brightness were pasted side by side.

The earth cut out did not end as a problem of these mountains alone. The City of Kobe carried this out as a single combined project of cutting the mountains to take out residential land and sending the earth that came out to reclamation on the sea side, which is known by the phrase "the mountains go to the sea". Myodani is one of the sites on the mountain side. In 1977 a subway station opened. The station was placed on ground that had finished being cut, so it was not the order in which tracks come through first and the area along the line grows. In the middle of the white surface of 1974-78, the future station area had been prepared first.

The blocks gain a skeleton

The 1979-83 photograph is from the season when the leaves had fallen, and the surrounding woods sink into brown. On the surfaces that were bare ground, residential buildings with black roofs have come in rows, and the empty lots have visibly decreased. In the center a dark water surface with a neat outline remains, and a building with a large roof enclosed by a white rim stands just northwest of it. Only the pond is a remnant of the valleys. South of the pond, buildings and wide paving gather, forming a group that looks like a station area. The blocks in the northeast spread further outward, and the diagonal rows reach the top edge of the frame. On the other hand, the right half still has wide lots that remain white, which shows that the front line of land development moved to that side.

By 1984-86, the blank space in the right half is also filled with buildings. On the left of the frame, an oval stadium with a reddish-brown track appears, and to its north another track lies alongside. You can read that wide places for physical activity were provided together on the western edge of the residential area. West of the station the tracks come above ground, and a long, narrow site with many parallel lines extends east-west. On the residential side, buildings come into the small open lots that had remained between the lots, and the roof colors begin to mix irregularly. At the left edge, white land development surfaces and square lots still remain, showing the figure of the town partway through continuing beyond this frame.

A town around a pond

In the latest aerial photograph, the pond in the center sits as a hollow surrounded by green. The hollow remained green. Of the two long, narrow water surfaces that blocked valleys in 1961-69, one has survived in this form. The rows of residential buildings remain without changing their framework, and only the colors have changed as roofs were repainted. The oval stadium and the track on the left are used as they were, and dense green continues on the hill to their north. In the upper left, roads make loops wound many times over, and at the left edge buildings with large roofs line up together. Around the station, many buildings with large roofs gather, and the surface each one occupies is a step wider than the residential buildings around them. A white band that seems to be a driveway for cars circles among the roofs, and wide roofs continue, jutting out south of the station. Inside the blocks, school sports grounds and the green of parks are set at regular intervals, and on steep slopes woods remain like islands.

Residential land in Ryugadai 7-chome, about 500 m from the location, has a record of official land prices (Chika Koji) running since 1989. It began at 240,000 yen per square meter, rose to 425,000 yen in 1991, fell to 136,000 yen in 2011, and is 163,000 yen in the 2026 official land prices. Numbers that have not even returned to the starting value line up as the values of land half a century after the white photograph. Land on top of cut ridges and land on top of filled valleys differ in the history of the ground, and you can roughly estimate the boundary between them by moving the eras of the photographs back toward the older ones. However, you cannot tell from the photographs what assumptions are placed on each piece of land. That is a matter of going through the City of Kobe's hazard map chome by chome.