Tokuriki Danchi about 60 years ago and today

History of Tokuriki Danchi

If you switch to the 1974-78 aerial photograph, a block of light gray-white strips lined up in order appears as one mass in the very middle of the frame. This is Tokuriki Danchi, a danchi (public housing complex), in Kokuraminami Ward, the City of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture. In the same frame of the 1961-69 photograph just before it, there is not a single one of those strips. Only paddies filling the valley floor, settlements along the river, and hills covered with woods appear. This location can go back to three past eras, and in the two older photographs the rural scene hardly changes. The sequence looks as if the time before and after the town was built were divided at exactly one photograph.

The valley floor along the Murasaki River

Among the measuring points for elevation, only the single point in the east stands out at 53.7 m. The other four points are 23.1 m at the center, 22.2 m in the north, 23.0 m in the west and 25.4 m in the south, all in the low 20 m range. A difference of 30 m within less than 1 km arises because a hill rises right to the east of the flat land. The danchi was placed on the low side, on the plain of the valley floor cut by the Murasaki River.

This valley is long and narrow from north to south and runs along the river out to the town area of Kokura in the north. Because the plain is narrow, the routes people travel also gather in the same valley. In the 1945-50 photograph, a thick white road running diagonally across the center of the frame and thin lines lined up to its east follow the direction of the valley just as it is. And the floor of the plain was used up with paddies from corner to corner.

There was a body of flat land, it was a few kilometers from the center of Kokura, and a transport route running north-south also passed through it. For those looking for a site for a large housing danchi, it was land where the conditions were all in place. If flat paddies that needed no steps were bought up, the grid of the plans could be placed directly on the ground.

Paddies photographed twice

The oldest photograph, 1945-50, is black and white, and the grain is coarse, but the lines of the lots read well. The valley floor is filled with paddies cut into strips, and through the middle the river meanders widely from top to bottom. Thin rows of trees continue along both banks, and the direction of the paddies changes with the bends of the river. Settlements only sit dotted along the roads and the river, and a solid town area exists only in the upper right corner of the frame. The left and the upper left are mountains finely cut by valleys and covered with dark woods. The right and the lower right are hills too, and among the woods several irrigation ponds shine as bright water surfaces. The one thing that catches the eye in the countryside is a large facility at the upper right with a long, narrow oval course. Buildings and a straight white band lie inside the ring, a shape completely different from the paddies and blocks around it.

The next photograph, 1961-69, appears in a hazy gray overall. Because of the shooting conditions the boundaries between the river and the paddies are blurred, but the arrangement of the lots almost overlaps with the previous photograph. The paddies are the same strips, the settlements are in the same places, and the meanders of the river have not moved. The danchi has not a single building yet. The oval course at the upper right remains in the same shape, and the buildings and white band inside can also be read. The woods of the mountains in the left half are, if anything, darker, and no cleared surfaces can be found. A few small lots have been added around the settlements, and despite a gap of nearly 20 years, that is the only change.

Rows of buildings and bare ground on the hill

In 1974-78 this frame changes completely. The rows of buildings appear all at once. In the center of the frame a block is born in which bright buildings of the same length line up tightly, and the arrangement is divided into two groups. On the north side the buildings are set in a grid, and on the south side rows turned from northwest to southeast overlap diagonally. Whitish bare ground lies between the buildings, and almost no tree shadows fall on it. It is a town that has just been planted. In the middle of the site, one bright square surface smaller than the residential buildings can be read, but you cannot tell from this grain what the place is for.

Right to the west of the danchi, lots of paddies still remain. The south is still the existing settlements and fields, and houses line up along winding roads. Blocks cut with straight lines and settlement roads that curve with the terrain sit next to each other in the same frame. The river meanders through the center left and passes out to the south, and along its western bank a thin, straight band runs vertically. In the left half there are two horizontal bands of different shading, which look like perfectly level, straight boundaries unrelated to the lots of the paddies.

The right half of the frame is easy to overlook. The hill to the east was being cut at the same time. Reddish brown and orange bare ground is scattered widely over the slopes, and its outlines are cut with straight lines and arcs. These are surfaces of land preparation. In the same period that the blocks of the danchi appeared on the valley floor, a separate housing land development was also going ahead on top of the hill to the east. At the upper left, too, there is white bare ground where the mountain was cut, and stepped edges can be read. This photograph is not a picture of the finished danchi but a record from the middle of a time when the earth was moving in both the valley and the hills.

A station named after the kodan

The name of the danchi also remained in the name of a station. A monorail that opened in 1985 followed this valley north-south and linked it with the center of Kokura, and the station placed near the danchi was named Tokuriki-Kodanmae Station (kodan means public corporation). Station names that carry the two characters for kodan can be counted on one hand even across the whole country. It is an example of the name of the organization that carried out the land preparation continuing to be used just as it is as a name for the town.

In today's aerial photograph, almost the whole frame is town area. Even so, the rows of buildings in the center have not changed in position or direction from the 1974-78 photograph. The arrangement of the buildings has not moved. The two groups, the grid in the north and the diagonal rows in the south, can still be read as they were. The difference is between the buildings: grown groves fill the space between the rows as green lines, and inside the site a surface that looks like a plaza of brown ground can be seen. Outside, the change is greater. The hill to the east that was reddish brown bare ground is covered with housing without gaps, and the paddies on the west side that remained on the valley floor can no longer be found. The bare ground at the upper left, on the contrary, has grown large and become a wide area with bright beige stepped surfaces and looping work roads. It shows that the work of cutting the mountain has continued over this half century. Only the oval course at the upper right, with green turf and white straight structures, remains in the same place and the same shape as in the oldest photograph.

In a residential area of Tokuriki 6-chome, about 600 m from the blocks of the danchi, there is an observation point for land prices. The series begins in the 83,000 yen range per square meter in 1995, and 100,000 yen in 2002 and 2003 is the highest value up to the 2026 publication of the official land prices (Chika Koji), while 75,500 yen from 2013 to 2015 is the lowest value. In the 2026 publication it is 88,600 yen, slightly above the starting point of 1995. On the low land of the valley floor and on the housing land made by cutting the hill to the east, the assumptions for how water behaves are not the same. The hazard map published by the City of Kitakyushu is colored by chome, so it is good to compare any lot you are concerned about there.

In the same Fukuoka Prefecture there is also Hinosato Danchi in the City of Munakata. If you look at large danchi side by side, the difference in the character of the land chosen for each town comes into view.