Yonezawa Station Area about 60 years ago and today

History of Yonezawa Station Area

The station stands to the east of the center of Yonezawa's town area, once the castle town of the Uesugi family, separated from it by a single river. In the aerial photograph too, the left side is packed with an old townscape divided into a grid, a river with a wide riverbed flows vertically through the center, and the tracks run straight north and south through the right of it. The area called the station area is a long, narrow band between this river and the tracks. If you line up the two eras and today's photograph, you can read the order in which the inside of the band filled with houses and the town area then crossed over to the paddies and fields east of the tracks.

A station across the river from the castle town

Yonezawa is the southernmost city of Yamagata Prefecture and lies in a basin spreading at the foot of the Azuma Mountains, the source of the Mogami River. Throughout the Edo period it was the castle town of the Uesugi family, and the City of Yonezawa explains that Yonezawa textiles (Yonezawa-ori), encouraged by the ninth lord of the domain, Uesugi Harunori (Yozan), became the starting point of its later industry. The grid on the left of the frame is the framework of the town that continues from that castle town. The streets cross almost at right angles east-west and north-south, the lots are small, and the groves of temples and residences are scattered as black dots.

The railway came in May 1899, when the Ou Main Line opened from Fukushima Station to Yonezawa Station. The Azuma Mountains lie between it and Fukushima, and at Itaya Pass, which crosses their watershed, a switchback, where trains reverse to gain height, was built from the time of the opening. The station was placed not in the middle of the castle town but to the east across the river.

Between the riverbed and the tracks

The 1961-69 photograph is in black and white, with a somewhat subdued tone overall. The left third is the gridded town, with roofs lined up without gaps. The grid is packed only down to about two-thirds from the top; going down to the lower left corner it changes to dark paddies and fields, and houses become sparse along the roads. In the middle of the top edge of the frame, east of the tracks, one wide, irregular patch of ground washed out white appears. In the river flowing from top to bottom left of center, the stream divides into many channels within a wide white riverbed and forms a braided pattern. The tracks pass from the top edge of the frame to the bottom edge with almost no curve, and north of the station many lines bundle together so that the yard swells. Between the river and the tracks, houses are fairly densely packed, and roads leading to the station enter diagonally. The east side across the tracks is paddies and fields with large lots, and houses only stand here and there along the roads; at the upper right another river runs down in large meanders. South of the station, a thick black band hugging the tracks continues to the bottom edge of the frame.

Square lots divided by white lines appear inside the riverbed from the 1974-78 photograph on, which shows that the space of the river had begun to be used. This era is in color, and with roughly the center of the frame as the boundary, the left appears in a bluish green tone and the right in a brown tone. East of the tracks, a bright white straight road passes from the top edge of the frame to the lower right, and on both sides of it lie paddies split into long, narrow strips. Southeast of the station, several long buildings of the same shape stand facing the same way. Houses enter here and there among the paddy lots a few at a time, and the frame of this era is where the town area began to cross to the east of the tracks. The gridded town on the left keeps the same framework as in the black-and-white era, and only the colors of the roofs look divided into blue and gray. Earth-colored open spaces open here and there, and one of them is paired with a large building with a red roof.

A station the Shinkansen reached

The trains on the tracks changed in July 1992. With the opening of the Yamagata Shinkansen, the Ou Main Line between Fukushima Station and Yamagata Station was converted to standard gauge, and the switchback at Itaya Pass finished its role at this time. The City of Yonezawa's chronology of industry also lists the opening of the Yamagata Shinkansen under 1992.

Almost no vacant land remains near the center of today's photograph. The tracks pass north and south in the same position, but just south of the station a streak curving in an arc beside the tracks has been added, and the shape of the yard looks different from the black-and-white era. North of the station a long east-west road passes, leading on the left across the river to the old castle town and on the right to the residential area east of the tracks. The area east of the tracks is filled with blue and gray roofs, and large flat-roofed buildings are also dotted about. This is where strip-shaped paddies once lay. At the right edge, one more wide road comes down from the north. Toward the south of the band between the river and the tracks, one long, narrow black water surface extends north and south, and to the south of it several large buildings with blue roofs stand together. The river that meandered at the upper right in the black-and-white era runs down almost the same course in today's photograph too, showing a wide riverbed of white gravel toward the right. Both banks of the stream are edged with green bands, and beyond them the rows of houses break off. The black band seen south of the station in the black-and-white era remains in the same place in today's photograph as the green of a long, narrow strip of woods. Inside the riverbed, earth-colored sports grounds line up, and toward the bottom of the frame a red athletics track can be seen.

Even so, the paddies and fields have not disappeared. At the lower left and lower right of the frame, square paddy lots remain together, and you can see at a glance where the edge of the town area is. For a residential area in Omachi 5-chome, about 1,215 m from the station, the land price record begins at 60,500 yen per square meter in 1995, and 63,400 yen in 1998 and 1999 is the highest up to the 2026 publication of the official land prices (Chika Koji). It fell every year from 2000 to 2021, and 26,900 yen from 2021 to 2026 is the lowest up to the 2026 publication. The assumed flooding of land near the riverbed is something to check individually on the municipality's official hazard map.

The grid of the castle town and the band of the station area still keep different textures, with the river as the boundary, in today's photograph. In the town on the left, small lots cross at right angles, and in the station area on the right, diagonal roads mix in along the tracks. Only the riverbed of the river separating the two has hardly changed width in any era. People heading from the station to the center of the castle town cross this riverbed by bridge. In the aerial photographs of both eras and in today's photograph, the line of a road crossing the riverbed north of the station appears, which suggests that the position of the route linking the town and the station was also fixed early.