The Lay of the Land

at left: Looking south toward Aburayama
from Ozasa 5-chôme, 21 July 2003

Ozasa is the southernmost neighbourhood in the central ward of Fukuoka city. It is part of a loosely defined transitional hemisphere between the central city and its suburbs to the south and west: it retains some of the character of the core of the city, in addition to the looser density and lower massing that characterize the suburbs. Several natural and artificial barriers combine to keep Ozasa separate from the downtown area. The most significant is a small mountain on the northern edge of the neighbourhood; it and several large hills to the north-east make it a bit challenging to walk or bicycle directly to the city centre. It is also tall enough to require the roads into Ozasa to wind inconveniently. This topography helped to determine the historical geography of the area relative to central Fukuoka. Urban spread from the old castle town stopped on the northern slope of the mountain, and the transportation corridors that evolved over the past hundred years tended to flow around it from east to west rather than from north to south.

Despite these barriers, Ozasa is well connected by bus routes to the rest of town. We also enjoy a surprising amount of parkland. The mountain has long been the home of Fukuoka’s municipal zoo and a large park; there was also a water purification plant and reservoir next to the zoo that became the Fukuoka Botanical Gardens about thirty years ago. These extensive public green areas form a combined natural and artificial barrier to development spreading south. This may change when the city’s new subway line opens due north of Ozasa: any land within a ten minute bus trip of the station should rise in value to the point where single family housing is forced to give way to higher density. Working against this will be the intent of Fukuoka’s development plan, which imagines density massing alongside transportation arteries, and intends to keep the southern slopes of our local mountain low and green. The more general point to draw from this situation is that Fukuoka’s urban geography is quite fluid for a well-established city. This neighbourhood, like many others in this city, could experience significant change in the near future.

Like most neighbourhoods in Japan, different land uses tended to pile up one on top of another in Ozasa, with small streets and major routes emerging haphazardly over time. This has long been a source of frustration for people who like their roads straight and their streets named, but there are real advantages to this kind of development. In the first place, things tend to emerge and die off as they are required by the people who live here. Later on, the confused and indirect streetscape is useful for those of us who dislike heavy through traffic. Unhappily, it also means that we live with a collection of now redundant land uses that are in the process of dying off, and await the arrival of some services other areas take for granted. We have half a dozen greengrocers but no video rental shop, and the old Ozasa market is now a shuttered relic housing little more than a meat delivery service and a few swallows.

I can imagine that our local shopping area was far more lively when Ozasa was a stop on the national railway’s Chikuhi line – a line that disappeared about twenty years ago. The old rail bed is now a busy, well-landscaped street. This ‘new Chikuhi road’ begins in the area around the Nishitetsu railway – a private rail company, which also operates the local bus service – and now continues through appropriated land beyond where the old tracks veered north-west. After that point the old rail bed carries on as a park for about a kilometre before disappearing into the city. Ozasa still hosts three blocks of company housing for the semiprivate company that emerged from the former national railway; we also seem to have more yakitori bars than a sleepy place like this would usually develop on its own.

There are two stories typical of modern Japan embodied in our community: one is the ongoing change and development still reshaping Ozasa; the other is its rapid transition from country to city. Within a lifetime, my little corner of Japan has gone from bush to medium density city in one lurching step. My house, at thirty-some odd years old, is one of the three oldest houses in the immediate neighbourhood. This second development in many ways causes and shapes the first: none of us can know which way the city is going, because it is not yet finished reinventing itself as a self-sufficient urban area. Up until the recent past, everything around here – including the city centre – existed in a mutually supportive relationship with the countryside. The generation now entering adulthood and child-bearing age in Fukuoka will be the first to have few and distant connections to the agricultural and fishing communities that made up its urban hinterland fifty years ago. It appears true that the character of a city changes fundamentally once it stops being little more than a market for local produce and becomes a genuinely cosmopolitan community. My demands of this transition are rather simple: I hope Ozasa can retain its greengrocers, and gain a video rental shop. I hope it won’t be too hard to manage.

2002/05/25

Date posted: 2003-09-01