A Flower Blooming in the Desert: Greeneries of downtown Sagamihara City 相模原市

 

A flower blooming in the desert proves to the world that adversity, no matter how great, can be overcome. 

- Matshona Dhliwayo

The City of Sagamihara 相模原市 has a wide coverage. The largest city in Kanagawa Prefecture is Yokohama with 438km2. The second is Sagamihara having 329km2. Together with the City of Kawasaki 川崎市, they are Ordinance Designated Cities with legally unique independent status among Japanese municipalities. (By the way, Kanagawa Prefecture is the only local government having 3 Ordinance Designated Cities.) Having said that, there is a huge difference between Yokohama and Sagamihara. Yokohama is almost entirely urban, with citizen forests and the like dotted here and there. The greeneries of Yokohama are like islands in urban ocean. In contrast, Sagamihara can be divided into two poles-apart areas. One is deep Tanzawa mountains of Quasi-National Park. For example, the summit of Mt. Tanzawa (ASL 1567m) sits on the border of Yamakita Town 山北町, Kiyokawa Village 清川村, and the City of Sagamihara. The reason why Sagamihara has such mountainous areas is due to municipal mergers in 2006 and 2007, responding to the aging and shrinking population of rural areas. The rural villages are in a sense coattailing the populational power of the “original” Sagamihara, and obtained a special Ordinance status … Anyway, in contrast, geographically speaking the old “Sagamihara” has a completely different feature. It’s flat.

Currently, South Exit of Hashimoto Station,
the largest commuter terminal in Sagamihara is
 having a huge construction project for SCMaglev Line
connecting Tokyo and Nagoya for 40 minutes.
Unlike standard photos of sceneries
in Kanagawa Prefecture, have you noticed it’s “FLAT”?

According to “A Verbatim Record of Kanagawa’s Traditional Food (1992), people who lived in the present-day Sagamihara area had not-so-rich diet, at least until some 50 years ago. The “new” Sagamihara area is remote and deep in mountains, and so they had familiar reasons for problems obtaining foods et al. The “old” Sagamihara did not fare well, either. The area is on the Sagamihara Plateau, sandwiched by Sagami 相模川 and Sakai 境川 Rivers. The place was made by erosion created by river flows. Inevitably, if people on the Plateau dug a well, they had to drill deeeeep down to reach water. When, then, people wanted to withdraw water from rivers, they had to pump up higher and for a long distance. In the 21st century, that does not matter much. But for ages of developmental problems, it was a huge problem. The “old” Sagamihara was not a place of rich agricultural bounty. Probably because of this, the place had lots of training grounds and bases for military before 1945 when World War II ended. The place is flat and wide. Not many farmers claimed the land … convenient. You see? Old Sagamihara still shows its history. Yokohama Engineer Depot for the US Army is there though its acreage was shrunk. A part of the former Depot area is now large Sagamihara Campus for Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, aka JAXA where they have control centers for Japanese satellites and space missions.

Seeing Sagamihara Plateau
from a community sits on the bank of Sagami River.
As this area is next to the river,
they have advantage of withdrawing water from the River
and have a beautiful golden rice paddies in autumn.
Their ASL is approx. 50m.
Would you please notice the ridge line at the bottom of the photo?
That’s where Sagamihara Plateau starts.
It’s ASL is about 86m.
The forest we can see here is spreading over a very steep slope.

When the place was a military training ground, I guess the plateau was covered by grass at best. In the other areas of private property, farmers planted crops requiring less water. In “A Verbatim,” there are several descriptions of daily meals of the area for yesteryears. Rice, the most important crop in Japan, was the dry-land variety only and the amount they could harvest was not much. The staple was barley and millet cooked for porridge. Miso soup with Japanese white radish, and pickles of white radish were the regulars. During busy farming days especially for sericulture, when people needed energy to ride over heavy workload of nurturing silk warms, sweet potato was the most important and gorgeous snack. Oh, by the way, sweet potato does not require rich soil and is easy to grow in Japan as long as the climate is not too cold. Another essential starch was wheat where moms made home-made Udon noodles or porridge for evening meals. Sweets with sugar was something for VERY special occasion. Meat? Forget it. Fish? Yeah, when fishmongers ventured out from seaside of Shonan 湘南, people in Sagamihara could purchase a bit of salty and/or dried fish. River fishes were not common to eat … The story in “A Verbatim” for Sagamihara is … I would say, in the “poorest” category. When in Yokohama city folks enjoyed ice cream and pork buns, people in Sagamihara had watery barley porridge. Inevitably I guess, they did not allow available land to be forest whose harvest was possible only in the long run. They plowed land as much as possible by constructing canals.

In the center of the “old” Sagamihara runs National Route 16,
the oldest circular road around downtown Tokyo.
Along the Route we can find familiar names for food,
 like MacDonalds, Starbucks, Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc. etc.
 Some say the area along the Route 16 is
 where the “average” Japanese lives.
Marketing-wise statistically,
if a franchise does well around here in this photo,
it has a higher probability having a success nationwide.
It is also considered in this age of
aging and shrinking population for Japan,
the area along the Route 16 is expected to
 see population growth with younger families.

Those were the days. Now the City of Sagamihara is supplied by the water and sewage system of Prefecture-wide. Space engineers for JAXA can use water as much as they need. “Old” Sagamihara is a bed town for people commuting to Tokyo where JR, Odakyu and Keio Railways servicing people directly to Shinjuku. Lots of lots of suburban houses. Flat lands near Chuo 中央高速 and Keno 圏央道 Expressways are ideal for big factories to open their shops. If you mentally delete green mountains decorating the western part of Sagamihara City, you may have an impression Yokohama has more greeneries than Sagamihara. We can try Google Satellite of Map and confirm the intuition. But what happened to the canals people of previous centuries built for survival in the Plateau?

“Old Sagamihara” seen from the space

Building water systems was very important in Sagamihara for such a long time. Even before the prefectural-wide system was built, the community did beautiful works for carrying water to their field and household. Some of them remain and are designated as historical artifacts recording the level of manual civil-engineering and people’s passion for water. Before the construction was for farmland, especially for mulberries fed for silkworms. When the export business of silk from Yokohama became completely out of fashion, people in Sagamihara switched for cedars and cypresses for their land, hoping they could have received a good cash in 60 years’ time. These coniferous trees drunk a lot from the canals, and abandoned when in the 1960s cheap imported timber killed domestic forestry business. In the 1970s, the City of Sagamihara started to utilize the forgotten forests as city parks. Now the forests as parks have aged for 40-50 years. They become comfortably nice places for strolling. That’s the forests we’ll go next weeks. We’ve already visited Sagamihara Park of Kanagawa Prefecture, do you remember (my post for January 25, 2019)?. Let’s start from another forest next week. Please stay tuned!

This is one of the canals completed in the previous century.
Though dry, don’t’ you think it’s beautiful?
It now runs through a municipal park,
but the original intention was to serve agriculture.

If you find environmental issues in Kanagawa Prefecture, please make a contact with Kanagawa Natural Environment Conservation Center 神奈川県自然環境保全センター

657 Nanasawa, Atsugi City, 243-0121
〒243－0121　厚木市七沢657
Phone: 046-248-0323

You can send an enquiry to them by clicking the bottom line of their homepage at http://www.pref.kanagawa.jp/div/1644/