Hints from Japan's hillsides

Slopes tell us about the past, enrich the present, and let us think about the future

Last month on the way home from Onomichi to Tokyo, I stopped by Kobe for a few hours to attend the second day of “Slope City Summit 2024,” an event that brought together municipal representatives, architects, activists, and others from hillside communities across the country.

It’s often said that Japan is four-fifths mountains, and the remaining one-fifth is where all the cities, farms, and people are. Of course, in actuality cities and mountains overlap; urbanization crawls up the slopes, depositing oddly shaped houses and other structures into the folds of the landscape. Streets dwindle into paths, and paths swell into stairs. Ever since we started building Labyrinth House on the hillside in Onomichi, 150 steps above the nearest road, I’ve been traveling around the country a few times a year in search of other hillside projects and communities, which are home to some of the most interesting urbanists anywhere in Japan. These places have much in common as well as many differences—a perfect topic for a summit!¹

The path to Labyrinth House, Onomichi

Slopes connect us to the urban past

When walking in urban Japan, it helps to have a few ground rules. Craig Mod swears by the “ippon ura,” or one street back from the main road, as a sure-fire way to find more interesting scenery, people, and history. My sento walking tour is a case in point—the bland and unpleasant four-lane boulevard in my neighborhood was built in the 20th century, but the parallel shopping street is quiet and human-scale, has existed since Edo times, and is full of familiar faces.

Here’s another tip: wherever you walk, seek out changes in elevation. The paths that follow the contours of the land, or confront them head-on, are almost always more rewarding to walk than those on flat ground. Keep a topographic map handy as you navigate. If you plan on doing a lot of walking in Tokyo, download Tokyo Jisou Maps (iOS | Android), not just so you can peel back the historical layers of development, but also to reference the shape of the city’s valleys and hills.

Learning the topography is step #1 to understanding Tokyo. From Tokyo Jisou Maps.

But don’t credit me—this is pretty basic knowledge among Japan’s city-walkers. The Suribachi Gakkai group has put out a whole series of topographic guides to urban exploration, which is also the theme of one of my favorite TV shows. Scholars have also written much on Tokyo’s slopes. Hidenobu Jinnai’s classic Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology explains how these areas developed unique social and spatial characteristics as transitional zones between the highland residences of the elites and the lowland commoner districts of Edo. More evocatively, Shinichi Nakazawa’s Earth Diver argues that the distribution of the city’s religious sites and red-light districts near modern-day slopes has deep roots in the ancient coastline once inhabited by prehistoric hunter-gatherers.

Here is sociologist Shunya Yoshimi (my graduate advisor) writing about the meaning of slopes earlier this year:

Cities are composed of more than just present layers; strata from different eras accumulate atop one other. But where land is flat and development is simple, old layers are easily destroyed and the landscape becomes smothered by new high-rises. Such erasure of historical traces deprives us of the opportunity to encounter the past. Contrast this with areas where the topography is more complex, which retain a stubborn ability to withstand forces such as large-scale redevelopment, wartime bombardment, or the construction of urban planning roads, which can only be described as acts of neighborhood destruction. In short, valleys and uneven ground are where urban memory remains. (吉見俊哉、「下り坂について：街歩きの文明論」『ユリイカ』2024年6月、pp. 250-252)²

Slopes enliven the present

But you don’t need to listen to a bunch of scholars to grasp why slopes are interesting. Just look at this spot we walked past on a summit-organized tour of the Kobe hills:

Kobe’s got it all: Tesla, old brick wall, fancy mansion, cheap apartments

Can you think of another developed world city where you can see such a visually stimulating juxtaposition of wealth, eras, and topographic conditions? Or for that matter, any place on flat land in a Japanese city? You might not think it’s beautiful, but it’s undeniably interesting in an age when monotony pervades both mainstream culture and our built environment. If walking is food for the mind and body, then the constant surprises, contradictions, and variety found on Japan’s slopes are a nutritious meal.

On the hillside in Saikazaki

There are also great distinctions between Japan’s hillside cities. With proper roads and infrastructure and a mixture of nouveau riche mansions and modest housing, Kobe’s slopes are closest in character to Yokohama’s. But they’re quite different from the akiya-filled hillsides of Onomichi or Kure or Yokosuka.³ The hills above cities like Nagasaki or Hakodate or Atami occupy different positions relative to urban centers than small fishing ports like Saikazaki or Manazuru. All are excellent places to wander.

Nagasaki

On slopes, you can find all the traits of good urban design arrived at organically: human scale, architectural diversity, proximity to transit, affordable housing, active lifestyles, encounters with neighbors, and places so quiet that meowing cats often wake us in the morning. The small town of Manazuru has codified a municipal design code inspired by Christopher Alexander’s pattern language, which values patterns such as the narrow paths between houses and the spots at bends in the road or the bottom of stairs where people stop and chat like pools along streams.

Today, the value of slopes extends beyond just vernacular charm. As Yoshimi suggests above, capitalist development has a hard time penetrating into uneven topography, sparing hillsides from some of the forces that have driven much our urban environment towards homogenous, interchangeable architecture and ways of life. Different forms of life endure higher up, through the tenacity of residents like the elderly woman behind Labyrinth House who cleans the gutter along our path every morning.

Achiki Park, just up the slope from Labyrinth House, is a gathering place for the community created by the local NPO and other residents.

Over the years, residents have emptied out of these places because the alternative found below is so much more convenient. But the active commitment demanded by hillside life also attracts a much smaller but recognizable countercurrent: newcomers (and returnees) who are turned off by the erosion of local places by thoughtless consumerism, the hectic rhythms of big-city life, and modernity’s relentless erasure of the past. Slopes thus become sites of creativity and experimentation that takes forms like the patchwork of hillside urban farms pioneered by a friend in Nagasaki, the slow style of four-days-a-week shops and cafes of our neighbors in Onomichi, or little community gathering places and creative businesses focused on uncovering local culture and history.

A serendipitous encounter in Onomichi

Shioya Project, the creative folks who worked with the city of Kobe to stage the summit, is a great example of the sort of urbanists who plant their flags in hillside communities. Their home base is Shioya, a little fishing port squeezed between the hills and Osaka Bay that is now surrounded by Kobe’s urban sprawl. I haven’t visited yet, but after seeing their work, it’s now on my 2025 hillside travel list.

“In Shioya, there’s lots of stairs, there’s lots of slopes, and the streets are narrow”

“The streets may be narrow but people’s hearts are wide open. It costs money to widen the streets, but being open-hearted is free. That’s why everyone gets along, am I right?”

—Residents in “Shioya Wonderland”

The project maintains an old Western-style home where they host various cultural events. They walk the heck out of the city, making maps and uncovering local history and culture and distilling it into new forms. Like other urbanists in post-growth communities, they curate a sense of what makes Shioya and Kobe special—their whole practice is an extended argument for why this little local place should continue to exist.

Downhill in the post-growth future

Slopes are where I go to get distance from the present-oriented commotion of Tokyo and search for things that root our urban existence in the past. But they are also places to think about the future of abandonment and aging that is already upon us—half of the houses on our hillside in Onomichi are empty, and half of our neighbors are elderly.

The novelist Shinji Ishii, who participated in the “Slopes & Culture” panel at the summit, drew an interesting parallel between slopes and literature. The source of all drama, he pointed out, is difference—yes, between elevations, but also rich and poor, good and evil, male and female, tradition and modernity, past and present, city and countryside. It is in the transitory space in between where narrative unfolds, and no good story continues in an endless ascent.

This reminded me of another passage of Yoshimi’s essay: when we climb up slopes, our minds are preoccupied with the obstacles before us, and the anticipation of cresting the hill. It is only upon starting to descend that our attention can turn towards the wider landscapes around us, which often hide a rich collection of surprises. When we focus on this previously unseen scenery, other systems of value reveal themselves, and our way of seeing the world is transformed.

He continues:

In fact, I am certain that [this rule of walking] also applies to life, and lately I’ve started to believe the same can be said of civilization, too. In short, the people alive in any civilization may enjoy greater cultural fulfillment during the phase of long, gradual decline than during the period of upward growth and development. This undoubtedly has great significance for the question of where Japan should go in the future.

Down on the flat land in Tokyo, they are still scraping the city clean and erecting skyscrapers, grasping for a little more growth. The future looks different from up in the hills. The narrative doesn’t end, it changes—there is still much to do and look forward to on the way down. Recognizing the moment we’re in is the first step in thinking about the places and cultures that ought to be saved and created anew.

1. For the past year, we had actually been talking about staging a slope summit of our own once Labyrinth House is finished. I was very happy that others are thinking along the same lines! If Nagasaki or another city carries the baton next year, we will be there.

2. Thanks to Sara Durt of Shioya Project for sharing this and other quotes at the summit.

3. Kobe and Yokohama’s similarity derives from their positions as the international ports near Osaka and Tokyo, which attracted Western settlement and elevated the stature of hillside living. In Kure and Yokosuka, home to big naval shipyards that took all the flat land, the hills were where workers carved out modest places to live.