S P O T ／ SPOT-291

Tsujun Bridge (Tsujunkyo)

通潤橋つうじゅんきょう

Built in 1854 on the orders of village headman Yasunosuke Futa to carry water to the parched Shiraito Plateau, Tsujun Bridge is a single-arch stone aqueduct about 78 meters long and 20 meters high, with three stone pipes running across its top that lift water uphill using the inverted-siphon principle. Its signature spectacle is the water discharge: to flush silt from the conduit, water blasts out from both sides of the arch in great fanning jets — a stone bridge that appears to spit waterfalls into the gorge below. In 2023 it became the first civil-engineering structure in Japan ever designated a National Treasure. What began as a working irrigation device — and a maintenance routine of clearing the pipes — has become a beloved icon, a place where Edo-period waterworks engineering meets the folk reverence for water that sustains a region's fields to this day.