Hakusui Dam

Most dams impress by mass. Hakusui is small — 14 metres high and 86 metres long across the upper Ōno River in the hills of Taketa, in Ōita Prefecture on Kyushu — and it is loved for its grace. The river spills over the dam in a broad sheet that breaks into white lace as it falls. That whiteness gave the dam its name: hakusui means white water. Seen from the bank below, with the green of the gorge around it, the curtain of water looks less like engineering than like a carefully composed garden feature.

It was built between 1934 and 1938, to a design by the civil engineer Yasuo Ono, to carry water to the rice fields of the district; it has never generated power and still serves irrigation. The structure is a concrete gravity dam faced with masonry of local tuff, dressed by traditional stoneworking methods, so its surfaces have the warm, irregular texture of cut stone rather than the flatness of poured concrete.

The spillway is the reason engineers and photographers make the journey. The river bed below was prone to erosion, and Ono shaped the flow to slow the water down: the overflow turns through a right angle, cascading over steps on one side and sliding down a smooth curve on the other. The practical purpose — to break the energy of the falling water — produced a pattern of ripples and folds unlike any other dam in Japan. Hakusui is often called the most beautiful dam in the country, and in 1999 it was designated an Important Cultural Property as a monument of Japan's agricultural modernisation.

Getting there

The dam lies in the countryside of Taketa, about 10 km from the town centre; Bungo-Taketa station on the JR Hōhi Main Line is about 11 km away, some 25–30 minutes by car. The nearest airport is Kumamoto Airport (KMJ), about 45 km away in a straight line. There is free parking at the dam: the left bank gives the view from below, and a path of about 1 km from the car park leads to a viewpoint on the right bank above.