Kintai Bridge

Kintai Bridge crosses the Nishiki River at Iwakuni in five tall timber arches, each rising and falling like a drumbeat, and seen from the bank the whole line has the rhythm of a ribbon laid on the water, which is close to what its name, "brocade sash", suggests. It was the answer to a stubborn problem. The river is about 200 metres wide here with a bed of deep, shifting sand, and the wooden bridges that the Kikkawa lords of Iwakuni built below their castle kept washing away. The third lord, Kikkawa Hiroyoshi, first sent his carpenter Kodama Kurōemon to study the famous cantilevered Saruhashi bridge in Kai Province, but that design works over a ravine of 30 metres, not a river of 200. Tradition says the lord found his idea while toasting a rice cracker that curled into an arch, and that a Chinese monk living in Japan, Dokuryū, told him of a chain of arched bridges hopping between islands on the West Lake at Hangzhou.

The bridge was first completed in 1673 and was swept away by a flood the very next year. The remedy was not in the arches but beneath them: the stone piers were strengthened and the riverbed around them paved with great stones so that floodwater could not scour the sand from under their feet. After that the bridge stood for 276 years, maintained by a special tax and rebuilt in sections on a fixed cycle. It finally fell in September 1950, when Typhoon Kijia struck a structure weakened by wartime neglect and a riverbed disturbed by gravel extraction, and it was rebuilt to the old design by 1953. It has been a nationally designated Place of Scenic Beauty since 1922, and Hiroshige included it in his series of famous views of the provinces.

The craft is the reason to walk it slowly. The arches are built of interlocking beams, fitted together by joinery and bound with iron bands rather than held by nails; the decks rise so steeply that the walkway becomes a series of low steps. In the full replacement of 2001 to 2004 the builders worked from old drawings in traditional units, used only Japanese timber selected over some seven years, including red pine, cypress, zelkova, chestnut, oak and hiba, and fitted hand-forged iron made in the old way rather than stainless steel. Look under the arches from the gravel riverbed to see the fan of layered beams. Above the bridge rises Mount Yokoyama with Iwakuni Castle on its summit, and the park at its foot is at its best in cherry-blossom season and when the maples turn in autumn.

Getting there

The bridge is on the edge of Iwakuni, about 4 kilometres from the city centre, in Yamaguchi Prefecture. Iwakuni Kintaikyo Airport (IWK) is about 7 kilometres away. Buses run to the Kintaikyo stop, a minute's walk from the bridge, from Iwakuni station (around 20 minutes) and from Shin-Iwakuni station on the Sanyo Shinkansen; a direct highway bus also runs from the Hiroshima Bus Center.