Kurobe Dam — dam
Raki_Man · CC BY 3.0

Kurobe Dam

  • 2 min read
  • 36.566° N 137.662° E

Interesting facts

  • Japanese people often call it Kuroyon Dam, short for Kurobe No. 4, after the power station it was built to feed.
  • The dam holds about 1.58 million cubic metres of concrete and tapers from 39.7 metres thick at its base to just 8.1 metres at the crest.
  • Water reaches the underground power station with a drop of about 545 metres, driving four Pelton turbines that produce around a billion kilowatt-hours a year.
  • The first two turbines came from the German firm Voith and the last two from Hitachi; the fourth was added only in 1973, raising capacity to 335 MW.
  • The project prompted Japan's first 275-kilovolt transmission system, which allowed electricity to be sent over greater distances.
  • The reservoir behind the wall can hold about 199 million cubic metres of water, filling a valley that began to flood in October 1960.
  • Monster films loved destroying it: Mothra breaks the dam in the 1961 film, shot there before completion, and Gamera bursts it in Gamera vs. Barugon in 1966.
  • The construction story was retold in the popular documentary series Project X, and the 2016 anime Kuromukuro is set at a research base beside the lake.
  • The spillway on the crest has ten uncontrolled openings, each 11.5 metres wide, able to release up to about 906 cubic metres of water per second.

Why it is worth it

Deep in the Northern Alps, where the Kurobe River cuts between the Tateyama and Ushiro-Tateyama ranges, stands the tallest dam in Japan: a concrete wall 186 metres high and 492 metres long at 1,454 metres above sea level. Kansai Electric Power built it between 1956 and 1963 to end the post-war power shortages of the Kansai region, and the site had been studied since the 1920s but always defeated by the gorge. The cost was enormous, 51.3 billion yen, several times the company's capital, partly financed by a World Bank loan, and it was paid in lives as well: 171 people died on the project.

The hardest part was getting in. Material had to travel through the Kanden Tunnel, 5.4 km under Mount Akazawa from the Ōmachi side, and its builders ran into a fractured, water-bearing zone that took seven months to cross. That struggle became a novel and the 1968 film The Sands of Kurobe. The dam itself changed shape during construction: after the Malpasset dam in France failed in 1959, surveys found cracks in the valley walls, so the simple arch was given gravity-dam wings on both sides and tilted downstream to press its load into the rock beneath.

Water from the lake, Kurobe-ko, runs through tunnels about 10 km to the underground Kurobe No. 4 power station, built inside the mountain to protect it from avalanches, and then passes on to two further power stations downstream. From late June to mid-October the dam releases water for spectators; it is sprayed out as mist so the torrent will not scour the riverbed below, and the white plume falling into the gorge is the great sight. An observation deck, a viewing stage for the discharge and a replica of the film's tunnel set tell the story of the construction.

The surrounding peaks, the green lake and the dizzying drop below the wall make this one of the most spectacular engineering sites in the country, and it has appeared in films from Mothra to Whiteout.

Getting there

The dam lies in Tateyama town, Toyama Prefecture, about 20 km west of Ōmachi in Nagano Prefecture. Shinshu-Matsumoto Airport (MMJ) is about 50 km away. From the Nagano side, an electric bus from Ōgizawa station runs through the Kanden Tunnel directly to Kurobe Dam station. From the Toyama side, the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route links Tateyama station to the dam by cable car, buses and a ropeway, a journey of several hours.

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Japan 122The Most Impressive Dams 6The Greatest Engineering Wonders in Japan 9The Greatest Engineering Wonders 271

From the encyclopaedia

The Kurobe Dam (黒部ダム), or Kuroyon Dam (黒四ダム), is a 186 m (610 ft) high variable-radius arch dam on the Kurobe River in Toyama Prefecture, Japan. The tallest dam in Japan, it supports the 335 MW Kurobe No. 4 Hydropower Plant and is owned by Kansai Electric Power Company. It was constructed between 1956 and 1963 at a cost of 51.3 billion yen. The project had taken the lives of 171 people by its completion.

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