Taushubetsu River Bridge
Interesting facts
- Trains crossed the bridge for only about sixteen years, from its opening in November 1939 until the line was diverted in August 1955.
- In 1997 the agency winding up Japan's national railways drew up plans to demolish the old arch bridges, but a local campaign saved them.
- After that campaign the town of Kamishihoro bought the surviving concrete arch bridges of the Shihoro Line from the state.
- In 2010 JR Hokkaido named the old Shihoro Line arch bridges, Taushubetsu among them, a quasi-railway monument.
- In 2020 scant snow and rain kept the reservoir so low that the bridge stayed above water into October, unseen in some twenty years.
- The power company that runs the reservoir has called the bridge an abandoned ruin and said it has no plans to preserve it.
- Although listed as Hokkaido Heritage, this bridge was left out of conservation work because of its awkward lakebed location.
- The rubble-filled concrete frame technique used by its builders is still employed today to reinforce slopes along Japanese roads.
- The bridge spans the Taushubetsu River, a tributary of the Otofuke, whose valley was flooded when the Nukabira Dam was completed.
- In 2018 the newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun published an entire photo book devoted to this single ruined bridge.
Why it is worth it
The Taushubetsu River Bridge is a string of concrete arches standing in the middle of Lake Nukabira in the mountains of Hokkaido's Tokachi region, and it is famous precisely because it does not always exist. Eleven arches, about 130 m in all, rise from the lakebed and, on still days, meet their reflections to form a row of perfect circles, which is why people call it the "spectacles bridge". Because the lake is a hydroelectric reservoir, its level rises and falls through the year: the bridge usually emerges in winter, standing on the frozen lake by around January, shows itself fully in spring, and by late summer or autumn slips under the water again. Local people call it the phantom bridge.
It was built in 1937 for the Shihoro Line of the national railways and went into service in 1939, when the line was extended to Tokachi-Mitsumata. In 1955 the Nukabira Dam was built on the Otofuke River, and the stretch of line through the future lake was rerouted around it. The rails were taken up, but the arches were simply left where they stood. The whole Shihoro Line closed in 1987. The Taushubetsu bridge is one of more than thirty concrete arch bridges that survive along the old route and were chosen in 2001 as one of the first Hokkaido Heritage sites.
Its beauty is also its fragility. The builders used a clever, cheap method: a cast reinforced-concrete frame filled with rubble, which made elegant arches quickly, but once the outer skin cracks the filling can spill out. Decades of immersion, ice pressure and freeze-thaw have done exactly that. Part of a side wall at the centre fell during the Tokachi-Oki earthquake of 2003, and further sections have collapsed since. The bridge is not conserved; it is left to weather in the lake, which gives every visit the feeling of seeing something that may not be there next time. In the best light it looks less like a railway structure than a Roman aqueduct abandoned in the northern forest.
Getting there
The bridge is in the town of Kamishihoro, about 47 km from Otofuke in a straight line; the nearest airport is Tokachi-Obihiro (OBO), about 76 km away. An observation deck with a car park lies on National Route 273, about 8 km from the Nukabira Onsen resort towards Asahikawa, around 750 m across the water from the bridge. Brown bears live in the area.
On these lists
43.41556, 143.18917per Wikidata