Former Nishioka Water Source Intake Tower

A Hexagonal Tower Standing in the Water

The Former Nishioka Water Source Intake Tower (旧西岡水源池取水塔, Kyū-Nishioka Suigenchi Shusuitō, also written Kyu-Nishioka Suigenchi Shusuito) is a brick-and-timber intake structure of 1909 standing in the reservoir at Nishioka Park in Toyohira Ward, Sapporo, Hokkaido, and it was entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on 28 August 2001.

Walk the shore path and it appears through the birches on the far side of the water. A cylinder of red brick rises straight out of the reservoir. On top of it sits a small hexagonal cabin of painted boards under a pointed cap. The proportions look wrong at first, top-heavy and slightly toylike, until you learn the measurements.

The brick base is 1.5 metres across on the inside and stands 6.6 metres high. The timber body above is barely wider than a phone box, clad in horizontal clapboard, pierced on its faces by tall narrow windows, and finished with a six-sided pyramidal roof of sheet iron. The registered building area is 1.5 square metres.

That last figure explains most of what you are looking at. This was never a place people gathered. It was a valve house, sized for one engineer and a wheel.

Water for the Tsukisamu Garrison

The tower belongs to a military waterworks. In 1909 the Imperial Japanese Army dammed the upper Tsukisamu River to supply the 25th Infantry Regiment of the 7th Division, whose barracks lay downstream at Tsukisamu. The scheme was known as the Tsukisamu Suidō. Water drawn at this point ran by gravity through a buried main, and the service road laid along that main is said to have become the ordinary Sapporo street now called Suigenchi-dōri.

The design is credited to Inoue Jirō, an engineer whose name the Agency for Cultural Affairs records alongside the structure itself. That attribution is unusual for a work this small; most utility buildings of the period reach us anonymous.

Secondary accounts place the Tsukisamu system third among Hokkaido's modern waterworks, after Hakodate in 1889 and Iwamizawa in 1908, although the ranking shifts depending on how military and municipal schemes are counted together.

The plant passed into civilian hands after the war. Local histories record that Toyohira, then a town in its own right, began piping the water to ordinary households in 1949, and that the system came to Sapporo when the two merged in 1961. The reservoir is said to have been retired in the early 1970s once larger treatment facilities opened elsewhere in the city. The basin was then laid out as the park visitors walk today, and the tower stayed where it was.

Why the Tower Was Registered

Registration in 2001 came under the criterion covering structures that contribute to the historical landscape of the country. Three qualities carry the case.

• Very little survives of the Army's civil engineering in Hokkaido, and almost nothing of its water supply.
• The tower joins two building cultures in a single object: an engineer's brick cylinder below, a carpenter's clapboard shed above, meeting at a line you can see from the shore.
• Its silhouette is unaltered. No later machinery was bolted on and no concrete jacket was poured around the brick.

Registered Tangible Cultural Property is the lighter of Japan's two principal heritage categories for buildings. Rather than freezing a structure outright, it obliges the owner to notify the state before major alteration. For a small object kept standing in open water by the City of Sapporo, that lighter touch has worked.

The registration number is 01-0029, and the listing was gazetted on 14 September 2001, a fortnight after the registration date.

Seeing It

Nishioka Park has no gate and no admission charge, so the tower can be looked at at any hour and in any season. It stands offshore, and there is no bridge, so the view is always from across the water. Photography outdoors is unrestricted. The interior is closed and there is nothing inside to see.

Reaching it without a car is straightforward. Take the Namboku subway line to Sumikawa, then a Chūō Bus service on the Nishioka loop (route 澄73 or 澄74) as far as the Nishioka Suigenchi stop, which leaves a walk of about one minute. Drivers need roughly thirty minutes out of central Sapporo. The car park holds about fifty vehicles in summer and about twenty once snow arrives.

The park office beside the entrance opens 9:00 to 17:00. It closes Tuesdays between April and November, and Tuesdays and Wednesdays between December and March. Staff lead free guided walks on Fridays through the warm months, meeting at the office by 13:00 and lasting around two hours. No booking is required. The commentary is in Japanese.

Two cautions worth taking seriously. This is real woodland and wetland, not lawn: ticks are a genuine risk, so long sleeves, long trousers and closed shoes make sense from spring onward. Brown bears range through this part of the city on occasion, and a bear bell is a reasonable precaution. Boardwalks cross the marsh, and stepping off them is not permitted.

Late October gives the reservoir its best colour, with larch and maple reflected around the brick. In deep winter the water freezes and the tower reads as a dark hexagon against white, though the path is slower going under snow. The Hitsujigaoka Observation Hill sits on the ridge to the northeast and pairs easily with this stop for anyone driving.