Matsumoto City Waterworks Bureau Shiroyama Water Supply Area

Matsumoto Waterworks Joyama Junction Well

A junction well is plumbing. It is the point where one length of pipe hands water to the next, a relay box for a system too large to run in a single stage. The engineering asks nothing of it beyond a watertight tank and a lid.

This one has the emblem of the Matsumoto waterworks mounted above its door.

It stands on the hill at Joyama, immediately west of the old distribution reservoir, and its silhouette is a cylinder: a round brick building, single storey, about 4.91 metres across, wearing geometric ornament and a mortar-rendered dado. Inside that brick drum sits the well itself, a concrete cylinder with an internal diameter of about 3.34 metres and walls some 0.34 metres thick. The registered building area is twenty square metres, which is roughly what a circle of that size covers. The whole thing is smaller than a studio apartment.

It was the hinge of Matsumoto's first waterworks. Springs at Shimauchi, beside the Naraigawa on the northwestern edge of town, fed a collection well. Pumps in the engine house drove the water some 600 metres to this hill. It arrived here, in this drum. From here it went into the reservoir next door, and from the reservoir it ran down into the city under its own weight.

Pumping stopped at this building. Gravity began at this building. Everything before it cost the city electricity; everything after it was free.

The Ornament, and Why It Is There

Brick was the premium building material of 1923, and Matsumoto's account of the registration says so plainly. The junction well got brick. So did the reservoir's entrance pavilions. Back at Shimauchi, the old engine house was given Art Deco detailing too, and the emblem of the city waterworks sits above its entrance exactly as it does here. The three buildings speak one design language across two sites and 600 metres of hillside.

Look at how the drum is put together. The brickwork carries geometric patterning across its whole surface. The dado and the pilaster forms are picked out in mortar render, which sets planes of smooth grey against the brick and gives the cylinder an articulation it does not structurally need. Above the opening, the emblem.

None of this makes the water cleaner.

What it does is make a claim. Matsumoto in the early 1920s was a town that had burned repeatedly and drawn its water from wells, and the arrival of a pressurised supply was among the more significant things to happen to it. The people who commissioned these buildings evidently thought a municipal achievement should look like one, even at a location the public would never visit. There is a confidence in that which is difficult to imagine a modern utility permitting itself.

Two engineers of national standing in the early construction of Japanese waterworks stand behind the project: Sano Tojiro, who surveyed the sources, and Takechi Shojiro, who did the design.

A Small Point About Categories

The national database sorts registered structures into types, and the junction well and the reservoir beside it were sorted differently. The reservoir is filed under other structures, the category for civil engineering works. The junction well is filed under buildings.

The reason is the brick drum. A buried concrete tank is a work of engineering; put a roofed brick house over it, with walls and a door and ornament, and the thing has become architecture. The category reflects the covering house rather than the tank inside, and it is a quiet acknowledgement that somebody in 1923 chose to make a building where a lid would have done.

A related wrinkle: the structural description in the national record reads concrete, single storey, describing the well body, while the same record's commentary describes a brick covering house. Matsumoto's own account is explicit that the well is concrete and the covering house is brick. The two readings are compatible once the building is understood as a drum inside a drum.

The sources also differ slightly on where it is. The national record places it roughly 600 metres northeast of the Shimauchi first source; the city says about 600 metres east. Both agree on the distance.

Its Condition, and Seeing It

The junction well has been out of service for years. Water no longer passes through it, and the reservoir it fed is empty too.

As a surviving object it has fared better than its neighbour. The reservoir lost its northeastern corner and half a staircase to later construction on the site. The junction well did not. Matsumoto's assessment is that apart from the doors, no substantial repair or alteration is evident, and the building stands very much as it was raised.

Registration came on 4 August 2015, in the eighty-first round, under number 20-0484, entered as a structure contributing to the historic landscape of the nation. The registration system dates from 1996 and works by notification rather than permission, a lighter instrument than the designation that produces National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, and one built to move fast enough to catch modern structures before they are demolished. This building was among the first in the group to be noticed: a survey of modern heritage by the Nagano Prefectural Board of Education in fiscal 2007 and 2008 named the old Joyama reservoir and its junction well as candidates, and an Agency for Cultural Affairs inspector who visited in September 2013 advised registering the Joyama and Shimauchi facilities together as one system.

The site is not routinely open. Matsumoto City arranges guided visits through its Demae Koza outreach programme, with applications made to the Lifelong Learning Division via the municipal electronic application system; timing and engineering work both constrain what is possible. Joyama itself, on the hill northwest of Matsumoto Castle, rewards the climb in any case.