Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Collecting Well House

What Is the Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Collecting Well House?

The Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Collecting Well House (別府市朝見浄水場集合井室, Shūgōsei-shitsu) is an octagonal reinforced concrete building of 1917 with a rounded dome-like roof, standing in the Asami plant in Asami 2-chome, Beppu City, Oita Prefecture, and registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on September 3, 1997. It covers 14 square meters and carries registration number 44-0012. The Beppu Water and Sewerage Bureau refers to it as the Second Collecting Well House.

As the name says, it houses a collecting well, the point where incoming water is gathered together.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs says the Asami collecting well house is widely loved for its unusual appearance, which has come to symbolize the modernization of everyday life. In Taisho-era Beppu, clean water from a tap was still a novelty, and the plant that produced it was given a building people would remember at a glance. It was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

There are two accounts of its date. The Agency gives 1917. The Beppu Water and Sewerage Bureau says instead that this is the Second Collecting Well House, built during the First Expansion Project completed in November 1927, beside the First Collecting Well House of 1917 (no longer standing), and apparently designed to resemble it. Read together, the two records suggest a building that carries the look of 1917 even if it went up a decade later. Dates on this page follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

What to Look For: Eight Sides and a Curved Pediment

The first thing you notice at the Asami Collecting Well House is its silhouette: an eight-sided body under a rounded roof. On a building this small, shape does most of the work, and the outline reads the same from almost any angle.

A porch projects from the front entrance, crowned by a segmental pediment. A pediment is the gable-like ornament placed over doors and windows in classical architecture; here it is drawn as a shallow arc rather than a triangle, echoing the curve of the roof. The Agency calls the building small but properly built.

The outer walls are scored with joints that mimic cut stone. The structure is reinforced concrete throughout, but the lines give it the weight of masonry.

How to Visit

The Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Collecting Well House stands inside a working plant with no regular visiting hours. If an open day lets you in, start at the front to take in the porch and its curved pediment, then walk half way around and watch the stone-effect joints turn each corner of the octagon. Ask staff before taking photographs.