Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Distribution Reservoir

What Is the Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Distribution Reservoir?

The Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Distribution Reservoir (別府市朝見浄水場配水池, Asami Jōsuijō Haisuichi) is a reinforced concrete storage reservoir of 1917 at the Asami plant in Asami 2-chome, Beppu City, Oita Prefecture, registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property on September 3, 1997. It covers 985 square meters and carries registration number 44-0013. The Agency for Cultural Affairs classes it as an "other structure" rather than a building and counts it as 1 unit.

A distribution reservoir holds filtered water before it is released into the mains. This one lies at the western edge of the plant, with a small maintenance entrance hut attached to each of its north and south sides.

Why It Was Registered

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the Asami distribution reservoir as built in the first phase of works meant to modernize daily life in Beppu. On completion it could serve 25,000 people, and it has been carefully kept inside the plant as evidence of the city's waterworks history. It was registered as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property for contributing to the historic landscape of the country.

The city's records point to a later date. Beppu's centennial waterworks history presents this reservoir, together with its north and south entrances, as part of the First Expansion Project, begun in 1926 and completed in November 1927. The city calls the 1917 works the "founding" and this project the "first expansion," so it is not clear from the Agency's note which phase its "first phase" means.

The same history lists the Asami No. 1 reservoir, still in service as of April 2017 with an effective capacity of 3,328 cubic meters, as built in November 1927. It does not say whether that is the registered Asami reservoir. Dates on this page follow the Agency for Cultural Affairs.

What to Look For: A Stone Coping

For a piece of plumbing, the Asami reservoir was given some care. The Agency singles out its stone kasagi, the coping that caps the top of the wall. A band of stone along the edge of the concrete sheds rain and gives the long, low wall a crisp upper line.

Scale helps here. The reservoir spreads over 985 square meters, while each of the two entrance huts that flank it covers just 13 square meters.

Its position matters too. The Asami plant has always relied on gravity rather than pumps to send water into town, and a reservoir at the far edge of the hilltop site stores that water at the height that drives it downhill.

How to Visit

The Beppu City Asami Water Purification Plant Distribution Reservoir sits inside a working plant, and the city advertises no regular visiting hours. The chance to get close comes with events such as the Water and Sewerage Bureau's summer open days. If you go, look along the stone coping and note how the two entrance huts attach from north and south. Ask staff on the day before taking photographs.