From Nitobe’s Bridge to Wushantou

What Remained After 1930

I have visited Wushantou Reservoir many times.

I have also taken the boat out onto the water and watched the reservoir open in front of me, not as a single object, but as a landscape.

For someone involved in architecture, the first thing that strikes me is the scale.

Architecture, however large, still has the boundary of a site. A hydraulic project faces something else entirely: mountains, watercourses, farmland, settlements, and the conditions of an entire plain.

The Chianan Irrigation System began construction in 1920 and was completed in 1930. Its engineering scale, technical difficulty, and agricultural impact have already been discussed in many studies and articles.²

This essay begins from the moment after completion.

When the work was finished, when the people on the construction site gradually moved on, what remained besides the dam and the canals?

And why did Hatta’s hometown of Kanazawa come to be connected again, decades later, with Wushantou in Tainan?

The first sign that the work had become memory was a statue.

A Statue That Crossed Half a Century

After the completion of the Chianan Irrigation System, people who had worked on the project formed an association and proposed making a statue of Hatta.

The sculptor was Yuma Tsugata from Kanazawa. The statue was brought to Taiwan in 1931 and placed near Wushantou Reservoir.

It was not a monument created long afterward by later generations. It was made when the memory of the construction site was still close, by people who had worked through those years and wanted something to remain.³

Then came the war.

In 1944, as metal shortages deepened, the statue disappeared from Wushantou.

After the war, people connected to the irrigation system found it in a railway warehouse. The water association bought it back, and the statue was kept in the dormitory where Hatta had once lived.

Only in 1981 was the statue finally restored to Wushantou.³

From its installation in 1931 to its return in 1981, half a century had passed.

The people who made the statue, the people who found it after the war, the people who kept it, and the people who finally returned it were not all the same generation.

No single person protected it for fifty uninterrupted years.

Someone found it.
Someone kept it.
Someone waited for the right time.
Someone brought it back.

Because each generation did one part, the statue crossed war, political change, and time, and returned to the place where it belonged.

What remained in the statue was not only the image of Hatta himself.

It also carried the question of how those who came after him chose to remember the work.

Half a century later, the statue returned not because bronze was durable, but because responsibility had been passed along.

Once the statue returned, memory had a place. The next step was return itself.

How One Date Became an Annual Return

Yoichi Hatta died on May 8, 1942.

Since 1984, memorial ceremonies have been held every year on May 8 at Wushantou, in front of the statue and his grave.⁴

A memorial ceremony is, at first, a way of looking back.

But when it continues on the same date every year, it also brings living people back to the same place.

A date can become a road if people keep traveling toward it.

Some come from Japan. Some receive them in Taiwan. People who met the year before meet again, on the same day, at the same reservoir.

What begins as remembrance slowly becomes return.

Kanazawa began participating in the memorial ceremonies in 2011. Apart from the years disrupted by the pandemic, delegations and related visitors continued to come to Tainan almost every year.

The exchange gradually widened: tourism, city councils, civic groups, cultural organizations, and younger generations all became part of the movement.⁵

The ceremony remained a place to remember one person.

But it also became a place where two cities could meet again each year.

Annual return was only one form of remembrance. At Wushantou, memory also had to be given rooms, timber, furniture, and a scale people could enter.

Restoring Memory to the Scale of Daily Life

Around the same years, another kind of work had begun at Wushantou.

In 2009, the Siraya National Scenic Area Administration planned the restoration of the old dormitory buildings connected to Hatta.

The design team went to Kanazawa to study timber construction methods. Four dormitory buildings, including Hatta’s former residence, were restored with reference to Japanese timber construction. Inside, old furniture donated by citizens of Kanazawa was placed in the rooms.

The Yoichi Hatta Memorial Park opened on May 8, 2011.⁶

To restore a house, goodwill is not enough.

One has to ask how the timber joints should be repaired, how the original spatial order should be read, what kind of furniture belongs inside, and what traces of daily life should be allowed to remain.

Taiwanese designers went to Kanazawa to look for clues. Citizens of Kanazawa chose pieces from their own lives and sent them to Wushantou.

Memory was no longer held only in inscriptions, photographs, or an annual ceremony.

It returned to the scale of rooms, timber, furniture, and touch.

A connection first formed around the memory of one engineer became, here, the work of preserving a place.

After memory had been restored as a place, the exchange could move beyond preservation.

When More People Began to Cross the Bridge

After the restoration of the dormitories, the movement between Tainan and Kanazawa did not remain only at Wushantou.

In 2021, the Tainan Art Museum held an exhibition on craft exchange between Taiwan and Kanazawa.

Against the background of Yoichi Hatta, Wushantou Reservoir, and the centennial of the Chianan Irrigation System’s construction, artists from Kanazawa and Taiwan met through metalwork, ceramics, lacquer, glass, dyeing, weaving, and the shared language of material and technique.⁷

By this point, what moved between the two places was no longer only the story of Hatta.

Craftspeople from Kanazawa brought their materials, techniques, and works. Taiwanese craftspeople responded with their own practices.

Hatta remained the point of departure.

But the people meeting one another were not simply repeating a historical story. They were facing what each side was making now.

In 2024, a Tainan–Kanazawa twin-city forum brought together curators, craftspeople, scholars, and cultural workers from both places to discuss craft, education, inheritance, and contemporary transformation.

In 2025, the exchange expanded again, this time into contemporary art and broader cultural dialogue.⁷

That same year, students from Kanazawa Municipal Technical High School made their first school trip to Taiwan and visited Wushantou.

They had never met Hatta. They did not belong to the generation that built the reservoir, preserved the statue, or restored the dormitories.

But they crossed the sea to see what a civil engineer from their own city had left in Taiwan.⁵

At that moment, the connection was no longer only a memory held by those close to the original story.

It had begun to pass to another generation.

The annual return had become wider than commemoration. Craftspeople, curators, students, and civic groups were now crossing the bridge with their own work and their own questions.

Hatta remained the beginning.

But the exchange had grown beyond him.

Fifteen Years of Visits Become an Agreement

On May 7, 2026, Tainan and Kanazawa signed an agreement to promote tourism and cultural exchange.

The following day, May 8, the Kanazawa delegation went to Wushantou and joined the memorial ceremony marking the eighty-fourth anniversary of Hatta’s death.⁵

A formal agreement can be signed in a single day.

But the relationship that made it possible had been built over many years.

The agreement did not create the connection between the two cities from nothing. It gave official form to visits, ceremonies, restoration work, exhibitions, educational exchanges, and civic relationships that had already been taking shape for at least fifteen years.

The starting point was one engineer.

What followed was carried forward by people who had never known him directly.

Some Bridges Are Seen Only Later

A hydraulic project does not automatically become a bridge between two places.

A dam is built to hold water.
A canal is built to carry it.
An irrigation system is built to serve land and agriculture.

The bridge came later.

It was formed by the people who found the missing statue, protected it, returned it to Wushantou, gathered every year on May 8, restored the dormitories, donated furniture, organized exhibitions, sent students, and finally gave the relationship between Tainan and Kanazawa a formal civic shape.

Hatta’s engineering work became a point to which people could return.

And because people returned, they met.

Because they met again, the relationship deepened.

And slowly, the work of one civil engineer became something more than infrastructure.

Inazo Nitobe gave words to the bridge he hoped to become.

Yoichi Hatta did not name this bridge.

What he left behind was Wushantou Reservoir and the Chianan Irrigation System.

The bridge was not the dam itself. It began because someone built a dam that worked, and it endured because others kept returning to what he left.

Later generations preserved the memory, returned to the site, and followed that memory across the sea.

Some bridges are named before they are built. Others are recognized only after people have crossed them for years, and finally understand what has been connecting them.