Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan's Bridges: 3: Nishidabashi in Ishibashi Park (2)

September 2013 (31.6041 Degrees, 130.5681 Degrees) Statue of Iwanaga Sangoro

Stonemason and bridge builder Iwanaga Sangoro came from Kumamoto at the end of the Edo period to build 36 bridges in Satsuma. Zushio Hirosato (who was the chief officer at Satsuma) asked Sangoro to build stone bridges to replace the wooden ones there were washed away every year by the spring floods. After constructing a stone bridge across the Inarigawa, Sangoro built five more bridges across the Kotsukigawa. He died in 1851 at the age of 59.

The Nishidabashi was completed in 1846 as one of the main entrances into town with its own gate on the left bank. At 6.2 meters it was widest of the five Kotsukigawa bridges.

"The Nishidabashi owed its unique beauty to the double-arch design and the fanning pattern of the stones between the arches. The stone balusters were capped with bronze and linked with elegant tubular stone railings," according to a plaque located where the bridge once stood.

The Nishidabashi was damaged along with the other Sangoro bridges by the flooding of the Kotsukigawa in 1993 and so it was painstakingly removed and reassembled in the new bridge park.

Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan's Bridges: 3: Nishidabashi in Ishibashi Park (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.