Calm local town excited on expected World Heritage registration of old pumping station

May 28, 2015



Calm local town excited on expected World Heritage registration of old pumping station

Residents near the riverside pumping station in Nakama City, Fukuoka Prefecture, had been little aware of its historical importance until a few years ago. Cherry trees planted inside and outside of the compound of the facility provided a nice location for local people to enjoy cherry blossom viewing parties. The site was also sometimes used as a shelter to protect people from floods, according to Manabu Hamada, a Nakama City government official.

The 105-year-old pumping station has come into spotlight this year, however. The facility was among the 23 industrial assets in eight areas across Japan recently recommended to be registered as World Heritage by a UNESCO-affiliated organization.
The Onga River Pumping Station started supplying water to the Imperial Steel Works, Japan, in the Yahata area of the current Kitakyushu City, in 1910. This was about 10 years after the inauguration of the steelworks as a symbol of Japan’s  industrialization drive in the decades after Japan opened itself to the western civilization toward the middle of the 19th century.
The pumping station is still in operation, providing 120,000 tons of water a day to the Yahata steelworks. This is 70 percent of water used there. Water is used to cool the blast furnace body and steel rolled out of the mill, and to clean steel sheets and other products. Overall, 200 tons to 300 tons of water is said to be necessary to make one ton of steel.
The pumping facility, located in the inside of the east bank of Onga River, is capable of providing up to 180,000 tons of water to the steelworks, currently owned by Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corp.
The pumping station is actually a rectangular, double-ridge building. The walls are covered with red bricks, while gray slag bricks are used for beams and arched window frames. The design provides a stylish outlook to the building as a whole.
The northern section of the building was used as a pump room and the southern section housed a coal-burning boiler which provided power to a steam engine. The facility started operation with four pumps introduced from Hathorn, Davey and Co. of Britain. The boiler and steam engine system was introduced from Babcock and Wilcox, also of Britain. The facility was electrified in 1950, but at that time, the building and related structures were preserved almost as they were.
River water is taken at a point up on a water gate and funneled into a settling pond in the northern area of the facility compound. An 11.4-kilometer water supply pipe starts from the northern end of the compound and crosses a branch of Onga River, and then it runs northwardly and eastwardly toward the steelworks.
Three historically important structures at the steelworks in the Yahata area are also among the candidates this time recommended for World Heritage registration.
The compound of the steelworks is sandwiched by the sea to the north and an amusement zone and densely populated areas to the south. The candidate assets there are not open to the public. Visitors can only have a distant view of one of the three structures from a recently built viewing deck. No entry or photo is permitted. Instead, visitors can take a look at monuments set up at part of the site formerly occupied by the steelworks.
The 10th generation model of the No. 1 blast furnace, which was in operation from 1962 to 1972, is preserved and opened to the public at a site near the steelworks compound.
The recommendation by ICOMOS, the UNESCO-affiliated entity, for the “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel Making, Coal Mining and Shipbuilding,” has paved the way for the 19th case of World Heritage registration of natural assets and other globally important sites in Japan. The recommendation must be authorized by a UNESCO committee in charge of the matter at its meeting from late June to July. Indications are that the recommendation will be adopted at the meeting, but South Korea has raised objection to the recommendation, claiming that some of the 23 assets are related to forced labor involving Koreans taken from their homeland when Korea was under colonial rule by Japan from 1910.
Hamada is a key person of a five-man task force set up by Nakama City, southwestern Japan, in April 2014 to promote the pumping station as part of the candidates for World Heritage registration. Nakama City, with a population of 43,000, has so far had few tourist assets, It had no budget for tourism-related activities until last year, but the former coal mining town has earmarked 30 million yen for tourist-related purposes this fiscal year, according to Hamada.
No entry is permitted into the pumping station compound, because it is a working, high-voltage facility. Some other candidate sites recommended this time are also operating, among them a shipbuilding yard crane. If registered, these facilities will be the first operating World Heritage assets in Japan.
The compound of the riverside facility had been surrounded with densely planted trees. The facility could be little seen from outside, but many of the trees were cut down earlier this year, enabling people to have a look at the facility from outside.
On a holiday in early May, just after the ICOMOS recommendation was made public, the sites involved were flocked by hundreds to thousands of visitors. The Onga River Pumping Station attracted at least 450 visitors on that day, said Hamada. After the initial fever, the number of visitors comes to around 100 on weekends.
The pumping station was not included in a provisional list of World Heritage candidates prepared by the Japanese government in 2009. Later in the year, a group of experts took a firsthand look at the facility and recommended that it should also be included in the candidate list.
A large water supply system was indispensable for steelworks in the modern times. This means that a water supply facility was always built as part of a steelmaking project. “This is what experts (in the steelmaking business) equally stress,” said Hamada. The pumping station attests to this theory as it continues to operate at the original site.
When the site will be actually registered as a World Heritage, “we will have many jobs, not just to better preserve the facility but also to make it available as an asset for the public, so that its historical value may be disseminated,” Hamada said.
People in the Meiji era carefully used old items and assets as long as possible. When the power for the pumping station changed to electricity from steam and then, when the facility was shifted to an unmanned operation, “they (the facility operators) could have rebuilt it to a smaller, easier-to-maintain facility, by scrapping old and unnecessary items and sections, but they did not do so,” Hamada said. “This may be a spirit of craftsmen in the Meiji Era,” he said. “We can learn their view by looking at this facility and we will have to preserve the asset toward the years ahead.”