Dried small fountain revives on continued heavy rain in southwestern Japan

July 31, 2020

Dried small fountain revives on continued heavy rain in southwestern Japan

Many Japanese people have come to realize that the current fight against the covid-19 pandemic will be a long battle. To be worse, they find themselves amid the extended years of phenomena of climate change, notably abnormally hot weather and heavy rainfalls, but people sometimes see rare happy signs brought by the nature. 

As a long spell of rain hit the southwestern Japan area from late June to July this year, too, residents of the central part of Asakura, Fukuoka Prefecture, saw pure underground water blowing out from a dried small fountain one day early July.

The move came after a decades-long hiatus, to be a delightful incident to people in the neighboring areas. 

Very cool, fresh underground water had kept blowing from the fountain until the 1960s. The "Ryusen Ike (Dragon Pond), the foundation so called, combined with beautiful maple trees seen around the site to attract spectators from neighboring regions, particularly from summer to autumn. 

The pond also became a playing ground for children in the neighborhood in the summer. The Dragon Pond, which was about 5 to 6 meters across at that time, was as deep as the water came to a height of the chest of the small kid, and because the water was very cold, children could not keep playing long in the water, an elderly man living near the pond recalled.

The fountain gradually began to dry up in later years. Local residents suspected that a main water vein believed to come from Koishiwaragawa River flowing from the north had been cut off with the digging of a site upstream for building a major restaurant in the 1970s.

The water then completely dried up. The site was then just like a low spot, or a pit, to be a danger to children. This was the reason why local people filled up the dried pond and set up playing gear for kids at the site. 

In recent years, people saw underground water blow up in the dried pond again from time to time after days of heavy rain in early July. But rainy days came more intensively than ever in the area this summer, causing underground water to blow up in the dried pond markedly.

A picture of the incident was used on the front page of a bimonthly newsletter for Asakura citizens in July. "We came to know about the reviving of the Dragon Pond, getting information from our colleagues," a city official in charge of the bulletin. 

They were monitoring the dried pond from a few days before, after receiving information from part of local people. They were working with a team newly organized in the city office for resuscitating the local community by refocusing water-related assets in the city, said the official.