Ishibashi Memorial Park

Between 1840 and 1849 five arched stone bridges were built across the Kotsuki river in Kagoshima by Iwanaga Sangoro, a master mason brought in from Higo, using a technique that produced spans of a size nobody in the region had attempted. They carried the city for a century and a half. In 1993 a flood destroyed two of them.

The three survivors were dismantled and rebuilt here at the river mouth, in a park at the foot of Shiroyama with Sakurajima across the water. The largest, Nishida-bashi, carried the daimyo's procession out of the castle town on the road to Edo — Atsuhime is said to have crossed it on her way to marry into the shogunate. The park is free and open at all times; a small museum explains the masonry. It is a strange and rather moving thing: bridges that go nowhere, arranged on a lawn.