Tower on Tokyo Lake Casts Bewitching Visions of a Wonderland, Provides City Residents with Drinking Water

By Shutaro Kakii / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

16:26 JST, April 1, 2025

A domed tower rises from out of the rippling surface of a lake toward the blue sky. It looks like a scene from a fairy tale, but the setting is Higashi-Yamato in western Tokyo.

The building in question is the First Intake Tower of the Lower Murayama Reservoir, which supplies tap water to the capital. Completed in 1925, it is regarded as the most attractive water intake tower in Japan and has been designated as a historic structure by the Tokyo metropolitan government.

The reservoir, together with the adjacent upper reservoir, is known as Lake Tama. The lake was built over more than 10 years, beginning in 1916, along with the Yamaguchi Reservoir — also known as Lake Sayama — to cope with rapid population growth. The three reservoirs can store about 34.35 million cubic meters of water. That is as much water as Tokyo residents currently use in about a week.

The First Intake Tower is 27.1 meters tall and 8.8 meters in diameter. The exterior walls, finished in tile, are accentuated by arched windows and decorative columns, and the verdigris on the copper-clad roof gives it a sense of history.

Visitors are not allowed across the bridge to the tower, but they can still see the Tokyo emblem on the facade by standing about 50 meters away on the embankment.

Water flows through seven openings on the tower to a water purification plant.

“It has a modern feel and looks especially beautiful with a sunset as its backdrop,” said Wataru Kiga, the director of the Hamura Weir Management Office, part of the Tokyo metropolitan government’s Waterworks Bureau. The office manages the tower. “It’s been exactly 100 years since the tower was completed, and having been repaired, it’s still functioning without a problem. It should be preserved for future generations.”

The tower was also featured in a famous novel. In Shohei Ooka’s “Musashino Fujin” (“A Wife in Musashino”), published in 1950, a man and a woman living in the Musashino area go for a walk to the reservoir, but their train home is stopped by a typhoon, and they are stranded overnight at a hotel by the lake.

“A quaint, oddly shaped water intake tower, topped with a cupola, was sticking out of the water,” reads the novel.

Their one night at the hotel brings about a decisive development for the couple and their surroundings. With its air of foreignness, this tower that supports the lives of Tokyo residents invites us to imagine the mysterious.

First Intake Tower of Lower Murayama Reservoir

Address: 4-644, Tamako, Higashi-Yamato, Tokyo

Access: 15-minute walk from Musashi-Yamato Station on the Seibu Tamako Line

Memo: Embankment and Sayama Park open 24 hours a day. Behind the First Intake Tower is the Second Intake Tower, built in 1973 with the same design.