Ushibuka Haiya Bridge was added to Your Favorites!
Unzen-Amakusa NP, Kumamoto
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
Renzo Piano, architect of Paris’s Centre Pompidou, helped design this 883m bridge with engineer Peter Rice, Noriaki Okabe and Maeda—a distinguished team working on a practical crossing for Ushibuka’s fishing harbor.
To make the bridge seem like a smooth line floating over the sea, its designers rejected showy suspension and cable-stayed forms in favor of a simple continuous girder—even across a 150m main span.
White side fins shelter pedestrians and reduce wind effects on the girder; they are safety gear, not frills. Their upturned faces also reflect changing sky light, making a practical wind shield part of the bridge’s signature.
This elegant crossing has a working-port purpose: it links Ushirohama’s fish-processing base with older harbor facilities in Daiba, cutting travel between them by 20 minutes and improving seafood distribution.
For Ushibuka’s 2023 winter light-up, about 40 local middle- and high-school students helped prepare the 10-color bridge display. At the night walk, visitors could also buy soup made with local aonori seaweed.
The bridge is named for Ushibuka Haiya-bushi, a song Amakusa City says grew from sailors’ weather delays in port. The city identifies it as a root of Japan’s Haiya-style folk songs, including Awa Odori.
The walkways sit at a different height from the roadway so pedestrians can enjoy views over Ushibuka while cars continue past. It’s a port shortcut that gives its slowest travelers a special vantage.
The bridge has an unexpected spiral branch: a loop at pier P3 was completed in 1999, 2 years after the main crossing. It carries a route toward Shimoshima, curling away from the harbor span.
Ushibuka Haiya Bridge won the Japan Society of Civil Engineers’ Tanaka Prize and the top prize in the Society’s 2001 Civil Engineering Design Awards—recognition for both the bridge and its landscape design.
