中島大水道跡

In the Edo period the Kita-Nakajima area was farmland producing more than ten thousand koku of rice, but it lay low and wet and flooded badly as silt built up. Three village headmen, Ichiyanagi Tarobee, Nishio Rokuemon and Sawada Kyuzaemon, led a strong appeal to the shogunate for a drainage channel. The shogunate allowed it on condition that the peasants bear the whole cost, and when the villagers, suffering from a poor harvest, begged for at least some help, it took offence and withdrew the permission. The three headmen could bear it no longer, and on the eleventh day of the third month of Enpo 6 (1678) they began the work without permission, with the Shintaromatsu sluice as the channel's starting point. Villagers young and old joined in and worked day and night, and in twenty-eight days they finished a channel of 5,102 ken, about 9,200 metres, three shaku deep, about 90 centimetres, running to the Fukumura outfall sluice. The great channel, which ran from what is now Higashiyodogawa-ku to Nishiyodogawa-ku and straight into Osaka Bay, has been filled in, but a stone pillar for the Shintaromatsu sluice and a monument to the Nakajima Great Channel, of Showa 63, stand beside the Shinkansen viaduct at Nishiawaji 5-chome.

Translated from the Osaka Prefecture and Osaka City tourist listings (観光施設一覧, CC BY 4.0).