Tokyo, Japan's Bridges: Confluence of the Sumida River

March 2012 (35.787 Degrees, 139.734 Degrees) Confluence of the Sumida River

We are looking at the confluence of the Sumida River. To the north the Arakawa is being diverted to the right away from the Sumida (except for the water flowing through the sluice gate on the left). There is another river, the Shingashi, that flows into the Sumida further to the left of this photo. Beyond the gate we can see an orange highway bridge (carrying Route 122) across the Shingashi and the Arakawa. Behind that are three through truss bridges carrying railway lines across the rivers.

There is another gate behind me (the Iwabuchi Sluice Gate in the photo below) that can stop the water in the Arakawa from entering the Sumida.

We've looked at about 33 bridges across the Sumida River from it's mouth in Tokyo Bay to it's source at the Arakawa 30 km upstream. If I counted all the utility bridges and the clusters of bridges separately, the number would be closer to 40. I put the locations of these bridges on the Google Earth photo below. The area of the map is about 15 miles by 5 miles or 75 square miles, which is just a small part of Tokyo.

Tokyo, Japan's Bridges: Confluence of the Sumida River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.