A few weeks ago I visited Kyoto, Japan's lovely ancient capital, but not to view historic shrines and temples. I went to look at a ditch. Well, not exactly a ditch, but a modest canal with a fascinating link to Aspen, Colorado.

The Otsu side of Kyoto's Ke-Age Canal built in 1885.

      Today, the canal transports fresh water from Biwa, Japan's largest lake, under a range of hills to Kyoto's municipal system, generating electric power along the way. But it had another purpose when the canal was first visioned more than a century ago, and it was by some unusual circumstance that Aspen comes into the picture.
      Go back with me to 1868, the year Emperor Meiji replaced the feudal warlords who had ruled the country for centuries. The warrior samurai class was abolished and Japan set out at breakneck speed to catch up with the Western world. Fortunately for Japan, many of the samurai were not simply warriors. They were men of vision, imagination and intelligence, and some of them and their descendants took important roles in the building of a new Japan.
       One of them was Tanabe Sakuro, only 6 years old at the time of the Meiji Restoration. By 1881, when he was 21 years old, Tanabe was a graduate of Kobu Technical College, which eventually was to become part of the prestigious Tokyo University.
      Kyoto, the former capital, at the time was in ferment, trying to cope with a changing world. One of its traditional industries was rice distribution. Rice grown in the northern, or Japan Sea side of Honshu Island, would be baled and transported by coastal ship to Tsuruga, then hauled by oxcart the short distance to lake Biwa. Barges ferried the rice across the lake to the town of Otsu, where the bales were loaded on other oxcarts and hauled laboriously over the rugged hills to Kyoto and shipped out to the Osaka market. This was a slow and costly process but there was another, more critical problem. Drought had reduced Kyoto's water supply.
      Tanabe, then a 25-year-old employee of the Kyoto city government, came up with an audacious idea. He suggested that a tunnel be built from Otsu, on the shores of Lake Biwa, through the hills to Ke-Age on the outskirts of Kyoto. The tunnel would have two uses: Water from Biwa would be diverted into the tunnel and barges loaded with rice would be floated to Kyoto on the slow-moving stream through the hills instead of over them. Simultaneously, the tunnel would provide Kyoto with a new source of water.
      He calculations indicated the canal would total about 6 miles in length. It would pierce three ranges of hills, running above ground in the valleys separating them. Drawings show that the tunnels would be about 12 feet in diameter at the base, with enough space for a pathway where, presumably, animals or men would haul the barges upstream on the return trip.

Par of the Incline used to lift and lower canal barges.

        In one spot near the Ke-Age end, where the slope was steep and the water flowed too swiftly, what appeared to be a major problem was solved by building an 1800-foot-long incline, or slide. The barge would be placed on a wheeled cart or platform and gently lowered into the stream below the rapids. On the return trip, the process would be reversed with animal power.
        After much debate the project was approved by the Kyoto city government and the project was launched in 1885. No project as ambitious as this had ever been undertaken in Japan. Construction time was estimated at five years.

      Then, in 1887, two years after the project was started, Tanabe stumbled on information that was to lead him to Colorado and change the entire nature of the Kyoto project. Kobu College was receiving various publications from the United States and Tanabe, thumbing through them, learned that a low dam had been built across a stream near Holyoke, Mass., to divert water into something called a Pelton wheel to generate electricity. Electric power was just coming into use in the United States. Electricity was needed for street lights, and to run the new trams and the new textile mills. Tanabe reasoned that if the water in his canal could be harnessed to produce electricity, that would be a third use for his extraordinarily costly project. With the approval of the city fathers, Tanabe and Takagi Bunpei, an influential businessman and adviser to the mayor, set off for to the United States to investigate the possibilities.

General Electric Power Generator on display at Kyoto Sosui Museum.

      Early in 1888 they sailed from Yokohama on an American steamer called the Abyssinia. They landed in Vancouver, B.C. and traveled by train to New York City. When they arrived at Albany station, they were astonished to see the railroad station brightly illuminated by electric lights and immediately sensed that electric power was the key to the future. Future they inspected a river project in New Jersey but found nothing applicable to Kyoto. They were disappointed again at Holyoke where they found electricity being generated under conditions far different from Kyoto. The river at Holyoke dropped about 100 feet in a short distance, and the water was diverted into four holding ponds, each stepping down about 25 feet, to reduce the pressure on the generator turbines. The drop in Kyoto was far more gentle, and in any case there simply wasn't enough land to     build holding ponds.
      But there was one hope left. There had been told that a small hydroelectric plant had recently been built at a silver camp in Colorado. Swallowing their disappointed, Tanabe and Takagi began the long, slow train ride from New York to Aspen high in the snow-clad Rockies. The first impression was far from encouraging. Aspen was no more than a crude frontier town. But with high hopes Takagi and Tanabe tracked down the man who had designed and built the hydro-electric plant. His name was Walter Devereaux.
       Devereaux was delighted that two gentlemen from Japan had come to see his project which had been ignored or widely ridiculed before he had finally got it operating. The timing was fortuitous. The plant had been running for only a few months before Tanabe and Takagi arrived.
        Somehow Devereaux made his visitors understand what he had done and how he had done it. Rushing water from the Roaring Fork River was diverted into a device known as a Pelton wheel which turned a crude generator housed in an equally crude building. Tanabe saw instantly that the idea was applicable to Kyoto. With Devereaux's guidance, Tanabe drew up specifications for a similar operation, improving the design by incorporating an automatic governor to control the turbine's speed. These were sent with a purchase order to the General Electric company in New York. On Jan. 15, 1888, Tanabe and Takagi sailed for home.
       Work started immediately after their return on what was to become Japan's first hydroelectric plant. In a small brick building four of the imported turbines were installed to drive two imported generators. The plant went into operation in 1891, providing power for Kyoto's textile mills and the canal's incline mechanism. Several years later Japan's first electric street cars began running on Kyoto's streets, and Kyoto became the first city in Japan to provide electric lighting in homes. But the original purpose of building the canal did not last long. Railroads, which before long were to criss-cross Japan, replaced the slow and labor-intensive canal boats.
        Meanwhile Takagi, the businessman, became deeply involved in developing Japan's electric power industry to run factories and tram lines.
       I first learned the remarkable story of the Japanese visiting Aspen in a round-about manner. In 1992, when the centennial of the arrival of electricity to Kyoto was being celebrated in Japan with considerable fanfare, a Kansai television station sent a crew to Colorado to film the story. The television people called on me at the Jiho office to see what I could contribute. Since I had never heard the story, I was of no help and the Kansai people went on to Aspen.
       About a year later, my friend Hiroshi Aoki of Tokyo, formerly the Asahi newspaper's Los Angeles correspondent, came to Denver on a visit and I happened to mention the Aspen story. As a result, we decided to visit Aspen for some first-hand investigation.
       We found no one who could tell us about Devereaux, or of the visit of the Japanese. What we did find was an old brick building on the banks of the Roaring Fork which had housed Devereaux's generating plant. It had been turned into an art gallery and we found it being used by children in a sketching class.
       However, from various sources I gathered bits and pieces of the Kyoto canal story for my newspaper. This information was used for a detailed article in English, titled "Aspen's 100-Year-Old Hook-Up with Kyoto," and published in the 1993 issue of Colorado Jiho, a bilingual slick-paper magazine then being issued as a supplement to this newspaper.
       Four years later - in 1997 - Takagi Bunpei's grandson, Takagi Makoto, visited Aspen. The younger Takagi, a graduate of Japan's naval academy and a medical doctor, had been taking specialized training at Philadelphia General Hospital in Pennsylvania. In his youth he had read the diary his grandfather had kept on his American trip, and was retracing the route.
       Dr. Takagi had no more success than I in learning details of his grandfather's visit to Aspen. When he sought information in the Historical Society, he was shown a copy of Colorado Jiho. I did not have an opportunity to meet him at that time.

This brick building housed Japan's first water-powered generator,
still in operation.

       I went to Japan in the autumn of 2000 and, together with Aoki who by then had returned to Tokyo, went to Kyoto to see Tanabe's canal and power plant and meet Dr. Takagi. The Ke-Age district was short cab ride from Kyoto Station. On a hillside, on the banks of the canal Tanabe designed and built, was a memorial park. Tanabe by then was long dean, but he was memorialized in a life-size bronze statue, wearing a frock coat, near the brick building where water-powered generators still operate. Displayed nearby, at the top of an incline, was one of the ancient barges which had transported rice through the canal. And much to our disappointment, we learned Dr. Takagi had died the day we arrived in Kyoto.
       Last fall I visited Kyoto again with my wife Yoriko, and met Dr. Takagi's widow, a charming lady named Kiyoko who was quite fluent in English. She shared her late husband's pride in the experiences of his grandfather, and showed us a book Dr. Takagi had written about Takagi Bunpei's mission to America.
       On the swift Shinkansen Bullet Train ride back to Tokyo, I could not help but muse at the audacity, the courage and wisdom of the leaders of a re-born Japan who after the Meiji Restoration helped bring their nation into the modern world. People like Tanabe Sakuro and Takagi Bunpei had dared to take the first steps that transformed their country from oxcarts and canal boats to a land where electric locomotives speed freight and humans over a vast computerized steel rail network.        It's tragic that more Coloradoans are unaware of the part that one of their own pioneers played in the dramatic bit of history.