Meganebashi Bridge

Meganebashi Bridge, the Spectacles Bridge, crosses the Nakashima River in central Nagasaki, in Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in southwestern Japan. Its two stone arches and their reflection in the water form a pair of circles that look like a set of spectacles, which is where the name comes from and why the shot only works when the river is calm.

The bridge was built in 1634 by Mokusu Nyojo, a Chinese Zen monk who served as the second-generation head priest of Kofukuji Temple a short distance away. That connection is not incidental: Nagasaki's Chinese community, and the temples it founded, brought stone arch construction techniques with them, and Meganebashi is widely cited as the oldest extant stone arch bridge in Japan.

It was built from locally quarried stone and fitted dry, without mortar, with the two arches leaning against one another so that the compression holds the structure together. It is a technique that looks precarious and is in fact extremely durable, and it is easiest to appreciate from the riverbank below rather than from the deck, where the joints between the blocks are visible at close range.

The bridge has been rebuilt twice. A flood destroyed it in 1647, and it was reconstructed the following year. Much later, the catastrophic Nagasaki flood of July 23, 1982 tore out six of the ten historic stone bridges along the Nakashima River and severely damaged this one. It was restored using nearly all of its recovered original stones, which is why the structure standing today is still substantially the seventeenth-century one.

Twenty heart-shaped stones are set into the stone embankment along the river near the bridge, said to bring luck in love, and hunting for them has become the standard activity for visitors who come with time to spare. They are not marked or numbered, they vary in size, and finding all twenty takes patience, which is rather the point.

Meganebashi is sometimes grouped with Nihonbashi in Tokyo and Kintaikyo in Iwakuni as one of Japan's three great bridges. That is a popular framing rather than an official designation, and you will see it repeated on signage and in guidebooks without much explanation of where it comes from.

Practically, this is a free pedestrian bridge on a public riverside walkway, open at any hour, with no ticket and no gate. It is lit nightly until around 10:00 PM, and the lighting becomes far more elaborate during the annual Nagasaki Lantern Festival in mid-February, timed to the Lunar New Year. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough for most visits, including a walk down to the riverbank and along to the neighboring bridges.