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Imagine this. You wake up, get out of bed, stumble to the sink or shower, and turn on the water. And nothing happens.

Nothing. The faucet turns, but nothing comes out. You do what anyone else would. You turn the faucet back off, and then back on again.

Still nothing. You stare at the faucet. It's not the way you wanted to start your day.

Then, and probably only then, you will think about water. Where it comes from, and how they get it to you. Clean water piped not just to your door but even inside your home, then quickly, invisibly and almost silently collected and removed. It is the public utility we take most for granted.

The water is almost always there. Turn on the tap, and out it comes. Use it, and away it goes. We know in the vaguest possible way that it came from somewhere, and, when we're done with it, goes, well, somewhere else.

In With The New

Quick quiz: You live in Kansai. Where does your water come from?

Answer: For almost everyone, Lake Biwa, one way or another.

It's immediately northeast of Kyoto. Maybe you've seen the lake while heading to a ski resort or hiking trip. It's the biggest lake in Japan, no matter how you measure it. The lake covers 670 square kilometers, has 252 kilometers of shoreline, and holds 27.5 billion cubic meters of water.

Where does the lake get its own water from? From the 120 rivers and 340 rain- and snow-fed streams that flow into it from the surrounding countryside. Together, they direct 100 cubic meters of water into the lake, every second. But at the same time 150 cubic meters per second flow out, through its one natural outlet, the Seta River, and through two canals that supply water directly to Kyoto. Rain and snow falling directly into the lake make up the difference.

Lake Biwa supplies fresh water for 14 million people in Kansai. Some of the water, mostly for Kyoto, is drawn directly out the lake. More comes from the downstream flow, after the Seta River becomes the Uji River and then combines with the Kizu River and the Katsura River to become the Yodo River, the major water source for Kansai's other cities.

Animals, including humans, have been drinking water from streams, rivers and lakes ever since they first came slithering out of them. And sending the water through pipes to where it's needed isn't new either...the Romans were doing it 2,000 years ago.

What's new, relatively, is cleaning the water before distributing it through the pipes. The first modern water treatment and distribution system in Japan was Yokohama's, which started in 1887. Osaka started piping cleaned water in 1895, and Kobe in 1900.

It helps to keep the source water clean, and the effort now going into Lake Biwa is significant. The Lake Biwa Research Institute has had scientists carrying out detailed studies of the lake and its watershed area year round since 1982, and promoting environmental controls. The downstream rivers, which reached a critical point of pollution in the mid-1960s, have also been much improved. Carp have even returned to the Katsura River, which had once been too dirty for them to live in it.

But even so, all the water pulled from the lake and from the Yodo River and headed for homes and businesses is still processed at treatment plants to filter and purify it.

It's a complicated process involving increasingly finer levels of purification. Grids catch the big stuff. Smaller impurities settle out in sedimentation basins. Ozone dissolves organic substances. Sand provides more filtration. Granular, activated charcoal helps fight the musty smell that comes from algae. Chlorine is added as a disinfectant.

All the cities test the water before, during, and after the cleaning, measuring it for the 46 standards provided in the Waterworks Law. (Last month it went up to 50 standards.) Some are things you've heard of...mercury, lead, arsenic. They're measured in milligrams per liter, and the amounts permitted have comforting numbers of zeros to the right of the decimal. Mercury, for example, is tolerated in quantities up to .00005 milligrams per liter.

Measuring impurities against standards is a start, but it's meaningless unless the numbers are reported accurately. In Japan that hasn't always been the case. For a sobering discussion of that aspect, see Chapter 2 of Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons, the most recent and readable work about what's gone wrong with Japan (and from someone who loves the country, mostly).

We use a lot of water. Osaka goes through 1.4 million cubic meters per day, drawing water from the Yodo River for its three treatment plants. Kyoto, which draws 97 percent of its water directly from Lake Biwa, uses 610,000 cubic meters per day. Kobe goes through 560,000 cubic meters every day, with only one-fourth of it coming from sources in or very near the city. The rest is piped through two massive tunnels from the Yodo River, 30 kilometers away.

In one of the best and oldest examples of regional cooperation in Kansai, the cities of Kobe, Osaka, Ashiya, Nishinomiya and Amagasaki all belong to the Hanshin Water Supply Authority, created in 1936. It formed a single independent organization to coordinate the extraction and sale of the water to those cities, instead of an every-town-for-itself scramble.

You use the water, and then, one way or another, you put most of it back. And the process starts all over again, but in reverse, and with a few differences. Now it's sewage.

And Out With The Old

Sewage is the stuff nobody wants to see, or smell, or think about. The ultimate magic of modern life is not our planes and computers and televisions, but the way we have removed sewage from our consciousness. It's only happened in the last 100 years, and even more recently than that in many areas, even in Japan. (And in many parts of the world, and not just in so-called third-world countries, it hasn't happened at all.)

For most of history and all of prehistory, people saw and smelled sewage a lot. Over the most recent centuries they have spent much time and effort storing it, moving it, and using it, mostly to fertilize crops. Now, it swirls away down the drain, and that's all we want to know.

To understand a sewage system, it's important to realize there are two major types of sewage: wastewater, and stormwater. Wastewater is the stuff draining down sinks and toilets, and that needs to be cleaned before being dumped into a river or bay or ocean. Stormwater is rain and snow landing on the ground. The portion of stormwater that isn't absorbed by the ground needs only to be channeled to a place where releasing it won't cause flooding. (One subtle and hidden cost of development and urbanization is the increase in stormwater to contend with, because pavement won't absorb it.)

The great divide in sewage systems concerns these two flows, wastewater and stormwater, and whether to handle them separately or together. Separate systems cost much more initially, because it requires two entirely unconnected networks of collection points and pipes. A combined system requires only one, slightly larger, collection and distribution network, but ends up treating and cleaning a lot of water - the stormwater - that didn't need it.

Kobe has separate systems. Osaka and Kyoto both have combined systems. History, politics, finances, prevailing engineering thought, and topography all are involved in the path that led each place to the system it has today.

How is sewage treated? It is first slowly stirred, to let the solids settle to the bottom. Stuff that doesn't settle out is digested by micro-organisms. The liquid is disinfected by chlorination, and then piped back to a river or ocean. The material that settled out, called sludge, is collected and concentrated. Any remaining water in it is squeezed out. The sludge is fermented in a digesting tank, reducing it to a dehydrated cake that is usually incinerated. The ashes from incineration are sometimes recycled, but most often sent to landfills.

In Kobe, where the city provides about 560,000 cubic meters of clean water every day, it also treats about the same amount of sewage. The end result is about 216 dehydrated industrial-sized cakes of sludge, to be incinerated or recycled.

Water and sewage purifying and cleaning technologies continue to advance, but the major change over the last 25 years has been the automation of the whole system. Sensors and even cameras lie quietly in pipes, valves, pumps, basins, filters, dams and reservoirs, keeping an electronic hand, ear and eye (and sometimes nose) on all the material passing by, feeding the information by wire and, increasingly, by signals through the air, to computers who gather in control rooms and chit-chat with each other about the system and what's going on in it (and also, presumably, about whatever else computers chit-chat about if things are calm). The computers record the data in their digital diaries and make minor adjustments in the system, opening a valve here and turning on a pump there, and, if anything is really wrong, they begin to size up the situation and may even call a human being.

The controls and key components of municipal water systems are kept safely locked away from the public (and were even before the threat of terrorism). But the systems and the officials who manage them are working to be more friendly today, both to their customers and to the environment. Throughout Kansai, parks, softball fields, tennis courts and walking paths have been built atop and among the reservoirs and treatment plants. It makes for efficient use of space, and also helps keep the precious water not quite so out of sight and out of mind.

A saint is good who wanders constantly. Water is good which flows continuously.

-- Punjabi proverb