The Koriyama region in Fukushima prefecture has long suffered from poor water supply due to low annual precipitation and narrow and steep river basins and therefore had been left uncultivated since ancient times. However, it had a great potential for becoming fertile land if water could be drawn from the bug lake at the opposite side of the steep mountain. In 1873, Fukushima refecture launched a land development project by having the warrior classes of the domain of Nihonmatsu settle in the region. The prefecture also encouraged local wealthy merchants to help promote the reclamation work. As a result, these merchants joined the reclamation work by establishing Kaiseisha, an investment company. Two years later, Kuwano Village with 216 hectares of arable land and a population of 700 was born.
When the Home Minister of the Meiji government Toshimichi Okubo visited Koriyama in1876, he took particular note of this success in land development project and of the geographical characteristics of Koriyama to decide to implement a land reclamation project, which would be the first national project, as a solution to serious issues that Japan faced at the time. The issues were jobless warrior classes and the necessity of new industries in the Asaka wilderness. Moreover, this region had long suffered poor rice harvests due to lack of irrigation water. Therefore, the government planned to draw water from Lake Inawashiro and initiated a project to develop a canal in Asaka. Under the project, the lake was embanked to secure irrigation water and was channeled into Koriyama region, without causing problems for the Aizu region that had been already obtaining irrigation water from the lake. For the project, 2,000 people moved into Koriyama from nine domains across the country including the domain of Kurume in Kyushu at a distance of 2,000 km from Koriyama.