Hatta Toyoki (1900–1945) was the wife of Hatta Yoichi, the engineer of the Chianan Canal. She married Hatta at the age of sixteen, binding her life thereafter closely to her husband's mission. After marriage she left the comforts of city life to follow him, living for years at the remote and desolate construction site of the Wushantou Reservoir alongside the families of the engineering staff, accompanying her husband through the decade of hard labour that built the Chianan Canal and raising eight children in those rough conditions, a steadfast pillar behind him. In 1930 the canal was completed and water flowed, turning a hundred and fifty thousand jia of rain-dependent fields on the Chianan plain into fertile farmland—an achievement that also embodied her quiet sacrifice and devotion. In 1942 Hatta Yoichi died when the ship carrying him to the Philippines was torpedoed, and she bore her grief alone to support the whole family. In 1945, as Japan was defeated and she saw that her family was about to be repatriated and that the Wushantou Reservoir, the work of her husband's life, would pass into other hands, she threw herself into the reservoir's outlet at dawn on September 1, dying at only forty-five, following her late husband in the most resolute way and coming to rest on the land to which they had together devoted themselves. Her ashes are buried beside Hatta Yoichi by the reservoir, and their story is the most humanly poignant and tragic chapter in the legend of the Chianan Canal.

• 1916 Married Hatta Yoichi and lived with him at the Wushantou site

• 1945 Drowned herself at the Wushantou Reservoir outlet