Despite that, the constant movement of the water meant it was clean enough to bathe in, though you might think twice about drinking it. In front of my house, in addition to a lot of brightly colored red and white koi swimming around, there were also a lot of water wheels, which is where the name comes from. Every village has water wheels, our village has quite a number of them, and they made for a magnificent sight. Overshot, backshot, undershot, breastshot… Those are all the ones I can remember. There might have been more. A lot of them were used to relieve us of mundane tasks like hulling rice and milling wheat.