When we did arrive a day late, the family was not there to receive us, so we went ahead with our visit to Oshoro without meeting them. Santha’s accident occurred and she had a powerful personal experience of some sort of miraculous intervention. What we learned later was that the family had been away attending the memorial service for the farmer whose death, it transpired, had occurred eight years previously on that very day.
At Santha’s request Suzuki telephoned the farmer’s daughter from our hotel. She had already heard of Santha’s accident at the stone circle and wanted us to know that she was angry with the spirit of her father for having failed to prevent it. Suzuki then told her of Santha’s experience of being rescued and saved from serious harm by the strong and gentle hands of a man no one had seen, and translated Santha’s honest question – did she think the rescuer could have been the spirit of her father?
Of course she thought that. We all did. For no matter how modern, rational and scientific Japan has become, it is still a land in which powerful and ineffable spiritual forces are perceived to move in secret behind all things, to pervade all things, and to underlie the very fabric of reality.
Isn’t it obvious that such ideas are extremely old?
The god in the mountain
Far away from Oshoro in Nara Prefecture on the island of Honshu, there is a sacred mountain called Miwa-Yama. In a pattern with which I was now becoming familiar, this entire pyramid-shaped mountain is considered by Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion to be a shrine, possessed by the spirit of a god who ‘stayed his soul’ within it in ancient times.20 His correct name is Omononushino-Kami (although he is also popularly known as Daikokusama) and according to the ancient texts he is ‘the guardian deity of human life’ who taught mankind how to cure disease, manufacture medicines and grow crops.21 His symbol, very strikingly, is a serpent – and to this day serpents are still venerated at Mount Miwa, where pilgrims bring them boiled eggs and cups of sake.22
In May 2000 the Shinto priests of Miwa processed me through the elaborate purification and blessing ceremony that is necessary for any pilgrim wishing to climb the mountain. Among other procedures this involved a ritual washing of my hands and mouth from a pure-water spring – over which reared the serpent icon of the god.
The climb itself, on a beautiful sunlit morning, took about two hours. From the beginning the way was steep and the path frequently led beside a tumbling stream.
Near the base of the mountain at the side of the path was a shrine consisting of a group of megaliths, each weighing a tonne or more and some showing signs of having been quarried or cut. On the right-hand side of this shrine, under a towering cedar tree, the devout had placed a dozen small statues of serpents.
My guide was a young Shinto priest. Seeing my interest in the rock shrine, he pointed out several other examples to me on the way up. In each case these shrines consisted of a single boulder or a group of boulders adorned with loops of thick rope. Some of the boulders seemed to have been arranged artificially; others appeared to be in entirely natural dispositions.
At the summit of the mountain we came upon a huge collection of iwakura forming a spacious, filled-in circle. It was hard to believe that these massive boulders had all just congregated here on this high point by chance. On the contrary, from what I had already seen of the Jomon obsession with stone circles and with the landscaping of mountains, Miwa-Yama’s summit shrine looked like something that would have been well within their repertoire. Indeed, in many ways it was typical of their open-air ‘rock temples’. It felt strange, therefore, to see modern pilgrims assembled here wearing white smocks over jeans, and to realize as they chanted the name of Omononushi-no-Kami, the god whose spirit had possessed the mountain, that in many ways Japan is still a Jomon country.
‘As to mountain worship,’ writes Professor Hideo Kishimoto of Tokyo University,
Its significance may change as the ages pass away, and its interpretation may vary according to the individuals. But people’s feeling of admiration and reverence to the mountain will not be affected by time so long as it soars sublimely into the sky with infinite mystery breeding solemn atmosphere. In Mount Miwa, a Shinto faith, based on such feeling, shows living force.23
Cult of stone
Surrounding Mount Miwa is the district of Asuka – a treasure house of tombs and ruins. Here there are hundreds of the keyhole-shaped mounds, known as kofun - the name Kofun is also applied to the culture that built them, the immediate successors to the Yayoi. The mounds are thought to have served as the tombs of the earliest members of Japan’s imperial family – roughly from the fourth to the eighth centuries AD – and of the nobility of that period. Even in our own enlightened twenty-first century, the emperor does not permit intact kofun to be excavated, and so archaeological understanding of these mysterious structures remains sketchy. All that can be said for certain is that their dating to the first millennium AD seems to be securely based on a wide range of evidence from a few kofun that had been opened for one reason or another during past centuries.
Under the pyramidial central earth mound it is now clear that all kofun conceal an inner megalithic burial chamber and a megalithic passageway, usually oriented south. One of the most spectacular of these ‘barrow’ structures, Ishibutai, thought to date to the seventh century AD, can be visited today because erosion long ago exposed and isolated its megalithic core. The two giant stones that form its ceiling weigh close to 100 tonnes each while the lesser stones of the side walls and the passageway are still enormous megaliths by any standards, weighing between 10 and 20 tonnes.
Near by are dozens of other megalithic ruins, all of which are thought to date to the same period around 1400 years ago. One, Kameishi Iwa, is a large rock carved into the form of a turtle. Another, Sakafune-ishi, is a granite slab into which has been cut, with remarkable precision – but as yet undetermined purpose – a circuit-like pattern of geometrical grooves and channels. A third consists of the upper and lower parts of a rock-hewn tomb (known locally as Onino Sechin – literally ‘demon’s toilet’! – and Onino Manaita, literally ‘demon’s chopping board’). The two parts were separated in an ancient earthquake and now a modern road runs between them.
But by far the most strikingly enigmatic of the Asuka megaliths is the Masuda-no Iwafune, the ‘boat stone’ (so-called because it is thought to resemble a capsized boat), which juts out from a densely wooded hillside. Consisting of one mass of granite weighing in the region of 1000 tonnes, it is 10 metres long, 8 metres wide and almost 4 metres high. One puzzling characteristic is that in places it is rough and unfinished, seeming entirely like a work of nature, and in other places beautifully cut into right-angled planes.
Although there are theories, and a date in the seventh century AD is preferred by most scholars, no archaeologist is in a position to state with certainty how old the Masuda-no Iwafune really is or what its original function might have been. There are some indications of astronomical orientation but these are too vague to be of any use,24 and, as the Asuka Historical Museum admits, the ‘actual purpose’ of the great megalith ‘remains a mystery’.25
All that can be said for sure is that its presence testifies to the long-term persistence and vigour of a cult of stone in Japan – stone on a gigantic scale, either natural or artificially cut (or both at the same time), serving as an interface between earth and heaven. It is not difficult to imagine how such a cult that was in one place and time responsible for the Masuda-no Iwafune and in another for the Jomon stone circles could, in yet another, have made monuments like those later inundated by the sea at Yonaguni and Kerama.
Kerama: entrance to the underworld
Diving well is all about relaxation. It’s like good sex. If your body and mind are relaxed you can go on for ever … But how can you be relaxed when you’re almost 30 metres under a deep blue sea in a place where a powerful current can suddenly whip up, like a gale-force wind, and have you fighting for your life in seconds? How can you be relaxed if y
ou pause to think even for a moment about the vastness of the ocean and the improbable smallness of yourself, or about the fragility of your body, or about your life-or-death reliance on your equipment with its fallible valves and tubes?
I made my first dives at Kerama in April 1999 and found it a dark and scary place. In April 2000, a year later, I came back for more.
We worked from a rented cabin cruiser owned by Isamu Tsukahara, a local diver who has made a speciality of exploring the underwater stone circles. Also with us was another professional diver, Mitsutoshi Taniguchi, who discovered ‘Centre Circle’ more than twenty-five years ago and who has written a book on the subject. We were joined by Kiyoshi Nagaki from Chatan, a brilliant diver who had saved Santha’s life the year before at Pohnpei in Micronesia when she accidentally began to descend into deep water with her air turned off. Another member of the team at Kerama was our old friend Shun Daichi, the translator of Fingerprints of the Gods. In addition, Tsukahara had two of his staff divers with us underwater at all times – so we were a large group.
But it was one of those perfect days that every diver dreams of. Although the current was still running strong when we first arrived at the site, it had dropped to nothing an hour later when we rolled into the water. We then sank down, in absolute stillness, through a cool, blue column of ocean lit by sparks and splinters of sunlight.
I had experienced before a certain dizziness at Kerama and I experienced it again now as I descended in a wide spiral over the megaliths of Centre Circle. Dropping into the circle itself, I reached bottom at the base of the central monolith, where my gauges registered a depth of 27 metres (as against a depth at the top of the monolith of 23 metres).
While the other divers pursued their own interests I sat at the base of the monolith looking up at the ring of huge cut stones towering above me. Then I swam several times around the circle and followed side channels out of it, some of which lead to a second monument – the one that local divers call ‘Small Centre Circle’ – while others lead nowhere. The whole place felt like a maze, or a labyrinth in which it was extremely easy to become disoriented. Glad of the open sea above me I relaxed and allowed myself to ascend until I floated weightless about 3 metres above the top of the circle, looking down through blue water at the bizarre and out-of-place structure.
From this perspective, in this light, it seemed like the entrance to a fairy-tale kingdom, a spiral stairway into the underworld … I was filled with a sense of awe and wonder, and of numinous dread. I have experienced the same feeling at other religious monuments – the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe, the Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge, the Hypogeum and the megalithic temples of ancient Malta …
‘If the Jomon built this,’ I found myself wondering, ‘then what else might they have built?’ But did the Jomon build it? Was it even man-made at all?
Iseki Point
When we consider the Kerama and Yonaguni underwater monuments in the light of what is known about the veneration of sacred mountains and stone circles in prehistoric Japan, they make perfect sense and do not in any way appear outlandish or improbable. With the notable exception of Kuromata Yama, they are on a larger scale than any Jomon structure previously known on land; however, they are of the general type of shrine that we know the Jomon could and did make. The circles speak for themselves in this matter – since no one can deny that stone circles played an important role in Jomon culture – and it takes little imagination to see the terraces of the Yonaguni main monument as the result of an extension of the iwakura and sacred mountain principles that were so well established in Jomon times.
Unlike Kerama, where the dive site is far out in the open sea, Yonaguni’s main monument lies close to the present southern shore under a glowering mudstone cliff. The locals call it ‘Iseki Point’ (‘Monument Point’) and make much of its terracing; however, this is not the only aspect of the site that impresses me. Less obvious, but more persuasive, is the way that the whole layout seems to be organized cardinally and ceremonially.
Tucked in behind the north-west corner of the monument and oriented east-west, two huge, clean-cut megaliths, thought to weigh about 100 tonnes each, lie stacked side-by-side like slices of toast. It is obvious that they bear a striking resemblance to the parallel megaliths of Mount Nabeyama in Gifu Prefecture (see diagram page 620). I suggest that they are unlikely to have fallen into such a position by chance, that they are intended as a focal point, and that the gap between them, as at Gifu, may prove to have a solar alignment (in this case equinoctial rather than solstitial). They are approached through a narrow tunnel of big, symmetrical boulders piled on top of one another in two courses.
To the south and west are what appear to be the ruins of a walled complex with a curved ramp.
A clearly defined path or causeway runs from west to east along the monument’s south face.
At the extreme western end of the causeway the diver comes to a classic iwakura shrine, part natural rock, part man-made.26 If this shrine were to be moved to the slopes of Mount Miwa it would blend in seamlessly with what is already there.
Riding the Black Current
Japan is not a small country, but it was bigger 17,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age, just before the global floods began. Once the meltdown was properly underway, however, the land-bridges to the mainland were rapidly inundated and the islands began a long process of shrinkage that still continues to this day.
As recently as 9000, possibly 8000, years ago the island of Shikoku was still part of a continuous landmass with neighbouring Honshu. Then the remorseless sea-level rise cut it off and ever since has continued to whittle away at its boundaries. Looking at the modern map, it is instructive to remember that the Jomon were there to witness the sea rush in to fill the lowlands between Takamatsu and Tamano – as indeed they witnessed all the strange phenomena and earth changes that marked the end of the Ice Age.
The Black Current between Japan and the Americas. Based on Meggars et al. (1965).
Perhaps it was this experience of rapid and invincible floods that led them to become navigators or perhaps they inherited their knowledge of the sea from the same unidentified ‘influence’ that brought them pottery and stone circles. Either way, it has for a long while been generally accepted amongst scholars that the Jomon traded extensively throughout the Japanese islands, and with the mainland, and must therefore have been using sea-going boats from a very early date.
More controversially, there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that the Jomon may not have confined themselves to exploring their own region. According to the findings of an international team of researchers led by C. Loring Brace of the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropology, migrants entering North America across the Bering land-bridge at the end of the Ice Age were ‘people closely resembling the prehistoric Jomon of Japan’.27 Published in the 31 July 2001 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the findings provide:
strong evidence supporting earlier work suggesting that ancient Americans … were descended from the Jomon, who walked from Japan to the Asian mainland and eventually to the Western hemisphere on land-bridges as the Earth began to warm up about 15,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age.28
But perhaps they didn’t always walk. There is at any rate evidence from a later period, approximately 5000 years ago, that they may have undertaken transoceanic voyages, reaching as far as the shores of South America. The most famous, though still disputed and controversial, case is the discovery at Valdivia in Ecuador of what has been claimed to be Jomon pottery in deposits more than 5000 years old. But Jomon pottery has also turned up in almost equally ancient layers across the South Pacific – at Fiji, for example, and at Vanuatu. ‘It’s reasonable to conclude’, says Professor Yoshihiko Shinoto of the Bishop Museum in Hawaii, ‘that the Jomon travelled very widely in the Pacific area. Of course they could only have done so by sea.’
One route of migration that would have been open to
them runs past Cape Ashizuri, the southernmost point of Shikoku, and then flows northwards from there up the eastern side of the Japanese archipelago, swings out across the Pacific with the Kuryl and Aleutian islands, comes close to land again along the northern California coast and runs south from there past the Pacific coast of Central America until it reaches Ecuador. This route, a kind of ‘highway in the sea’, is known in Japan as the ‘Black Current’ (Kuroshio) and is most visible where it passes Shikoku at Cape Ashizuri – running like a river at a steady 40 nautical miles per day. Given sufficient time and the survival of its crew, it is easy to see how a boat could ride the black current from Japan to South America.
Covering unimaginable distances
Words cannot express the degree of similarity between early Valdivia and contemporary Jomon pottery … Not only techniques of incision but motifs and combinations of motifs are the same. In most categories of decorative technique examples can be found so similar in appearance that they might almost have come from the same vessel.29
With these observations, Smithsonian Institution anthropologists Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans and Emilio Estrada sparked off a storm of controversy that is still blowing today. ‘Early Valdivia’ means at least 5000 years ago and, according to the orthodox model of history, Japanese hunter-gatherers, even strange ones who made pots, are not supposed to have had the capacity to sail across the Pacific 5000 years ago. Yet what Meggers, Evans and Estrada found in Valdivia – thousands of pieces of Jomon pottery in securely dated strata – seems to prove the orthodox model wrong. Once their results were properly codified it became clear that ‘twenty-four of the twenty-eight major characteristics of the Valdivian pots were found in Jomon pottery. Their decorative elements and the construction of their spouts were among the most striking of the similarities.’