Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  Other miracles

  There are several other intriguing sites around Yonaguni that I was not able to show Wolf in the time available to us in March 2001 – though I do not think any of them would have changed his mind.

  One of these, which takes a form that some recognize as a huge rock-hewn sea-turtle, stands at a depth of 12 metres on the shoulder of the main monument at Iseki Point approximately 150 metres east of the terraces.

  A second, badly damaged when Yonaguni was struck by an unusually severe series of typhoons in August and September 200018 is found half a kilometre due east of the terraces in about 15 metres of water. Consisting of a one-tonne boulder mounted on a 10-centimetre-high flat platform at the apex of an enormous rocky slab almost 3 metres high, it has all the characteristics of a classic iwakura shrine, part natural rock, part man-made. As I noted in Chapter 25, if this shrine were to be moved to the slopes of Mount Miwa it would blend in seamlessly with what is already there.

  Two other anomalous sites are located within half a kilometre of Iseki Point, and I would also very much have liked Wolf to see them. One is the extraordinary ‘Stadium’, a vast amphitheatre surrounding a stone plain at a depth of 30 metres. The other is a second area of very large steps – on a similar scale and of a similar appearance to those of the main terrace at Iseki Point, but much further out to sea, in deeper water, and at the bottom of a protected channel.

  Nor does the list of signs and wonders end here, but I think the point has been sufficiently made. Some people with good minds – among them Japanese scientists with Ph.D.’s – are adamant that what they see underwater at Yonaguni are rock-hewn structures that have been worked upon by humans and purposefully arranged. Others with equally good minds and equally good Ph.D.’s are equally adamant that they see no rock-hewn structures underwater at Yonaguni at all – only rocks.

  Rocks? Or structures? Just interesting geology? Or discoveries that could fix the true origins of Japanese civilization as far back in the Age of the Gods as the Nihongi and the Kojiki themselves claim? These are grave questions and they cannot be answered at Yonaguni on the basis of available evidence. Wolf is right about that. It is just possible that the remarkable structures and objects that I showed him there underwater are all freaks of nature, which by some amazing additional improbability all happen to be gathered together in one place.

  I don’t think that is what they are. And I repeat that the balance of first-hand scientific opinion is, at the time of writing, two-to-one against Wichmann in this matter (Kimura and Sundaresh provide two clear votes for the structures having been overworked by man; Wichmann provides one clear vote in favour of the structures being entirely natural; Professor Schoch votes both ways). In the future other discoveries, and other diving scientists, could alter this balance of opinion dramatically in either direction. But we shall have to wait and see. Meanwhile, after a thorough exposure on-site to Wolf Wichmann’s relentless empiricism I concede that I am not yet in a position to prove that humans were involved in the creation of the Yonaguni structure – any more than Wolf can prove, as he admits, that they were not.

  But I believe Wolf came to his conclusions about Yonaguni sincerely, not too hastily, and on the basis of his own vast experience as a marine geologist of how different kinds of rock behave underwater. Although I disagree with him, I therefore resolved as we left the island in March 2001 that I would not base any argument or any claim in Underworld on the copious evidence which suggests that the submerged structures of Yonaguni are indeed ancient rock-hewn human sites … In this chapter I have simply tried to marshal and present that evidence, and Wolf’s purposeful and eloquent counter-views, as clearly and as objectively as possible, as a matter of public record.

  But suppose for a moment – an exercise in speculation only – that I and others are right about Yonaguni. If so, then what Japan has lost to the rising seas is no small or insignificant matter but a defining episode in world prehistory going back more than 10,000 years. For if the Jomon did make the great structures that were submerged off the south and east coasts of Yonaguni at the end of the Ice Age, then we are confronted by a previously unexpected and as yet completely unexplained dimension of that increasingly remarkable ancient culture. In terms of organization, effort, engineering and ambition, the sheer scale of the enterprise is beyond anything that the Jomon of 10,000 or 12,000 years ago (or any other human culture of that epoch) are thought to have been capable of. Yet it makes a strange kind of sense in the context of the other incongruous characteristics of these strange ‘hunter-gatherers’ – their permanent settlements, their stone circles, their cultivation of rice, and their navigational and maritime achievements in two different waves of settlement of the Americas (one as early as 15,000 years ago, one more like 5000 years ago).

  Wolf and I had just one more day of diving to do after Yonaguni, just one more day for me to find him a major structure in Japanese waters that he could not come up with a natural explanation for … For that adventure, and test, I had chosen the great stone circles at Kerama.

  28 / Maps of Japan and Taiwan 13,000 Years Ago?

  In part based on Marco Polo’s inaccurate figure for Zipangu’s distance from the Chinese coast, the Florentine physician and astronomer Paolo Toscanelli, who – like many another medieval scholar – assumed that the world was a sphere, placed Zipangu some 5000 nautical miles west of Europe on his map of the world … As early as 1470, Toscanelli proposed to the Portuguese king that one could reach Cathay, Zipangu, and the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) – perhaps even more quickly – by sailing directly westward.

  Ulrich Pauly, German East-Asiatic Society, Tokyo1

  It was the submerged structures of Japan that first awakened me to the possibility that an underworld in history, unrecognized by archaeologists, could lie concealed and forgotten beneath the sea. Then, when I learned to dive and started to look elsewhere, I began to realize how vast this vanished underworld really might be – for its traces seem to have been scattered around the continental margins not only of the Pacific but also of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea.

  In five years of diving, following up rumours of anomalous underwater structures wherever they have been sighted, and using the logic suggested by convergences between flood myths and inundation maps to seek out probable sites, I know that I have only scratched the surface of the mystery. I’m just a private individual without any of the institutional infrastructure behind me that is really needed for productive marine archaeology. Even so, there has not been space in this book for me to recount the results and experiences of all my own dives and explorations – let alone all the dives and explorations that should be done in the future if we really want to know what’s out there.

  I’ve said nothing for example about the underwater enigmas of Tenerife where I dived, and was nearly swallowed by the sea, in June 2000. I learned a lot there … about the Kami Great-Ocean-Possessor.

  I’ve not spoken of the work Santha and I did in the South Pacific around the Tahitian islands of Raiatea and Huahine, or of the strange things we saw underwater off the Tongan island of Haapai.

  And I’ve said nothing more about Alexandria, which I introduced in chapter 1. Yet Santha and I spent several weeks diving along the Alexandrian coast with Ashraf Bechai looking for, and eventually relocating, some of the giant blocks of Sidi Gaber that he had first sighted years before. Indeed, we found a carpet of gargantuan stone blocks in an advanced state of erosion, completely unconnected to any of the known marine archaeological sites in the vicinity, covering a huge area of the sea-bed at 10–12 metres water depth (see photos 1–3).

  But while all this was happening, and as I began to focus more and more closely on specific regions and specific issues of the ‘underworld’ problem, it always remained my intention to seek a final reckoning on the submerged structures around Japan that had started me on the quest. I took my time – years in fact – to do the travels and the dives in the Indian and At
lantic Oceans and in the Mediterranean Sea that I’ve described in this book. But through it all I was privileged to be able to revisit Japan frequently, to continue to dive repeatedly at all the most important sites in the Ryukyu archipelago, and to acquaint myself thoroughly with their characteristics and peculiarities.

  Satanaze and Antilia

  So the point we are at now in the story is exactly where I had always intended that we should arrive. Strangely, however, because quests have lives of their own, we have arrived here by a route quite different from the one I imagined we would take. This happened because I did not anticipate the appearance, very late in the investigation, of a significant intersection between the mystery of the ancient maps and the mystery of the underwater ruins of Japan. On the contrary, having pored over many early maps of Japan by both Japanese and Western cartographers, and having found none that show it in anything like its Ice Age configuration, I long ago gave up the search.

  It was only when I was finalizing the maps argument in Part 5, and in fact pursuing Bimini, that I read Professor Robert Fuson’s breakthrough study, Legendary Islands of the Ocean Sea, and realized that I’d been looking in the wrong place all along. If there was indeed a lost cartographical science of the Ice Age then its best crumbs had been preserved in the portolan tradition in Europe by pre-Columbian mariners and copyists who themselves knew nothing about the existence of the Americas or the Pacific Ocean. If an Ice Age map of Japan – and one of nearby Taiwan – was going to turn up anywhere, therefore, it made perfect sense that it should do so in a pre-Columbian European portolan purporting to depict islands in the Atlantic Ocean.

  I need to reiterate that Professor Fuson goes nowhere near this far; nor would he wish to. His breakthrough, which I described in chapter 24, is the discovery of the compelling series of correlations on the 1424 Venetian chart that link Satanaze with Japan and Antilia with Taiwan. Fuson plausibly suggests that the source map – or maps – that the Venetian copyist worked from could have originated in the voyages of the Chinese admiral Cheng Ho in the early fifteenth century and could quite easily have found their way to the West from one or other of Cheng Ho’s fleets via Arab intermediaries prior to 1424.

  Because the correlations he presents are in general so persuasive, one glaring mistake on the 1424 chart is not fatal to Fuson’s argument. The mistake, as he admits, is that Japan’s ‘three main islands (Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu) are represented by the single island of Satanaze. The channel between Kyushu and Shikoku/Honshu (modern Bungo-suido and Suo-nada) is well-defined.’2 But 12,500 years ago, this mistake would not have been a mistake at all because at that time Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku were indeed consolidated by lowered sea-levels into a single landmass.

  While I’m prepared to accept that the Venetian cartographer’s source maps probably did come from the voyages of Cheng Ho therefore, it is not inevitable that these maps were necessarily ones that had been newly charted by Cheng Ho’s navigators. They could equally well have been amongst the many older maps that Cheng Ho is known to have brought along on the voyages. We will see later that China by Cheng Ho’s time, already possessed a cartographical tradition that was hoary with antiquity.3 It is by no means impossible that the same wellspring of mysteriously anachronistic geographical knowledge from which Marinus of Tyre may have sipped, and that so nourished the portolan tradition in Europe in the late Middle Ages, had also been known all along to the ancient Chinese.

  I suggest that the 1424 chart may contain evidence of that knowledge.

  The missing waterways

  Although sea-level is still rising today, the rate of change is very slow and has made no significant difference to Japan’s coastlines during the past 1000 years. It is safe, therefore, to treat the modern map of Japan as an accurate portrayal of the archipelago as it would have looked in the early fifteenth century,

  Now compare the map of Japan with the portrayal of Satanaze/Saya on the 1424 Venetian chart (opposite).

  At first glance, despite an obvious general similarity of layout, I think one would not immediately leap to endorse Fuson’s conclusion that Satanaze represents Kyushu, Shikoku and Honshu (since it is only one island, not three) or that little Saya represents Hokkaido. However, the theory is undoubtedly correct and I have already presented the principal evidence that underpins it in chapter 24. All that remains to be added is the process of ‘cartographic devolution’ (the gradual introduction of errors and deletions in a series of copies) by which Fuson believes that the Venetian mapmaker managed to turn Japan into Satanaze. This is best expressed in his own diagrammatic way (see page 630).

  To focus the discussion here, I will accept Fuson’s well-supported argument that most of Hokkaido was simply ignored and reduced to the rump of Saya on the original source map from which the 1424 chart was copied.4 I will accept too his other suggestion that at some stage in the chain of copying and transmission by which the source map reached Europe a large section of the north of Honshu was missed out thus shortening the distance from the tip of Honshu to the tip of Kyushu.

  But it is the other proposed ‘deletions’ of the copyists that interest me. All of these – every one of them with remarkable consistency – prove to be ‘deletions’ of bays and inter-island waterways that have only come into existence around Japan since the end of the Ice Age. In other words there was a time, not too long ago (and certainly well within the enormous span of Japan’s mysterious Jomon culture), when most of the bays and inter-island waterways on the modern map were dry land and did look pretty much the way the 1424 chart of Satanaze shows them.

  Modern map of Japan.

  The island of Satanaze, from the 1424 Pizzagano chart.

  I will focus here on the portrayal of modern Japan’s most prominent group of inter-island waterways around the Inland Sea separating Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku. Fuson himself takes special notice of ‘the channel between Kyushu and Shikoku/Honshu’ on the 1424 chart, and its ‘well-defined’ presence there is undoubtedly helpful to his case. To make use of it, however, he has to overlook the fact that the equally prominent channel that has separated Shikoku from Honshu for at least the last 9000 years is not only not ‘well-defined’ but actually is not shown at all. Likewise, he must put up with a very poor portrayal of the segment of Satanaze that he allocates to Kyushu – poor, that is, if it is a portrayal of Kyushu in 1424. However, either by chance, or because a fragment of a cartographical tradition from the end of the Ice Age was resurrected in that 1424 chart – or for some other reason – its portrayal of what is now Kyushu does match very well with Kyushu’s actual appearance at the end of the Ice Age.

  Let’s look more closely at this odd ‘coincidence’ with reference to the 1424 chart, the modern map of Japan, and inundation maps of the archipelago provided by Glenn Milne and his team at Durham University. The latter model Japan’s coastlines at the following dates: 21,300 years ago (onset of the Last Glacial Maximum), 16,900 years ago (end of LGM and start of meltdown), and thereafter at roughly millennium intervals for 14,600 years ago, 13,500 years ago, 12,400 years ago, 10,600 years ago, 8900 years ago, 7700 years ago and 6900 years ago (end of meltdown).

  The cartographic devolution of Japan into Satanaze, according to Fuson (1995). © R. H. Fuson.

  Mapping specific Ice Age details

  We’ll begin with the modern map of Japan, on which we note that Kyushu is only just an island, separated by a very narrow strait from the southern tip of Honshu. Nonetheless, it is an island. The strait widens into the Suo Gulf of the Inland Sea. There it splits into two branches – one trending southwards into the Bungo Strait between Kyushu and Shikoku, the other trending north-eastwards via the Iyo Gulf to the series of further straits that separate Shikoku from Honshu.

  Now look at the depiction of the same waterways on the 1424 chart of Satanaze/Japan (opposite). It is obvious immediately that the system is much simpler.

  Most notable difference: instead of the narrow strait that today lies between Kyushu and H
onshu we observe that the two islands are joined by a land-bridge almost 100 kilometres wide.

  Most notable similarity: there is a roughly square inlet on the south-east side of Satanaze which corresponds well with the location and direction of the present Bungo Strait.

  But today, as we’ve seen, the Bungo Strait splits into the Suo Gulf to its north-west and the Iyo Gulf to its north-east. On the 1424 chart, by contrast, the Suo Gulf is completely missing. And although the Iyo Gulf is present, note that it is represented only as a very narrow, north-east-trending, fjord-like channel. Opposite its terminus, on the south-west side of Satanaze/Japan, there is a further, much smaller inlet. The neck of land between the two – about 100 kilometres wide – lies along the line of the missing Suo Gulf.

  61. Jomon pottery mask, Japan.

  62. Pottery dogu figurine of the ancient Jomon from Sannai-Muriyama, Japan.

  63. The author inside the megalithic passage grave of Ishibutai, Japan.

  64. The author standing on top of Masada-no Iwafune, a massive megalithic structure in the Asuka region, Japan.

  65. Pilgrims at the megalithic rock shrine on the summit of Mount Miwa, Japan.

  66. Jomon stone circle of Oshoro, Hokkaido, Japan.

  67. Jomon stone circle, Cape Ashizuri, Shikoku, Japan.

  68. Jomon megaliths deep within a forest, Cape Ashizuri, Japan.

  69. The author at Masada-no Iwafune megalithic structure. Note the method of cutting the rock in square sections visible on this side of the structure. Compare with 70, below.