Virtual Tour | Yoshimi Hundred Caves: Ancient Tombs to Wartime Tunnels & Archaeology All Gone Wrong
This is most definitely a rare place with an uncommon story in Japan. The name, Yoshimi Hundred Caves (吉見百穴), is a bit of a misnomer, given that the caves were used for burials and were thus tombs rather than simple “caves.” Further, there are 219 existing caves, but the name given by locals in the Edo Period stuck. Yoshimi Hyakuana is the largest ancient grave cluster in Japan.
A seemingly monumental task, the cliff is made of sandstone, which is relatively easy to carve with primitive tools. Each tomb has a roughly square, one-meter entrance that once had a lid to seal it. Many of the caves have platforms inside (perhaps for coffins), which also suggests that there were multiple burials in some of them, given the presence of more than one pedestal. Some tombs are small; others have a short tunnel leading to a larger chamber and extend several meters inward (you can venture into a couple if you’re okay with getting a little dirty). While there are many rows of these caves, none are interconnected.
So, who made them, and why? This is where archaeology comes in to help – though archaeology sometimes gets things wrong.
In 1887, Tokyo Imperial University archaeologist and professor Tsuboi Shōgorō excavated the site. To his credit, he was a pioneering archaeologist in Japan, but his imagination may have gotten the better of his interpretations.
Tsuboi certainly found some exciting items: gold and silver rings, swords, bronze mirrors, and, in particular, Jōmon pottery fragments and clay haniwa figurines. Perhaps it was these discoveries that led him to conclude that the caves were created by pre-Japanese people of smaller body size. He associated them with the Koro-pok-kuru of Ainu mythology and posited that they had used the caves as dwellings, which were later converted into tombs by the invading Yamato people. This interpretation, unfortunately, was a myth. By the 1920s and 1930s, archaeologists in Japan challenged his conclusions, noting that the structures were not significantly different from late Kofun Period tombs and that the artifacts closely resembled burial goods from that era. While archaeology often leaves us with more questions than answers, without a written record we will never know the whole story.
An interesting chapter in the history of the caves came near the end of World War II. The Nakajima Aircraft Company employed up to 3,000 (or more) laborers – many forced or conscripted, and some volunteers – to dig wide tunnels intended to serve as an aircraft engine factory. The goal was to protect production from American bombing. Ultimately, the factory was never put into operation, and an unknown number of the original cave graves were destroyed in the process.
It was local activists who later pushed the local government to preserve the story of the caves, including the fact that the wartime construction was carried out using forced labor, likely by Koreans.
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