Takayasu Kofun Group

In the film "The Last Samurai," we saw Tom Cruise play an American soldier hired by the Meiji government to help modernize the Japanese Army. He was just one of many foreign experts hired to help achieve the truly remarkable transformation of Japan from a feudal to a modern society is just four decades. Takayasu Kofun Group, the subject of this post, was studied by two of these distinguished foreigners.

Gowland

Morse

William Gowland (L), the "Father of Japanese Archeology," made a study of this area in 1887 or 88. I haven't read either of his books about kofun, but I have made use in this post of a paper by Edward S. Morse (R) entitled "Dolmens in Japan," which was published in the June, 1879, issue of Popular Science Monthly, considerably earlier than Gowland's work there. Gowland was an eminent British metallurgist who also did significant archeological work at Stonehenge. Morse was a distinguished American zoologist. In archeology, both were working outside their fields, as "amateurs" if you will, but certainly also as pioneers, and while Gowland's work in archeology is generally considered to be much more significant than Morse's, Morse's work is quite significant.  His excavation of the shell mounds at Omori in 1877 was the first in Japan to employ scientific methodology. He was the first to apply the term "cord pattern" to the ceramics he found there. Translated into Japanese as "jōmon ," this word has come to describe the period between 10,000 and 300 B. C. that is characterized by ceramics of this style. You will find most of Morse's article about Takayasu Kofun Group incorporated in this file.

The Yamato Period of Japanese history (c.300 - c.550 AD) was characterized

• by powerful clans merging into the Japanese state,

• by a vigorous cultural interaction with the kingdoms on the Korean peninsula,

• by the emergence of a military and horse-riding culture,

• and by the building of distinctive tombs, called kofun or "old mound tombs."

Throughout the course of the Yamato Period, there was a marked difference is style of the tomb mounds built. Monumental, often keyhole-shaped tombs were constructed for leaders, with a few early examples built around 250 AD. By the 6th century, burial mounds were constructed for lesser leaders as well as those at the top echelons. They were much smaller than the older keyhole-shaped ones, and there were, of course, many more of them. They were large stone structures covered by earth and entered from the side. The number of man-hours required to build a keyhole shaped kofun must have been immense. The new style kofun would obviously have required less labor, but the effort needed to build one must still have been quite considerable. Locating, moving, and positioning a dozen or more boulders, some weighing several tons, is no small task.

Takayasu Kofun Group is an area of about 300 such 6th century kofun. It is just one of many such groups found in the foothills along the mountain range that separates Osaka Fu and Nara Ken.

This post owes much to my friend Mr. Toshiyuki Yoneda, who over the years has been entirely generous in his efforts to educate me on the subject of kofun and the fundamentals of Japanese archeology. If there are errors here, they are no doubt due to my poor command of Japanese, and not to misinformation that he has given me.

The maps displayed in this file are taken from the non-copyrighted book:

Basic Research on the Takayasu Kofun Group
Katsuhiro Hanada
Yao City Education Committee
Cultural Property
May, 2008

高安古墳群の基礎的研究
花田勝広
八尾市教育委員会
文化財課
２００８年３月

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Last revised March 8, 2023.