Post by washi on Apr 15, 2015 18:13:24 GMT
The Takaida Yokoana Kofun Park encloses most of a unique group of Asuka Period tombs, as well as a small but well designed and appointed history museum. (Takaida, a fairly common place name in Japan, mean "high well paddy". Yokoana -- "side hole" -- means cave or tunnel. Kofun means "ancient tomb," and is applied all of the tombs -- some huge and monumental, and built for emperors and other members of the nobility, and some less grandiose, built built mostly in later times and for lesser folks, but none-the-less impressive.)
Not everyone I know shares my enthusiasm for crawling into ancient tombs. For those who also have a latent "Indiana Jones" gene, I have mapped the kofun in a clickable overlay. (The "hot" areas on the map are marked in purple.) This map will not display from the GEC Layer, so the placemark attached to a reply to this post provide a link for downloading it.
The Kashiwara City Museum of History (柏原市立歴史資料館) is located within the park. It exhibits materials all taken within Kashiwara City, throughout the course of Japanese history, and is well worth a visit. The placemark attached to the reply to this post is on the museum, however most of its content focuses on the park, which, even if it were not full of interesting old tombs, would be as beautiful and pleasant a park as any I know.
These tombs are thought to have been constructed over a 30 or 40 year period, sometime between the middle of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th. I wish I had a better understanding of why this group of kofun differs so markedly from other kofun in the area constructed at roughly the same time. Is it because of cultural differences in the people who made them? All throughout the Yamato Period, there was a great deal of interaction between Japan and the Korean peninsula. At the time these tombs were made, this area was inhabited by many recent arrivals from Korea, and some features of these tombs seem to be imitating features with are not found in other areas in Japan. Or are the differences merely a reflection of the differences in available building materials? My recently re-written post on the Takayasu Kofun Group and my exploration of the Ichisuka Kofun Group in my Chikatsu Asuka Historical Park and Museum post, show kofun whose general appearance differs most markedly in the size of the boulders available to build them from. I have no reason to think that the people who built them were or were not also recent arrivals from Korea, but only that they more strongly resemble the monumental kofun of the earlier period.
The kofun in the Takaida Yokoana Group are cut into exposed tuff, soft stone of compressed ash laid down by an eruption of nearby Nijōsan about 10 million years ago. Tombs constructed in this way appear to be comparatively rare. There is a much smaller group of very similar kofun located near Anpukuji (安福寺) on the south side of the river, cut into the same rock formation, but my search for similar tombs turned up just two other examples, one in Kanagawa Ken and one near Sendai. Both of these sites are a considerable distance from Takaida, and from the center of Japanese political power as it existed in the 6th and 7th centuries. This quick search does not necessarily mean kofun of this type are not more common, but I suppose I would have discovered something about them if they were. My brief exploration did not suggest a strong similarity between them and the Takaida group.
Another unique feature of the Takaida tombs is the large number which have pictures inscribed into their walls. They are crudely drawn images of human beings, ships, buildings, trees and leaves, flowers, birds, and weapons. They are difficult to see, and even more difficult to photograph, but I have tried to present at least a representative sample. (Not everything visible dates from the time the tombs were made, but some of the graffiti may in fact be many centuries old.)
I wish I had a better understanding of the significance of the original petro glyphs. I sure there are many people who have a much better understanding of this site than I do. If you can explain anything more clearly, or you detect errors in fact or judgment, please respond to this post or send me a private message. If you wish to write in Japanese, I will attempt to provide an English translation.
Download FileFile last revised March 9, 2023.
