S P O T ／ SPOT-351

Sakitama Kofun Park (Saitama Ancient Tumuli Park)

さきたま古墳公園さきたまこふんこうえん

In the flat rice country of Gyoda — the place that gave Saitama Prefecture its very name — nine colossal earthen mounds rise from the plain, built between the late 400s and early 600s by chieftains who could command the labor of thousands. This is the Saitama Kofun Group, a 30-hectare archaeological park and National Special Historic Site, and its centerpiece is Maruhakayama Kofun: at roughly 105 meters across, one of the largest round burial mounds in all of Japan, a grass-skinned hill so smoothly enormous it reads more like landscape than tomb. You can climb the stone steps to its summit, the same vantage where, a thousand years after it was raised, the warlord Ishida Mitsunari is said to have pitched his command post for the water siege of nearby Oshi Castle. Nearby, the keyhole-shaped Inariyama Kofun gave up Japan's most famous archaeological object: the Gold-Inlaid Iron Sword, its blade carrying 115 gold characters that name a fifth-century great king and a date read as 471 — a National Treasure that rewrote the textbooks on how the Japanese state was born. To stand among these mounds is to feel the sheer earthmoving scale of power fifteen centuries gone.